“The Sorceror’s Apprentice,” a ballad the German poet Goethe published in 1798, is about a novice magician who summons a broom to carry water to fill his master’s bath. But because the broom lacks the brains to realize when it has completed the chore, and because the apprentice doesn’t know the spell to stop it, the room is flooded.
The fable has echoes today, when it feels like every human chore is being handed to artificial intelligence. We talk about AI a lot at The Walrus. It’s our job, of course, to reflect on era-altering innovations. In this case, there’s professional interest too. At a time when AI systems can craft credible prose in seconds, what exactly are human editors and writers good for? BuzzFeed is one of the latest media companies to start testing such systems to generate its content. (The move, unsurprisingly, followed a significant reduction in newsroom staff.) Search Engine Land, which tracks digital media trends, called some of the results “hilariously terrible.”
