The year was 2012, and I was around a year into my first job in the Big CityTM. I was creating video and turning print content into web content (read: copying and pasting words, cropping images) for trade mags covering the advertising and marketing industry.
And, of course, being trade mags…there were tables. Lots of tables.
League tables, circulation tables, tables about billings and everything else of interest to anyone in an ad or media agency.
I had started playing round with ‘interactives’ – a cool name for things that do something when a user clicks them – and tools to make the mindless copying-and-paste less of a slog (and hopefully hand it back to journalists who thought formatting content for the web was either too difficult, too time-consuming or not important enough for them to have a hand in).
One of the main offenders was the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) tables. ABC day was a huge deal across the newsroom back in the early days – we covered various rounds of newspaper circulations and all the different categories of magazines with league tables to accompany them.
The source data was often delivered in a monolithic spreadsheet…so over weeks (and months) I messed around with a tool that would parse a copy-and-pasted spreadsheet and initially select which of the many publications to turn into a table with the relevant columns.
This then evolved into playing around with a tool that would allow a user or journalist to ask questions about the data in human sentences by picking up on keywords (like ‘give me the total circulation of lads mags in 2012‘).
It was never really properly put to use or released to the wild.
But like someone who’s visited Nepal and claims that means they ‘almost climbed Everest’, I think it only fair to say I basically was a pioneer of the large language models underpinning what we now call Artificial Intelligence.
‘Quite the stretch’, I hear you politely cry.
Yes. Yes, it is.
But, as I begin to consider and build on these new technologies, it’s interesting to consider how much quicker a decade-and-a-bit younger me might have got to something useful with AI as my sherper.