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 She’s just been replaced by another marketing droid.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
People had these same concerns are troubles during the industrial revolution, when machines started to work better, faster, and cheaper than human labor doing the same job. Is there going to be a serious upheaval in labor again? Yup. Is it a bad thing for the world? In some ways yes, in other ways no.
The industrial revolution has done horrible things to the global environment. At the same time, many more people are much better off today than they were in the early 19th century.
It's not better yet, or for everything (arguably not for most things), and the first forays into mechanization of industry weren't, either. We're at the very beginning here.
Which is actually not a big difference to what companies have done the past couple of decades, namely moving positions from high-cost to low-cost countries. Cost for an AI is problably easier to mask in the balance sheet as well, as costs for human resources.
AI is already better… than some people. A human using AI is probably better and faster at certain tasks than a somewhat skilled human is.
I bet midjourney is better at making concept art than the vast majority of the population.
I think we have a high threshold for success of AI. I saw a video a while back about how AlphaGo (an AI designed for playing Go) was able to beat a whole bunch of experts in Go. One expert used an atypical move and beat AlphaGo. People started reacting like “see? AI isn’t impressive. This genius beat it.” How many of us are geniuses? How often will geniuses beat better AI?
This is not like the industrial revolution. You really should examine why you think “we figured other things out in the past” is such an appealing narrative to you that you’re willing to believe the reassurance it gives you over the clear evidence in front of you. But I’ll just quote Hofstadter (someone who has enough qualifications that their opinion should make you seriously question whether you have arrived at yours based on wishful thinking or facial evidence):
“And my whole intellectual edifice, my system of beliefs… It’s a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. And especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed. It felt as if not only are my belief systems collapsing, but it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon. People ask me, “What do you mean by ‘soon’?” And I don’t know what I really mean. I don’t have any way of knowing. But some part of me says 5 years, some part of me says 20 years, some part of me says, “I don’t know, I have no idea.” But the progress, the accelerating progress, has been so unexpected, so completely caught me off guard, not only myself but many, many people, that there is a certain kind of terror of an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all humanity off guard.”
Bald-faced appeal to authority, okay. With a side of putting words in my mouth that I clearly did not say.
The industrial revolution destroyed some jobs, and created others. Destroyed some industries, and created others. We've been in an "information revolution" for some time, where electronic computers have supplanted human computers, and opened up an enormous realm of communication, discovery, and availability of information to so many more people than ever before in history. This is simply true.
Just as the landscape of human physical labor was forever changed by the industrial revolution, the landscape of human thinking labor will continue to be forever changed by this information revolution. AI is a potential accelerator of this information revolution, which we are already seeing the impacts of, even at this extremely early stage in the development of AI. There will be both good and bad outcomes.
Appealing to authority is useful. We all do it every day. And like I said, all it should do is make you question whether you’ve really thought about it enough.
Every single thing you’re saying has no bearing on how AI will turn out. None.
If a 0 is “we figured it out” and 1 is “we go extinct”, here is what all possible histories look like in terms of “how things that could have made us go extinct actually turned out”:
1
01
001
0001
00001
000001
0000001
00000001
etc.
You are looking at 00000000 and assuming there can’t be a 1 next, because of how many zeroes there have been. Every extinction event will be preceded by a bunch of not extinction events.
But again, it is strange that you can label an appeal to authority, but not realize how much worse an “appeal to the past” is.
Nope. I certainly have. It’s the same arguments I’ve been hearing from people dismissing AI alignment concerns for 10 years. There’s nothing new there, and it all maps onto exactly the wishful thinking I’m talking about.
You understand that the fallacy is the appeal to false authority, right? Not just any authority?
Swinging the partial names of logical fallacies around like a poorly wielded shield isn't actually an argument. It's just an attempt to poison the well.
Absolutely agree. We all have a strong drive to feel that what we do is unique and special, but that doesn't make it true. From the mundane to the artistic, AI already can do a large amount of what people do, and there's every reason to believe that AI's abilities will grow quickly and will surpass humans abilities. Based on the evidence it looks like this is gonna happen within the next few years - like within 5.
When AI is able to replace most jobs, as a society what do we do when there are no jobs for the large majority of people? Humanity is going to go through a tough upheaval more disruptive than anything ever before. We're gonna have to figure out how to completely reorganize how we exist, what we do in our daily lives, and how we think of ourselves as a species.
the thing about The Jungle was that we were supposed to read it and think “people need better working conditions” but a shockingly large number of people read it and thought “we need some sort of filtering system in place to keep all those immigrant thumbs out of the sausage”
You’re right, I hadn’t read that yet at the time I posted this.
Retraction: It appears that minors are not allowed to be working in meat processing plants, but that he was hired by an external staffing contractor who did not properly adhere to those restrictions.
news
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.