We made it to 100! To celebrate, I thought I’d make a map showing that LLMs are not destroying white-collar, cerebral creative jobs on their own. Oh, no! The internet did a number on many of those first. In particular, on careers in writing and publishing.
To be up front: I adore writing. Nothing gives me the joy of parroting my way through explaining my own thoughts and emotions using words and syntax I’ve stolen throughout my lifetime of listening to people talk and reading the New Yorker. (This is why I empathize with LLMs; they are no more stochastic parrots than humans. We have no original linguistic thought or writing ourselves. Every word I write, I read or heard somewhere else, thousands of times, and I am parroting and placing these words in an order that seems logical and to make sense. It’s no different. It’s plagiarism.
All writing — LLM-based or now — is plagiarism. But plagiarism is only a crime in a capitalist world-economy that has commodified reasoning… copyright laws are literally the commodification of communicating free-will thought and reason — much as property laws are the commodification of geography.
What cracks me up is that LLMs are stripping the veneer off the shortcomings of the social (and economic) construction of copyright laws. Hmmm… maybe Marx was on to something? ! But I’ll leave that to the David Harveys of the world to bicker about in copyrighted academic publications.
Writing is also why I dig prompt cartography. Language is merely human code for engineering our own and others’ beliefs about the world and changing people’s behaviors. That’s all. It’s a programming language we use on ourselves. Viewed that way, it’s absolutely brilliant!
As a wayward teenager lost in Hungary in 1993/1994, reading English translations of Jozsef Attila and Orkeny Istvan in cafes while cutting class, I decided I would grow up to be a writer someday. It became my life’s goal. I even entered my undergraduate degree as an English Major.
And why not? The world was once full of writers. My family knew a bunch of them. My mother had a writing business at one point – Said Write, LLC. My second best man’s — meaning the best man at my second wedding in this case — dad was full-time poet! Imagine that!
The woman neighbor next door to us growing up was a journalist for the local newspaper. My parents were friends with a couple of full-time magazine writers. We knew the editor of Lake Superior Magazine, which was a full-time job back in the day… unbelievable!
And then it hit me… I don’t know anyone today who makes a living writing. We all have to write. And I know people who have written novels. I’ve written screenplays and non-fiction books, but I don’t know anyone who holds a career in writing. (And yes, I know there are still journalists. Just not nearly as many.)
Now… there was the big blog phase in the mid-2000s. But even blogs are no longer a major thing like they once were compared to podcasts and influencer videos. And what about all those newspapers and book publishers that got shutdown, merged, downsized, and sold off? Including Rand McNally Atlas even being bought and weeded out by a Hedge Fund… not even atlases are sacred?!?!) And what exactly doesn’t Taylor & Francis Group not own in academic publishing, I ask, in all sincerity? (Aside from Springer – keep it real, Deutschland!)
I realize that many of my former colleagues in academia may be livid right now. They write. They have careers. True but… you don’t officially get paid for your writing. In fact, you often have to pay Taylor & Francis Group to ensure your writing can be read (i.e., to make it open to anyone outside of academia). Rather, you get paid to do research and report on your findings. Writing is one form of communicating your results. I would argue it’s probably less effective than a podcast or vlog, but writing still possesses a higher stature even if it goes largely… well, unread.
I digress again… it’s what I do best… particularly while freewriting!
So where was I, ah yes, encourage a young writer day…
I began thinking: my daughter loves writing. But how can I possibly encourage her to become a writer? (Similarly, my sister-in-law loves calligraphy. But I wouldn’t encourage her to become a calligrapher right now; she’s already struck out as a yoga instructor so…)
I simply can’t encourage any young person to pursue a career in writing. All I can do is encourage someone, like my daughter, to write for enjoyment — similar to how I don’t encourage her to become a professional videogame player, but to play Baulder’s Gate for enjoyment purposes.
Encouraging young people to only write for enjoyment also happily removes a lot of the problems young people have with writing.
Writing for enjoyment means you don’t have to worry about what others think of your writing or following others’ prescribed notions of what constitutes writing versus what doesn’t. You can try new tools.
Not a gifted writer… or perhaps you have dyslexia like someone in my family does?
No worries! Spellcheck, word processing, or writing outlines of your ideas and feeding them to LLMs to spit out more clearly counts as writing. Because it is… writing is using tools to communicate your ideas in code that other humans (that share your natural language) can interpret and do with what they want. No human has ever written anything without technology. No human has ever written anything without plagiarizing everything they’ve ever heard, read, or seen. LLMs are just the next technological step.
But I then remembered, and coming full circle, the death spiral of writing for a career started way before LLMs.
Video may have killed the radio star, but internet killed professional, career-based writing jobs with health insurance and benefits.
