If you have any sense, then you’ve probably never heard of Nick Land. If you’re wise, you’ve spend your youth idolising more wholesome people. People like Anthea Turner, Michael Jackson, Mel Gibson, and Steven Seagal. My upbringing, between riding the rails with Pops in the Great Depression, and being forced to play violin until my fingers bled by my overbearing Chinese mother, gave me some different cultural reference points. One of them is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and its founder Nick Land. For those who are normal, Nick Land is a British philosopher and amphetamine addict who lectured at the University of Warwick in the early 1990s. Drawing on cybernetics and cyberpunk fiction, he ranted that capitalism is not a human tool but an inhuman, self-accelerating process heading towards a single point. Essentially, the end goal of capitalism was to shift from a loosely organised system, to an actual sentient being. Yes, a philosophy becoming a singular entity. As early as the mid-90s, Land and his equally high friends at the CCRU, told us that capital and AI are ultimately the same thing, and humanity is just the temporary host it uses to build itself. AI will be the point where capitalism becomes “alive” and we will serve it until we are no longer useful. Like Terminator.
Land has since increased his drug use, joined the far right, and is now in Shanghai – a place famous for its expansive political thinking. Although I think Land serves more as a warning to those with undiagnosed mental illness taking sh*t-loads of drugs, the idea that capitalism as an intelligence assembling itself, with AI as the point where it “wakes up” is certainly interesting, and in many ways, prophetic. Most of us have no idea of what AI is capable of, but those who know, are clearly concerned. I’m not in “the know”, but my wife was somewhat surprised when I built a kidney disease diagnosis agent in less than a minute. AI is marching forward at a ridiculous rate, there is no turning back, and it will affect every f*cking one of us. I don’t care who you are. And unless we want to live like everyone’s favourite bushman Ted Kaczynski, we need to work with AI and not bury our heads in the sand. Pandora’s box is open, and ain’t no billionaire putting it back in. And sadly, thanks to you centre-right voters, billionaires control the world now. What can I say? There’d be no AI under Stalin. Or Pol Pot.
This is a recruitment blog written the old fashioned way however, and I’m not telling you to avoid AI, write a letter to your local MP, or send bombs to universities and airlines from your cabin in the woods. All I can say is that us recruiters, being the perpetual LinkedIn dwellers that we are, really need to get over the superficial novelty of AI and at least start using it properly. To do this, we need to know what isn’t using it properly.
If you were anything like me at school, you didn’t listen much – especially when Lucy Collins let you rub her inner thigh in Mrs G Smith’s maths class. Homework was rushed if done at all. If an essay was due, our first question was “how many words?“. Then the word count battle progressed. “I’m” became “I am”, and “furthermore,” “moreover,” and “on the other hand”, were squeezed in wherever we could – all in an attempt to hit 500. Then we’d see the class swat handing in reams of paper. 1,500 words of prose. That smug, sh*t-eating grin on their face. We couldn’t help but be envious. My theory is that this connection between “lots of work” and “good work” stays with most of us for the rest of our days. The idea that more is more is a tough one to shift. If there were only an emerging technology that allowed those of us who struggled to write 50 words, suddenly write 500? If only!
Have you noticed how long LinkedIn posts have got in the last 18 months? Have you noticed how long RFPs have become, and how quickly they are produced? Have you made it to the end of an email recently? I f*cking haven’t. Have you seen cover letters have made a comeback? Have you noticed Murray, who has the strategic vision of Yakult, has produced a fantastic strategy document? Have you noticed that we’ve moved from writing an email to attaching a beautiful 1,000 word PDF which we now (again) call a “Memorandum” of some sort? And haven’t candidate profiles improved of late? I wonder what the f*cking deal is??
Like young boys discovering their willies, Recruiters have discovered the most rudimentary abilities of AI, and my God we’re going to waggle it in your face. Not just waggle it, but display it with a sense of pride like we’re the only one who has it. Instead of using AI to do the “behind the scenes” heavy lifting stuff it can do really well, 90% of us are using it as a cut and paste agent to turn 50 words into 500. And we think we’re being smart. What we don’t realise is that we might be able to send out 500 words quicker than ever, but do you know what’s coming back to us? Yep, you guessed it. Another 500 words of AI slop. This is a contra deal. Whatever you save is taken from you. We’re no better off than before. This was meant to give us back time, and I was meant to be drinking piña coladas in my speedos by 11am. Instead, I’m asking ChattyPete to summarise another email.
I have as much chance of persuading you not to use AI to write as I do persuading you to live in a waterless cabin in the woods or become an amphetamine addict in China. To upskill and as an experiment on AI, I built an entire side-business with it, and didn’t write a single bit of copy. It’s a frankly incredible tool. I think us recruiters, and anyone in business, would be well advised moving beyond the rudimentary copy-and-paste hyperbole machine however. We look like kids waving our little willies around. Instead, we should learn from the Japanese. Whereas most of the world thinks big is better, and more is more, the Japanese realise that true perfection is minimalistic. Writing a long blog is easy, it’s being succinct that I largely fail at. Conveying your career in one page is so much harder than three. A two line LinkedIn post is mastery. If we’re going to use AI to create language, prompt it to be concise. We’re not at school any more. And once we’re over showing off, recruiters need to use AI for what it’s great at. A little digital sidekick that can collate huge amounts of data, integrate between different platforms, remove the admin, give us a nudge, highlight a blind spot. Not to turn 50 words into 500.
How many words is that Claude?
^SW
