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.
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.
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.
Thank you for good insight, I was just thinking if all here clients are satisfied with AI, then
The few remaining clients you have specifically don’t want AI to be used.
Is not completely true.
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.
At the end of the day if an AI can do the job to an acceptable standard a human doesn’t need to be doing it.
As you say it’s happened to countless industries and will continue to happen.
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
That was mildly offensive and didn’t really have anything at all to do with what I said. Are you an AI chatbot?
Oh ok you can’t understand, dw I won’t waste your time.
In case you really want to know; I am saying it’s amz how you can predict the future.
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.
Anyway, here’s an article about what I said:
You can dispute it with them. In fact, it cites a research paper:
No? Wtf are you talking about? This is such a nonsense take.
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.
Here, you can read this research paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
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.
or this consumer article:
Okay fair enough.
I acted like a smug prick, but you’re absolutely right.
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.
Not optimality. Maximum profit. Very different from any definition of optimal I would personally use.
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.
What a little, ridiculous, narrow-minded view of the world.
I agree, but that is how it is taught.
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?
Unrelated agreement, the world would be better off if we had skipped cars.
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…
“I’m worried about how the cotton gin might collapse an entire labor market” I think was the point to be made
Always blew my mind that the word car comes from carriage
Carriage > motorised carriage > motorcar > car.
And you just blew my mind right now
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It’s comical how she uses the example of the printing press in her introduction. Are we really sad that we don’t have to rely on monks copying books?
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.
Maybe she should pivot to using ML tools to produce the same content she was already writing, but faster.
Naw, she should bitch about it to a cheap rag so more people can be sensationalized to the idea that robots are out to take err jawbs.
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
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.
“I have no skills that couldn’t easily be automated, please have sympathy for me”
I guess her “undeniable beauty” isn’t enough to carry her to fame and fortune. What a pitiful article.
I think the “undeniable beauty” bit was a joke.
I think she has a good point at the end. Lots of us think we have skills that can’t be replicated by a machine, but companies would rather have something replicated poorly by a machine if it saves them money.
Of course they would, that’s the point of the company! Companies don’t align with our needs as humans. Ideally we’d have more free time due to advancements and automation, but our corporate overlords think we should just work more actually. And old people who got theirs don’t think anyone should have it easy since they didn’t.
True, but I meant to emphasize that the quality of the work is not as important as some people might think. For a lot of bosses the work quality from a machine only needs to be passable, not good. So while one might say “AI would suck at my job, I’m safe” they might need to be worried.
Copy done by ai is dull garbage.
Whatever ai is meant to be replacing here has to be garbage to begin with, if ai can replace it.
Remember when big corporations thought they could outsource 100% of customer service to india many years ago? Remember how well that went?
Because of a related fiasco, two of the largest communications companies in the USA won’t allow Indian subcontractors for design work at all unless directly overseen by one of their American contractors.
And the same thing is happening with AI. Friend of mine who is a programmer has a few side projects for customers. One of them got impatient trying to get him to fix a bug in their software. So instead they tried to use ChatGPT to fix the bug, and it went as well as can be expected.
Having worked with ChatGPT to program code, I’ve seen it literally invent fake modules, declare variables, call up this fake module and then never bother to declare the code for that special module (which supposedly does 99% of what you want it to do). And if you ask it to program the missing module, it simply declares that module and calls up a new magical module that still does 99% of the desired work. It’s and endless loop that goes nowhere lol
And there are still loads of call centers staying in India and the Philippines.
And there will be loads of companies who insist on using AI in the future… but not all will - because they’ll learn that like everything, there are limits to it’s capabilities.
Companies fuck up all the time kid
I’ve read lots of dull copy written by humans. even if their first draft was good (and it probably wasnt) it still goes through a committee that sterilizes it in the end anyway
But it’s cheaper than dull garbage written by a human.
That is actually a good reason to be sympathetic, being displaced by new technology.
Yeah, I’m not sure where this attitude of “Fuck people who did work and developed skills in fields that employers thought were necessary, but now suddenly the new hotness is believing that they’re not” is coming from. Smug superiority based on the avenue through which you allow yourself to be exploited is pretty fucking dark, and says nothing good about the people espousing that mindset.
Edit: Unsurprisingly downvoted by someone who seems to have mistaken themselves as smarter than the average bear and unreplaceable. “I was interested in a thing that turned out to be more lucrative than you” isn’t a good enough reason to look down on other people, folks. None of us deserve more comfort than anyone else, especially not because we liked something other people didn’t. Believing otherwise is just anti-social, sociopathic bullshit.
It’s neoliberal economics where the economy exists for its own sake.
You’re generalizing a LOT here. The attitude isn’t typically “fuck people who did work”… it’s “I don’t have sympathy for you if your job role was so piss poor that a language model could scrape up data already present in the world and slap it together better than you can.” AI is still extremely limited and the results it produces are fed from other sources, and very soon itself, as it generates more and more. A human is capable of complex, self critical, unique thoughts. If the human in that job role was doing any sort of critical thinking, a robot would not be able to replace them. AI isn’t all powerful and all knowing. It’s pretty shit. And if you can be replaced by it, you’re shit at your job.
