A student’s guide to selling your soul

Katie Meeker, Opinions and Humor Editor

If you are college-aged and have spent any time online, I am sure you have come across a post joking about “defense engineers” before. Each joke runs along the same line — the seemingly inevitable fate of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed engineering graduates to make Lockheed Martin weapons for $150K a year. 

There seems to be an “evil” career route for almost every college major, not just engineering, though a vocation building weapons of mass destruction seems to take the cake. Real estate majors becoming landlords, criminal justice majors chasing to be cops, political science majors turning into lobbyists. This list goes on. 

By majoring in English, I figured I would be so far away from any hope of a profitable career and never have to worry about hearing the siren songs of blood money. Generative AI, however, has created careers that have even my most progressive peers leaping overboard to their watery dooms. 

The newly emerging field of prompt engineering involves optimizing generative AI responses by providing it with refined and deliberate inputs. According to an article from Forbes, companies such as Anthropic are offering salaries over 300K. 

When comparing these big, beautiful and damning numbers to an English major’s median wage, an estimated $60,000 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I understand the appeal. 

Not only does the training and operation of generative AI models need an enormous amount of energy, but it also involves deforestation, mining rare earth elements and producing significant amounts of electronic waste. AI also requires considerable amounts of water during construction and for cooling electrical components — so much so that one report estimates global AI-related infrastructure may soon consume over six billion cubic meters, which is more than Denmark’s total annual water withdrawal. 

The issues regarding generative AI’s horrendous environmental impact are just the tip of the iceberg. I have not even discussed how AI is slowly sucking the human aspect out of the creative arts. By working with AI, I would essentially become a cog in the very machine taking away jobs from my fellow fine arts majors. I would be stable and happy with a six-figure salary, but I would also become part of the problem. 

I do not want to sell my soul at the all-American altar of profitability. I do not want to train AI models to write so they can produce more colorless content, while destroying the environment in the process. When I see that average salary statistic, though, I cannot deny that my resolve starts to weaken.

The never-ending quest for financial security we all go through should not rely upon the concession of morality — yet, sometimes, it does. That is just the world we find ourselves living in. 

It is up to every individual to decide on exactly how much they are willing to surrender in the name of capital. Some may be willing to overlook their ethical concerns and some may not. 

I am not going to tell you what to do with your life. I will leave you with one thought, though — if you are prepared to disregard your sense of morality for profit, then you have put a price tag on your soul.