The Ballad Of The Sad Clickbait Monkey

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I don't have a lot to say to you this week. I'm very sorry about that. Well, I mean, I do have an essay below, due to the whole format-of-the-newsletter thing, but honestly I don't know that I have tons more to give currently. It happens.

I did read a good piece recently and I'm not going to pretend it's going to be for everyone but, on the off-chance that it could be your thing - here are, I would say, roughly 4,000 words on John Updike, by Patricia Lockwood. She actually wrote the piece a few years ago but I only got to it recently, as I finally read my first Updike and, presumably like every woman before me, found myself in urgent need of Thoughts About Updike And Women, ideally written by a woman. That really hit the spot.

If somehow - somehow! - that doesn't feel like your jam, I also enjoyed this short but v compelling little piece on Lobsang Rampa, the man who pretended to be a Tibetan lama, with limited success. It's really fun.

That is all. Thank you. I will now show you some posts. Good bye.

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A column

For a long time, being a young or new journalist meant doing the jobs no-one else wanted to do in the newsroom. You'd tackle the really minor news stories, go knock on the doors of recent widows, all of that. It probably wasn't pleasant, but I wouldn't know.

For my generation, being a young or new journalist meant being a clickbait monkey for a while, or possibly forever, if you couldn't escape. I worked at a few different places in my early twenties, back when the internet felt bewildering to execs and editors. I was hired to write pieces that would "go viral" - a novel concept, at the time - and I was pretty good at it.

In practice, though, it was awful. There was this one website I worked at, which I won't name, which needed us to write seven articles a day. We were never told not to make any calls and do any original reporting per se, but we didn't have the time to do it anyway, so it was a moot point.

Instead, we were sent links to MailOnline stories, sometimes from other places too, and our job was to rewrite those pieces, using words and sentences that were different enough that we couldn't get done for plagiarism. Again, that last bit was never said out loud, but we knew. We weren't stupid.

It was, in a way, quite an interesting intellectual exercise. In retrospect, I wonder if it made me a better writer, purely by accident. Spending eight hours a day trying to swiftly come up with synonyms is quite good practice, especially if English is your second language. In any case, I ended up jumping out of that particular ship after a year and a half, and got myself a job which actually felt and tasted like journalism. My clickbait monkey days started in 2013 and ended in 2015, and I've not returned to them since. What a beautiful decade it's been.

That doesn't mean I never think about those months, even now. Soul-sucking jobs tend to burrow under your skin, and you just can't quite get rid of them. I was so bored by the end: so bored! I felt like a sad little robot, probably because the job I was doing could have been done by one.

There was no humanity to my job. I didn't need to be good at finding the right people to interview, then getting them to say the things they probably shouldn't say on the record. They had no need for my ability to spot what felt like a story, and the enthusiasm with which I'll keep digging until I get it. My prose didn't matter, and neither did the structure of my pieces. Monkey read, monkey typed, monkey hit publish, monkey waited for clicks to come in. Monkey went to the pub every weeknight and sank three to five pints because monkey had this stupid need to actually feel alive and cognisant for at least a few hours a day, and friends could help with that.

The point I'm hoping to make here has probably come into view by now, but we might as well spell it out. As you may have guessed: I just wasn't that shocked when publications started announcing that they would use AI to write stories for their websites. I should have been! I loathe generative AI! But I just couldn't get exercised about that particular development. Swathes of Fleet Street got rid of any semblance of humanity years ago: formalising the arrangement was always going to happen, and just doesn't feel as big a jump now as it would have even as I got my first media gig.

Sure, it'll take some jobs away from people already struggling to earn their keep while working as journalists, but are those jobs really worth saving? That's a genuine question, by the way, and not one to which I really have an answer. I hated being a clickbait monkey with every fibre of my being, but I probably wouldn't have been able to get my foot in the door without it. What would have happened if I'd not managed to jump into a life raft quite quickly, though? Would I still be there, a decade on, writing my eight stories a day, quietly wanting to top myself?

We keep talking about AI taking our jobs but sometimes it feels like a convenient way to avoid talking about those jobs, and whether they're worth saving. There's a similar dynamic at play with higher education, I think. There is widespread horror, worry and fury at students using ChatGPT instead of writing their own essays, but too often we're not digging into what that means, and what those students would be doing instead.