At least, that was my hypothesis, which I decided to explore in today’s map.
I went and downloaded US Census data to map the number of writers per square mile by county in the US in 1990 versus in 2023. I used the US Census’s Business something or other data, which changed a bit in classification scheme since 1990s but is roughly the same.
Again, I love writing. I encourage young people to write using whatever tools they want — pens, pencils, word processors, paint, or LLMs. (Lord knows, an LLM would have written this more clearly than I just did.)
I do not advise anyone assume they will be able to feed themselves making it their day job, though. More like a passion project similar to this 365 Days of Maps Campaign. Just for fun. Just to make people think. Just to poke some sleeping bears.
Happy Encourage Young Writers Day!
P.S. For those of you that think I’ve committed some sort of writing blasphemy… perhaps I have. But I promise Monday’s map makes up for this – it requires impeccable spelling! 😉
Data compilation and cleaning:
Original Prompt Used in WebMapGPT
I would like to make a sad map for Friday’s National “Encourage a Young Writer Day”.
The map should use the two attached datasets, or a combination of them, to do the following:
Show the difference in the number of people employed in writing and publishing jobs between 1990 and 2023 by county in the US.
I have two geojson files. One shows different employee counts by type of writing/publishing employment, count of employers, as well as total payrolls in thousands of dollars in 1990 and the other shows total people employed and either payroll or count of employers in 2023.
Though they use slightly different categories (due to technological changes), the evidence is clear — there are fewer writing jobs.
Please come up with a map design of the United States that is equal area (with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left) that does the following:
Shows total number of people employed in writing and publishing (regardless of field) in 1990). Also shows the total number of people employed in writing in 2023 by county. Also shows the change in count as a percent between the two years (using a purple (decrease) to green (increase) diverging color ramp. (You may have to add separate values within a year per county and then subtract the count differences between the two datasets per county to show change over time. Sorry about that. Feel free to clean or create a new geojson, etc.)
For counties that are missing data from both years, please still include the boundaries but use a light gray fill with no boundary outline.
Once the data is prepped, I provide some guidelines for the map design below beyond the projection, which was discussed above.
# Intent
To show how bleak the future of writing looks, not to mention LLMs replacing a lot of the human writing grunt work.
# Communicative Goal
– Tongue-in-Cheek Satire for Young Writers’ Day
– Informative about just how much the internet changed the writing and publishing landscape and hinting at AI changing it
# Interactive panel
Should allow users to change which map they are looking at, as well as the number of classes in the dataset and visualization technique.
## Three Mapped Datasets:
1. 1990 Writers/Publishers
2. 2023 Writers/Publishers
3. Percent change between the two
### For datasets 1 and 2
Allow the user to change the classification scheme. Default scheme is natural breaks, six classes.
– User may choose among: natural breaks (default), equal interval, arithmetic, standard deviation, unclassed.
User may select between 4 and 8 classes on a slider for each classification scheme, except for unclassed, in which case the slider will made inactive and when the user hovers over it a tool tip will note: “Change classification to select number of classes.”
### For dataset 3
Default classification scheme is diverging in arithmetic chunks for 0% change. User may select number of classes. They may also select unclassed diverging from 0%. Color scheme is the same as above, except the middle color is white. Purple is heavier negative percent and green is heavier positive percent growth.
# Map Layout
Interactive panel should be in lower right-hand corner of hte map with some padding from edge of window. Title should be: “Writing Opportunities”
When the user clicks on the panel, it should minimize. When they click on it again, it should open again. When the map loads, the panel should be open. A legend should be included in the panel.
The title should be in a header across the top, left-aligned. “Never tell a writer the odds…” in a handwritten display font, preferably a bit modern cursive. (Use Google fonts or similar open font.)
On the right of the header, right-aligned wiht some margins from the right window border, have an small “i” button. When the user clicks that a modal opens with sources and information, as well as a link to www.webmapgpt.com and attribution information for the API. Please note the datasets came from the Census: County Business Patterns and were filtered to writing and publishing jobs.
# Styling
– Popups should be white with light drop shadown and have an arrow to the county.
– All divs with borders or fills should have border-radius values of 10 or less.
– Colors… let’s go for faded typewriter ribbon style and graphite pencil.
– Fonts: let’s go with typewriter fonts in the pop-up windows and in the legend, etc. Title will be handwritten as described above.
Colors: Purple = decline/low, Green = positive/growth (try to find a color ramp that mimics Color Brewer but isn’t ungodly bright.
County outlines should look like they were drawn in pencil with light line thickness variation and grayness density.
Background of HTML page should be lined paper with a light texture and very light blue lines.
Once it concluded, I realized my error in the original instructions and added a second prompt to recreate the choropleth maps to show derived values based on number of writers per square mile.