> it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous
"Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1].
The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.
Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly, the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe you're right:
First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us.
Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM.
(There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness.
In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this engagement of the mind, is a prompt.
Yeah man, I'm not so sure about that. My father made good money writing resumes in his college years studying for his MFA. Same for my mother. Neither of them were under the illusion that writing/receiving resumes was important or needed. Nor were the workers or managers. The only people who were confused about it were capitalists who needed some way to avoid losing their sanity under the weight of how unnecessary they were in the scheme of things.
"Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1].
The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...