Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"
10 comments
·September 12, 2025furyofantares
dentemple
It was 3 people who were replaced for the making of a list.
The number 50 was what Doctorow presumed was the entirety of the department that could potentially have been replaced by AI, of which the making of this list had been only one of that department's overall tasks.
At 3 interns per article, having 30 interns working on 10 simultaneous articles at any given time seems like reasonable output for an online zine.
rtkwe
That wouldn't have been their full time jobs but that list would have passed through quite a few people's hands; from gathering all the events/books/activities, picking out some that seem fun for several different 'types' of people, compiling, writing, reviewing/editing, fact checking and formatting.
throwway120385
In the days of print media, before you could google "top 10" X, the newspaper might well be your only source of "listicles." They took that responsibility seriously.
Top 10 lists are garbage nowadays because the format is used to flood search engines with Amazon Affiliate links for things like fartely brand leggings.
smithkl42
I agree with Doctorow about the de-humanizing nature of this sort of work - but to your specific point about fact checking, it'd honestly be fastest to outsource that to a different LLM, maybe ChatGPT in "deep research" mode or something like that.
CamperBob2
The other thing is that the missing books can be created on demand and published in a couple of hours, using the same tech that mistakenly added them to the list in the first place.
They'll suck, of course, but so do most of the books on any given "Summer Reading Guide."
throwway120385
So it's a sort of "reverse memory hole" where things that never existed contemporaneously to the list can now be given life to invalidate fact checking.
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Freak_NL
A reverse centaur? Isn't that basically just BoJack Horseman?
A reverse mermaid; now that's something!
I'm sorry, but is producing 10 lists of 15 items each really 50 peoples' worth of work? The amount of effort this would take today without the use of a chatbot seems overblown. Or with the use of a chatbot, but fact-checked, for that matter.