If you don’t have sympathy for people because they lost their livelihood, and the reason for that loss isn’t that they were themselves rotten people making other people’s lives worse, then you’re a rotten person.
Full stop. End of discussion. Kindly exit society, we don’t need more people like you in it.
This person was writing email advertising. It’s the kind of job that’s not necessary to society, it would be better if people never did it ever again
Your opinion on necessity is a red herring. That isn’t the system we are in. We are in a market system (for better or worse) that determines what jobs exist and how much they’re worth in compensation.
Besides if it were all about bare necessity, we could pare down most jobs. I mean heck, let’s go back to being hunter-gatherers. We don’t need anything more to survive as a species. (And all this bullshit we do every day dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will guarantee our demise, most likely).
I mean to say is that this job being eliminated is market efficiency at its best, since this job not existing and being done by dumb AI is good enough. Nobody will cry about lower quality copy in email ads
I have some friends like this… It’s so frustrating. They have no idea how lucky they are to be so interested in such lucrative careers… They’d literally sit at home during the summer and work on things they found interesting. Yes they worked for it, I’ll never say they didn’t, but they didn’t have to FORCE themselves to do it, they were having fun…
Now they’re wealthy and enjoying work while I’m stuck in a literal sweatshop because everything I find interesting are just hobbies that can’t be monetized… But fuck me for not being “valuable.”
It’s just another variation of “fuck you, I got mine.”
I don’t think anyone expected “creative” careers to be replaceable by AI even 5 years ago.
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Don’t worry, only jobs that aren’t soul crushing will be automated. How else will people build their little wannabe corporate fiefdoms lording over the miserable peasants?
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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.
all you need is low-quality product
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?
THE POORLY WRITTEN SENTENCE with the typo right at at the punchline doesn’t help her case: “The contract was six months, because that’s how long it’d take the AI would learn to write just like me but better, faster, and cheaper.” Yep. Better than that.
This is a complex issue!
On one hand, I’m not sure what kind of consistent and great results people are getting with GPT today. It’s an amazing tool but it is still lacking in a lot of ways.
Into the future? I think a lot of the jobs will change dramatically and entirely new ones will exist.
Adaptation is necessary in life, a disruptive technology has been created and we are just starting to understand it.
The results which are probably not ideal isn’t so much of a problem when you factor in the costs. GPT is good good enough for far cheaper and that’s why people are being replaced.
I use it for various tasks but I treat it like a tool. I understand it can’t make miracles, and I make sure I’m feeding it the right information to produce my desired result.
It saves me a decent amount of time and effort in rote work while the creative inputs still come from me.
As with anything, proofread and edit heavily to ensure it all makes sense.
“ unless that writer could also provide email management and a funnel-building system, most likely because of the newfound popularity of ChatGPT.”
So they moved to a more complex managed marketing program. Email and funneling have nothing to do with chatgpt.
the horse whip & buggy industry still hasnt recovered
Meanwhile ChatGPT:
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?
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Ala🅿️ama
Rho🅿️e IslandThe AI is just giving you the names from 2077 after GenZ wins the memewars.
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 debunked the “self driving is safer than human driving” myth too, autopilot kills at a higher rater than human drivers.
Because new technology never gets better, ever
Don’t you think technology should only be available for mass consumption if it’s safer than the existing options?
It should be available when it’s similarly safe. We allow 16-year-olds to drive and they are much less safe drivers, maybe even less safe than AI
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.
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.
It’s because it’s a fancy Markov chain machine. It doesn’t have any understanding of the question, it just picks words it’s seen near similar words.
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“new states or name changes could have occurred”
language models. not intelligence.
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Ok, I’m sorry but this is hilarious.
I also have an over-fondness for dad jokes.
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I thought my job would have been automated already, but it turns out that AI doesn’t make an acceptable scapegoat when things go wrong.
Now introducing AI Fall Guy
While I understand the concept of this article. Its really not a good example.
Its the best example ChatGPT could come up with.
This comment brought to you by ChatGPT.
That’s why I’ve seen so many dead-eyed sample passers taking the jobs of old ladies.
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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.
AI isn’t better, it is cheaper.
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.
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.
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?
I subscribe to Grammerly and that is AI. I use it to rewrite my paragraphs to sound better.
Worse is better, and cheaper is the best kind of better.
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 actual 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.
Bald-faced appeal to authority, okay.
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.
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.
You don’t seem to have actually read anything I’ve written, and just want to argue with someone.
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 don’t seem to have actually read anything I’ve written, and just want to argue with someone.
Based on the fact that I have not anywhere “[dismissed] AI alignment concerns,” I stand by the above statement.
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.
OK but that’s comparing apples to oranges. The AI revolution will be NOTHING like the industrial revolution.
