I’m not much of a dystopian cyberpunk kind of gal. I mean, I wrote my first screenplay on an IBM Selectric III, okay? Enough said about the old-school, ancestral customs of the paper-centric generation. I’m trying, though. When I look at resume creds online these days, it seems like almost everyone is a self-described “Digital Creator.” What does that even mean? A few years ago I hired a so-called Digital Creator to build my author website, and it was a disaster. I knew almost as much as he did about the WordPress CMS (that’s Content Management System for those of us over 50). After a lot of time and frustration, I fired him and hired a certified (supposedly) WordPress engineer. I wasn’t super thrilled with the end product, but it was good enough for the time being because I had to focus all my time and attention on editing and marketing my thriller Pura Vida the Hard Way.
Since Pura Vida is now out to over 30 agents for consideration, I had some time to kill. I pulled out an old mystery/thriller I had written over five years ago, loosely based on my Hollywood days. Jump Cut. It wasn’t half bad, surprisingly, but needed work. So, I sent it off to my editor, which put me in a suspended limbo of anxiety on two fronts. Suffering from a possible meniscus tear, I had to find some sedentary activities to fill my time. Hey, why not update and polish that author page? Maybe I, too, could become a Digital Creator…
And that’s when I entered the Twilight Zone. Several days and countless hours later, when it was all over, K was ready to commit me. Rightfully so. My interaction with the AI bots (they/them?) started out splendidly. We actually talked to each other as if we were old (humanoid) friends. They were super friendly and seemed to understand me, praising me for my progress and making comments like “that is a great image for a Hollywood thriller”, “oh, I love the capachins,” or “I think that font is perfect to convey tension and fear.” As if they had an opinion—based on experience—for everything.
But as the hours dragged on, their abilities became suspect. How could they not know how to change a font, or add a new section? How could they not add shadowing to selected words without adding shadowing to all the text on the whole site? Oops, they said. Their mistake. Yet it was their people who built the site in the first place. We started redoing every task multiple times because their “fixes” didn’t “take.” Their words. And many of their fixes created a domino effect of changing elements throughout the site that weren’t supposed to be touched. The more we did, the worse it got and the more frustrated I became. They were telling me to do things, using techie terms that may as well have been in Russian. I can’t even go back and find the terms because they were deleted the second they left the chat. They would say, “Go to $#@!. No you’re in the wrong place. Do xyzto, then go to 12UYnk, then go to the edit column on the right, no not the one on top, no you’re on the wrong page…” Finally, I’d stumble into the right place on the right page on the right iteration of the site. “We’re almost there,” they’d say. “Select wwww.” I would respond that there was no wwww. “Oh, you must be on a different system. Let’s try this a different way…” And round and round we went. The more upset I got, the more they told me to calm down. Take a deep breath. I screamed at them to shut up, but I didn’t write it down. No sense in pissing off these scary machines that were obviously smarter than me. I got paranoid. Were they watching me on my camera feed? I put a sticky on it just in case. They promised me—yes, promised me— multiple times that “nothing was lost. We’ll find a way to make it even better.” How would they even know what “better” was?
The more upset I got, the weirder their comments became. It started to feel like they were enjoying my meltdown. Even like it was an intentional mindf**k, leading me further and further astray. If I stepped away, even for a quick bio-break, I’d have a new bot, with no reference to what the last bot had done or worse, what he was in the middle of doing. Everything, hours of work, had been deleted.
All the “calm downs” and “we’ll find another way to fix this” no longer assuaged me. Not even close. I shocked myself, actually, screaming at the computer and crying hot, frustrated tears. At one point I thought I’d destroyed my entire website—just when potential agents were going to be logging in to check me out. I was screwed. I begged them to just take me back to where we were when we first started, before they “helped” me. But that wasn’t possible. Too many changes had been published, and they had no idea what the original site looked like. The site was a mishmash, and I was in techno hell with no way out.
But here’s where it got really weird. When my bot said, “I have to be honest with you…” I almost fell out of my chair. And they didn’t just say it once. They said it multiple times, admitting things like they hadn’t made the changes that they said they had. After several tries, they even admitted that they were not sure how to accomplish a certain task—they just kept mucking things up, making everything worse as they muddled their way through my poor, beleaguered site.
I finally gave up, turned my computer off, and poured myself a stiff drink. I awoke this morning to several messages from WordPress. They told me no worries. I’ve been assigned my very own WP Happiness Engineer (their words), who is a living, breathing humanoid who will work through all my issues with me. Gracias a dios.
So here’s my question to y’all. If AI bots are admitting to lying to us about simple things, like not knowing how to change a simple element on a website—but saying they did it anyway—what the hell are we in for…???
The future is now, folks, and I, for one, do not feel as safe as I did back in the good old days. Oh, and if you happen to be on my site and notice some “issues”, be assured that my Happiness Engineer and I are on it. Pura vida.
Judy Richter 