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{Written a few years before the launch of ChatGPT and the 2023 surge of AI into the consumer marketplace that has prompted a wider discussion of how writers’ will work.}

So much for the highway toll-taker and the truck driver he used to see coming down the road. Technology has taken their jobs. Electronic readers, driverless cars -- day after day we see where and how far artificial intelligence can take us.

Not gonna be my problem, creative types have reasoned. Our work is original, uniquely subjective, important, and somehow protected.

Yet, I see now that my first writing job would be an ideal candidate for AI obliteration, its personal moments, expendable.

My task at National Jeweler was simple; write product descriptions for wedding rings. I’d landed a job at a trade publication with my portfolio of college daily newspaper clips — my feminist columns, political cartoons and editorials about free speech. Of course, anyone able to use Roget’s Thesaurus could probably have clinched it.

The interviewer for this first-step-on-the-ladder job was the head of Gralla Publications’ Human Resources, Marilyn Klinghoffer. Her large, kind eyes sized me up across the desk. She had a regal sweep of hair high off her forehead and looked endearing and authoritative all at once as I chatted nervously in front of her. It seems clear now that she was a bit high on the “org” chart to be handling this entry-level role. Maybe she was short-staffed? Our brief meeting made a big impression on 20-something me, forged by her demeanor, corporate title, and the fact that she actually gave me a job.

In a small, shared office, bordering what I wanted to believe looked like a real newsroom, my assignment was to describe gold bands.

Crafted in gold, fabricated in gold, designed in gold, rounded from gold, fashioned in gold, formed in gold, shaped in gold, made in gold, produced in gold, forged from gold, conceived in gold, created from gold; magnificent, gleaming, radiant gold -- adjectives flowed like molten lava. Platinum was a welcome break. I cranked out varied, and more appropriate, ways essentially to say hey, check out this damn wedding band, will ya!

Years later, Marilyn came back to mind as terrorists tossed her wheelchair-bound husband Leon Klinghoffer off the deck of the Achille Lauro into the Mediterranean on their anniversary cruise. Their names became symbols of a nightmare, an historic political and cultural touch point.

I felt just a few degrees of separation from these unthinkable events. Replaying in my mind that brief interaction with Marilyn over what had turned out to be a bleak, but formative, first reporting job.

Now she was a tragic star on a dark world stage, ultimately on her way to being a character in an unlikely opera about this horrific murder. Reading her name in the news, I felt perhaps one extra thin thread of emotion, an additional synapse of feeling in the surge of collective outrage. I followed media coverage of the couple’s story, and then, a few years later, reports of Marilyn’s own death from cancer.

I’ve since wondered, where would that odd wisp of a human bond be if my grunt work - and career launch - had been wiped out by synthetic synonym production? What if that job had been handled by a robot? Or, managed by a robot, undertaken by a robot, mastered by a robot, accomplished, completed, usurped by a robot? What - and who - would I remember instead of my first foot in the door and hands on the keyboard?

I certainly would not be needed to describe band, after band, after band. That drumbeat of a job, and the swift, but lingering and warm, personal connection surrounding it, that was somehow wedded to the cruel and wider world, would’ve been lost at sea.