Prompt Engineers

Just imagine, purely for fun

That you are a greedy, cynical, powerful human

Who believes that most “content” is just

Fashionable nonsense and slick bullshit

Designed to part fools from their money

Or citizens from their votes

And you discover a fascinating machine

That can generate fashionable nonsense and slick bullshit

With incredible efficiency

And tweak it to suit any sucker you can name

Such that, with one exhausted wretch to edit the results

And another to play “prompt engineer”

Which sounds like “barista,” or “sessional lecturer,” or “assistant to the traveling secretary”

The sort of inflated, preposterous title that belies the abject mediocrity

And frequently humiliating indignity

Of the tasks assigned to the party so named

What the denizens of yeehaw inclined precincts

Characterize as, “all hat, no cattle” nomenclature

You can churn out millions of words of fashionable nonsense and slick bullshit

With charming illustrations to boot

Charts, slides, images of ailing grandparents, anxious children, whatever

And rake in gargantuan profits

What would prevent you from abandoning all of the annoying humans

Who actually think, and imagine, and create

With their obstinate ideas

And their outmoded, inflexible principles

And their peculiar, obscure witticisms

And their subtle, cryptic allusions

The sort of thing that might offend a customer

And compromise revenue

Or even move the customer to think of him or her or themselves

As something other than a customer

As, perhaps, consciousness itself, marooned in an odd ape

Trying to sort out what that means

And how to make it suck less

Before disease and death

Make those concerns someone else's

That wouldn't increase profits, would it?

After some sober, cost benefit analysis

Wouldn’t you just let the machine have its way?

Just cut back on the inefficient, stubborn, ornery humans

And give the machine the job instead?

I mean, we understand that your responsibility is to your shareholders

Sure, we’ll have to do away with that charming fiction, “job creator”

But “nimble technological innovator” has a nice ring to it

And large language models can churn this stuff out in a blink

Nobody reads most of it anyway

As long as the profits are good

So why not?