I wrote about something tangentially related a few years ago for the New Statesman, and reckon it may be worth going through the relevant bit of the piece again. Here it is:

"As I saw it, I took out a ten grand loan and, in exchange, I was given some time to piss about and a piece of paper that’d guarantee me a higher salary. It seemed like a fair bargain.

This is why I struggled to get exercised about Rishi Sunak’s campaign vow to phase out degrees that don’t improve the “earning potential” of students. It was criticised for cheapening education and seeing degrees as purely transactional, and he was judged for misunderstanding the very purpose of university.

Still, I’m just not sure he's the one who is out of touch. It was lovely to hear from Oxford graduates whose many seminars on Hungarian weaving and medieval Normandy opened their eyes to the world and made them more rounded. No, really, it was great to have to read the tweets and columns of so many of them, on the beauty of learning for learning’s sake.

It just felt like getting dispatches from an entirely different world. In the third year of my journalism degree, in 2012, I was the only student in a class discussion who could name the Leveson Inquiry. If we really were young people learning for learning’s sake, it wasn’t going great."

Whatever happened to that Sunak lad, eh? Guess we'll never know. My point still stands, though: it's easy for Russell university alumni to sigh and despair at the thought of students not learning anything meaningful while doing their degrees, but my question is: did the rest of us really get anything from those years anyway?

I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you that, in my personal experience, getting a degree involved relatively little learning. For the most part, I partied and drank and made friends and tried, vaguely, to become an adult, and when I had a spare moment I'd consider doing a smattering of studying. Because I went to a decidedly un-Russell university, this didn't show in my grades at all.

I graduated with a 2:1, despite having failed to attend a single lecture for a whole semester, and after researching then writing my dissertation in exactly one week. Arguably my most pleasing achievement was the essay I wrote on Lester Bangs, one of the writers who made me want to get into journalism in the first place. I tore through it one night, alone in my room, helped by frequent lines of speed. It's what he would have wanted, right?

More seriously - I didn't find half-arsedly writing about topics I'd chosen not to learn anything about to be especially taxing, as writing has always come easily to me. Can I say with absolute certainty that, if that hadn't been the case, and I'd been born a few years later, I wouldn't have been lured by the sirens of AI? Here's my honest answer: heh.

University is now a mechanism through which young people are relieved of thousands of pounds of future earnings, in exchange for which said future earnings are, they're told, likely to be higher than they would have been otherwise. Unless you really are gifted and going to study something wonderful and which you're passionate about at an excellent university, it's a transaction. Nothing more, nothing less. In this context, why wouldn't you use any shortcuts available to you in order to make life easier for yourself?

At risk of repeating myself, none of those are pro-AI arguments. If it were up to me, 2025 would be the year of the Butlerian Jihad. I've essentially stopped reading contemporary fiction because I just can't deal with most internet culture anymore. I've got a dumb phone arriving at my home next month. I would personally be in favour of imprisoning Sam Altman for the rest of his natural life, following his crimes against my will to live.

My point is that AI is, in a lot of those cases, the symptom and not the illness. Critics keep yelling about the robots threatening to replace this or that, but rarely stop to wonder why it is that people are finding it so easy to seamlessly replace human labour with AI in the first place. This doesn't work for every sector - drawing and other illustrative arts spring to mind - but several of them had problems which began long before ChatGPT got on the scene.

To reuse a metaphor I brought up in a separate column a few weeks ago, it feels like watching wolves invade your home, having walked through the open door, and screaming about the wolves without wondering why the door had been left open in the first place. I used the two examples I have personal knowledge of, but I'm sure there are plenty more.

Of course, AI can now write dogshit PR emails, because too many modern PR jobs involve little more than writing some dogshit emails, then sending them to media contacts with the precision of a man getting to the urinal after his seventh pint. Soon, I'm sure that countless "email jobs" will get ChatGPT-fied because most of them shouldn't exist in the first place - and so on, and so forth.

There's another essay I'd like to write on the great hollowing of once enjoyable corners of life, as I think it deserves to be spelled out properly but, in the meantime, I think we can just focus on AI. We can say that, sure, the stupid, thieving, hallucinating computers shouldn't be replacing human brains, but we should also wonder why those human brains already are so easily replaceable. We can look at the elephant in the room and wonder why he got there, who helped him in, and how we can get him out again.

Is it too late to do so? Perhaps, though we won't know for certain until we acknowledge him. This is what I'm doing here, in the full knowledge that it is nothing more than a first step but, often, one step is better than no step at all.