SEO-style pseudoscience meets a career path with the lifespan of a mayfly
But... but... we were told that generative AI was going to create as many jobs as it destroyed, opening up exciting new career paths like "Prompt Engineer".
Oops.
Seriously, when I first heard that term, my reaction was that this was likely to be the next pseudo-profession full of bullshitting YouTubers passing themselves off as experts, followed by further wannabe "experts", all the way down to customers driven by AI FOMO, dazzled by fake "expertise" consisting- like search engine optimisation- of little more than memorisation of ephemeral and shallow tips and tricks masquerading as a science.
A bandwagon you could see countless people jumping on to under the mistaken impression that "prompt engineer" was ever going to be a career with a long term future. When in reality, it's not just that any "expertise" they're going to accrue in how gaming the current generation of LLMs is likely to be worthless in a few years time, let alone something worth building on. (*) It's that the entire concept of a "prompt engineer" itself was so obviously little more than a reflection of the current- but ephemeral- state of the art, and likely to be rendered irrelevant as things moved on.
So yeah, I could have told you that this would happen. But I'll admit that I never realised it would happen *quite* so quickly.
(*) Rather like someone who knows that if you hit their current car in a particular place or jog the accelerator it gets around a particular problem with the engine, but doesn't really understand the underlying mechanics of why that is, or how the engine works. There's nothing to build on, and all that "knowledge" will be irrelevant when that car gets scrapped and replaced by another with completely different foibles.