COMMODIFYING LINGUSTIC SKILLS AND WHATNOT
A proudly organic farm amid mass production
22 September 2025
I met with a long-lost colleague from my teaching era the other day, and we caught up, politely lamenting the state of the economy and the current political climate. Following the topic of tech winter and the stalled job market, she asked, “You still running your editing business?”
I answered, pre-emptively, “Yeah, despite all the rumours about AI taking over my job.”
She paused, genuinely concerned. “Is it not?”
“No, it isn’t actually...” I stopped mid-sentence.
The artisan editor in me wanted to fire off the usual arguments: how AI will not take over because we are a proudly organic farm amid mass production; how human judgment remains relevant; how Indomie hasn’t made penjual mie goreng obsolete; or how Padang restaurants will not lose customers just because instant bumbu rendang has hit the market.
I could also have cited a recent survey of 1,150 workers in the US, which found that AI-generated content (dubbed “Workslop,” meaning content that looks good but lacks substance) often leaves others to clean up the mess, increasing rather than reducing workloads. As one project manager put it:
“Receiving this poor quality work created a huge time waste and inconvenience for me. Since it was provided by my supervisor, I felt uncomfortable confronting her about its poor quality and requesting that she redo it. So instead, I had to take on the effort to do something that should have been her responsibility, which got in the way of my other ongoing projects.”
I could have said all of that but the entrepreneur in me spoke first.
“Because we live in a world where we can commodify basically anything: linguistic skills, time, convenience, trust, attention, and whatnot. I don’t just sell services, I sell peace of mind. AI can’t do that.”
“Girl!" She exclaimed, "Who are you, and what did you do to Anisa?”
We laughed. I admitted how much I’ve changed since my teaching era.
The truth is, when you sell linguistic services, you don’t just sell words. The value doesn’t vanish when a machine can string a sentence together. Language work also sells time and convenience, just like when nasi padang customers choose to eat at a restaurant instead of making rendang from scratch.
Sometimes, I think it even sells a sense of fairness. Take multi-authored papers: everyone has their share: A does this, B handles that, C assures something else. So when it comes to polishing the English, it’s only fair that a professional steps in. Nobody is doing extra; everyone’s just getting it done.
In other words, this commodification of linguistic skills also entails packaging perception and emotion into something quantifiable. It’s both a transaction and a trust exercise, which is the same logic behind most creative labour today.
Taylor Swift, for instance, doesn’t just sell music. She sells her personal narratives, parasocial relationships, belonging, a version of selfhood her fans can claim as their own. The tour isn’t just a concert but a marketplace of emotion, with friendship bracelet and lyric turned into merchandise reminding us that the commodity isn’t just the album, but the feeling attached to it and discourses surrounding it.
By the same logic, AI simply exposes the cheap commodity we’ve been forced to sell (words) versus the expensive one we actually deliver (trust, time, convenience and whatnot), so my job isn’t gone, rather: I am now freed up to focus on the latter.
Although sometimes, quite ironically, we also find ourselves the ones cleaning up the Workslop mess. But hey, that also means we’re not losing our jobs to AI after all :)
(See the full report here: Workslop is the new busywork, and it’s costing millions)
Human editor in the age of AI, totally unstaged :)
