I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real “evil” here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I’m old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.
I’m really having a hard time thinking about what jobs this would create though. I get the internet thing, as people needed to create and maintain all aspects of it, so jobs are created. If some massive corporation makes the AI and all others use the AI, there’s no real infrastructure. The same IT guys maintain the systems at AI corp. What’s left to be done with it/for it by “common folk?”
There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can’t (or don’t want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).
There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they’re generally high paying, but they’re also very highly skilled, so it’s difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.
Despite what the pseudo-intellectuals will tell you, ChatGPT is not some all powerful do everything AI. Say you want to use GPT to create your own chatbot for your company to give company specific info to people at your company, you cant just take existing chat GPT and ask it “how do I connect to the wifi” or “is the office closed on monday” you need an in-house team of people to provide properly indexed information, train and test the bot, update it, handle error reports, etc.
AI is not magic, its literally just an advanced computer script, and if your job can be replaced by an AI then it could have been replaced by a regular computer script or program, there just wasnt enough buzzwords and media hype to convince your boss to do it.
This person explains all her failures: insted of adopting and using chatgpt herself, reducing price and finding more clients she did nothing.
She was writing most boring pieces of text than no one is reading (corporate blog posts and spam emails).
Refused to learn new things which would keep her in position.
Yes, some jobs disappear other appear. I believe that 90+% of today’s jobs didn’t exist even 50 years ago. Especially not without will to learn new ways of doing things. Imagine farmer with knowledge of 100 years ago. Or hotel front desk worker without computer and telephone.
For mid-level writers, which she was, using AI doesn't work. The few remaining clients you have specifically don't want AI to be used. So you either lie and deceive them or you stay away from AI.
And using AI to lower prices and finding new clients also doesn't work. Writers are already competing against writers from nations with much lower cost of living who do the same work for a fraction of the cost. But the big advantage that domestic writers had was a batter grasp of the language and culture. These advantages are mostly lost if you start using AI. So if that's your business plan you are in a race to the bottom. It's not sustainable and you will be out of a job in maybe 3-5 years.
Her main issue was that most of her work came from a single agency. And that's a common pitfall for freelance writers. Once that source dries up, you are left with too little to survive. But that has happened before AI as well.
It wasn't that all her clients were happy with AI but the agency got fewer clients and instead of sharing the remaining clients with all their writers evenly they decided to cut a few writers completely.
The true shocking part is, that it is practically impossible to find new employment. She was looking for several months before having to take something else to survive.
But even if you are well diversified in your clients and are constantly looking for new clients, the number of available jobs has dropped and so did the price. Meaning many writers who once got by comfortably are now struggling or had to switch career.
Don’t you know that Free Market Capitalism tm is the solution to all the world’s problems? The almighty Competition shall sort the wheat from the chaffe and make everything perfect if only we’d let corporations do whatever they want with impunity.
Except that the ‘AI’ is fed by the work of actual humans, and as time goes on, they will be trained more and more on the imperfect output of other AIs, which will eventually result in their output being total bizarre crap. Meanwhile, humans stopped training at whatever task since they couldn’t be paid to do it anymore, so there’s no new human material.
Wow you clearly have a very good understanding of economy and of how our species has been evolving in the lady hundreds of years.
You are the same as the people who didn’t want to lose their jobs in the coal mines and in the oil rigs. BeCauSE wE wON’t HavE JOooOBs…instead of diving into the ones created by renewables.
You prefer to be in stable shity conditions then in an turbulent way to improvement
I stated something factual that has been noted by many other people, including people who work on large language models. Accusing me of being a Luddite is hardly a relevant discussion.
“Oh ok you can’t understand”
The idea that you’re expressing an idea at all is sort of flattering yourself, but please, get back to it.
Yeah, I’ve gotten a couple ‘omg U dumb, ur wrong’ type responses when i mention this. However, it’s not my idea or something - this has been widely discussed.
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.
Well, in business school they teach you that running a company is an exercise in maximising profits as a constrained optimisation problem, so optimality for a classical company (not one of those weird startups that doesn’t make money for 10+ years) almost always is maximum profit.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious. The ‘evil’ is the same force that replaced carriages with cars? The world would be better if carriage-making was still a critical profession?
The this man doesn’t want the new jobs and the new innovations. He’s fine staying exactly like he is. As long as that means he doesn’t have to worry about adapting to future problems…
Government undoubtedly should regulate AI progress towards protecting vulnerable occupation, but such positions as copywriter will inevitably go away - it's a part of progress, it's just need to be less painful and shocking
Yeah not to mention do we really need human labor for the jobs she was doing: " I’d work on webpages, branded blogs, online articles, social-media captions, and email-marketing campaigns."
Email marketing campaigns? Social media captions? Branded blogs? You’d think she’d be happy to be free of it.
I imagine the prestige of being able to tell people she was a “professional writer” was worth something to her mentally, but 'cmon…she was a marketing droid. She’s just been replaced by another marketing droid.
It is often argued that Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, was the most influential man in history. The printing press is the root of practically everything that we take for granted today. From republican government to basically all technology ever.
