If only I had known then what I know now
Doing my Marie Kondo bit the other day – but instead of saying, “thank you for the joy”, I said, “good riddance” – I came across a letter written by my secondary school teacher. I must have been around 16 and I wanted to apply for a scholarship to study journalism and she was kind enough to write me a reference.
It said, “In my opinion, Miss Yeoh has shown great determination and single-mindedness in her pursuit of journalism as a career …”
Her words however were not enough to get me the scholarship but nevertheless, I persisted.
I wonder though would I have persisted if I had known then that there would be cooler jobs in the future such as an “AI Whisperer”.
With generative AI creating a storm in a tech cup, people who know how to whisper to the machine to coax and lure the best results are the most-wanted species on the planet right now. You can get paid up to US$335,000 a year, according to this article, and you don’t even need a computer engineering degree.
A less sexy term is “prompt engineers” but who wants to be an engineer who prompts when one can be whispering sweet somethings to a machine.
According to Albert Phelps, a prompt engineer at Mudano, part of consultancy firm Accenture in Leytonstone, England, “You’ll often find prompt engineers come from a history, philosophy, or English language background, because it’s wordplay. You’re trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words.”
Well, soon it will be Chinese too because this week, Alibaba Group showed off its generative AI model and said it would be integrated into all of the company’s apps in the near future. This was immediately followed by the Chinese government’s publication of draft rules outlining how generative AI services should be managed.
And so the AI arms race continues – and so will the demand for AI whisperers. There’s now even marketplaces such as PromptBase which helps you “find top prompts, produce better results, save on API costs, sell your own prompts” for a fee.
So what does it take to be a good AI whisperer, beyond knowing how to talk to a robot with clever wordplay?
In the area of AI image generation, skills “would include an eye for quality designs, technical knowledge of image parameters (Aspect ratios, resolution, etc), a way with words and a certain understanding of how the AI operates and where it draws, for a lack of a better word, inspiration for image generation”, according to this article I found in Medium.
In other words, a “fusion of designer, copywriter and a programmer”.
I also asked Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego, for what would it take to be a super duper AI Whisperer, and he said, “Constantly asking “Is there a better way to get this done?” and staying on top of the firehouse of new product releases and use cases.”
Curious, I trawled the net – a journalist today is more Net Trawler than anything else, to be honest – to learn more about other whispering jobs, particularly those that involve communicating with animals and best portrayed in “The Horse Whisperer”, the Nicholas Evans book turned into a 1998 movie starring Robert Redford and Kirstin Scott Thomas.
The Horse Whisperer were men who could “see into the creatures soul and soothe the wounds they found there. The secrets muttered softly into troubled ears”. And their qualities included patience for the long run, understanding, calm natured, great at reading non-verbal communication and ability to effectively communicate with people and horses.
In one scene from the movie, Annie MacLean (Kirstin Scott Thomas) says to Tom Booker (Robert Redford), “I’ve heard you help people with horse problems.” To which he replies, “Truth is, I help horses with people problems.”
Could the natural conclusion then be that the AI Whisperer helps AI with people problems?
Anyway, I think I will stick to my chosen career as Net Trawler. It’s way too late in the game for me to learn how to whisper to the machine, when I’d rather be whispering sweet nothings to my dogs.