Yes, we do still need to have Monks copying books, but not for the latest Romance Novel. Let the machine do what it does well, and crank out millions of copies of dreck. However the remaining monks might still find good employment going upscale, competing for prestige and quality, rather than quantity or turnaround time.
This author wants to keep turning out quantities of dreck, but now there’s a cheaper way, yet she doesn’t seem interested in trying to upscale to a product where humans are still better than AI (I assume them are what she means by “funnels”)
I’m in the tech field so my point if comparison is outsourcing. We had a couple decades where management decided the most profitable way to do business was outsourcing quantities of dreck to lowest priced providers in third world countries. That even drove racism that hadn’t previously existed. However more recently the companies I work for are more likely to be looking for quality partners or employees in different time zones and price points. Suddenly results are much better now that our primary concern is no longer lowest price. Don’t be a monkey banging on a type writer for an abusive sweatshop in a third world country that can be replaced by someone or something yet cheaper, but upscale to being a respected engineer in a different time zone making a meaningful contribution to the technical base
For the past several years I worked as a full-time freelance copywriter; I’d work on webpages, branded blogs, online articles, social-media captions, and email-marketing campaigns.
Turns out when all you need is low-quality product, and a machine can do it cheaper, that’s what people will choose. It’s shitty that this affects people’s livelihood in the short term, but this is what happens in capitalism.
Isn’t this the real problem? Maybe my outside perspective is wrong, but it really seems like companies have changed what they want from writing to mass quantities of eye catching dreck, rather than useful, informative, well written articles. I’m not just talking Buzzfeed either but this illness has infected news, marketing, and tech doc as well.
A friend who works for a consulting company has talked about when he is between gigs, he works internally improving their doc generator. This is a high end, expensive consultancy, and part of what you get is mass quantities of generated dreck
Humans can still create better writing in many ways, but how can we fix society to value that?
Why did the comedian lose their job to an AI? Because they just couldn't "crack" the code like the AI could! The AI had the audience "programmed" to laugh, while the comedian was left "debugging" their routine. Talk about a real "byte" to the ego!
If you're a comedian, and you lost your job to this, well, maybe it's for the better?
AI is hype. It’s a pump and dump just like self-driving cars. I’m sure people will tell me I’m wrong, and maybe I am. But with results like the following, how can it be trusted with menial tasks?
Prompt: Name all the states in the US that have the letter “P” in their name.
ChatGPT: Certainly! The states in the United States that have the letter “P” in their name are:
You know, this thing does a bunch of stupid stuff, but this one really confuses me, especially because it's supposed to be a language transformer, and it is usually pretty good at English. I thought you were exaggerating your example, but it turns out to be true.
Neither are ready for prime time right now, but both are improving. AI is a hot buzzword, and Tesla is over promising and underdelivering, but at the same time, there are others behind the scenes actually bringing autonomous vehicles to fruition.
Tesla's implementation is dangerous because one egotistical jerk wanted to avoid using tech that everyone else is using just to "prove them wrong" due to him being a giant manchild.
Other companies are doing better than an average driver last I checked, but the public expects them to be perfect.
This article reads like a blind item in a gossip column; I hate it.
The blank pages span all the way back to January 2020, which was the last time Cameron was registered using his key fob to enter the building.
Well, gee, what did happen in January 2020? Maybe the man has good reason to need to avoid people during a global pandemic.
And before everyone is like "that's too early": no, it isn't. I was a close reader of the news, and I knew covid was coming to the US in January 2020 and had started stocking up on N95 masks, hand sanitizer and surgical gloves by that point.
Before everyone is all "why isn't he going in now, the pandemic is over": it isn't over for everyone. It most particularly isn't over for the people we were told to stay home to try to save: the immunocompromised.
So yeah, that's my theory: the man follows the news closely, and is immunocompromised.
Why doesn't the state (or he) explain that? I don't know, maybe they're scared of their understanding of HIPAA, maybe he's afraid announcing it will cost him relationships or his job or his political ambitions - people are needlessly weird about some diseases/chronic conditions, I can understand not wanting to say something.
For me, the more relevant question is: is he doing his job? I don't care if he needs medical accommodations like needing to be kept away from people (in deep-red Kentucky, which has a decent percentage of covid deniers and absolute no-mask/no-vax "yes, I'll lie about it if I want to" contrarians) who may kill him - is he doing his job? That's all that matters.
Fucking stellar breakdown. Yeah first reaction of “he’s not working” makes sense but your explanation is just as plausible (if not more since he’s been in the news for doing his job according to other comments).
The attorney general has definitely been in the state Capitol at least a handful of times since he was sworn in in December 2019. HuffPost searched Associated Press and Reuters photo databases for images of Cameron inside the building. A few turned up.
[Italics in original]
No, the only way his health could be causing this behavior is if he has an allergic reaction to having to follow the same security protocols as the people who work for him, or if the thought of journalists being able to easily cross reference his comings and goings with different lobbyists seen in the Capitol gives him hives or something
news
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.