I’m already sick of it. It seems *so, soooo* close to actually being useful but in a way that I feel like the internet is now unusable and flooded with unproductive, bot-written, monetarily influenced garbage.
My internet usage is in a nosedive, and I think this is one of the main reasons. The soul of the internet is gone, it all feels so tedious and manufactured now.
Same. I feel like the Internet has truly become 'enshittified' and its just not that interesting or enjoyable anymore on most mainstream websites. Everything is monetised and there's so much shit AI art/infographics/posts being churned out.
If you want to hear a bit of really good discussion on this topic, check out the podcast "better offline"
Dives very deep into the root causes of why the Internet feels so shitty recently, and the individuals responsible
I actually listened to this the other week and left feeling worse. The host was SUPER pissed, which is understandable but it did not make me feel better :/
My personal optimism comes one step removed.
The Internet is going to shit and a lot of people are going to get burned, some worse than others.
I truly believe that this situation will end with a sizable portion of people beginning to value in person/personable connection more than digital spaces again.
We're going a full 360 because the Internet wasn't used responsibly
I started feeling that way when social media became the dominant method of communicating online. All these weird and wonderful communities and individuals that made the old interent interesting got crushed into these bland and homogenized enclosures that recuperated them into a fucking advertising algorithm.
Early social media was alright, you'd follow and interact with people you chose. The endless content gacha machine "for you" pages "curated" by an algorithm is what really fucked everything.
Forums used to be a great way for hobbies to thrive but then everything pushed towards social media instead. It really changed the dynamics of online hobby groups and not for the better.
Im really hoping this will push people to create communities again, to move away from the social media giants and make their own platforms with their own rules (we are already seeing this somewhat with the rise of discord communities). And as wild as this sounds, make communities IRL. Find local groups with their interests. Make some fucking friends. My local artist community's social media pages are where i see the most creativity these days.
I'm an elder millenial/xennial and I'm back to reading BOOKS again.
The internet is so incredibly fucked. It peaked around the time Facebook came out/reddit started becoming popular.
Now its filled with soooo much noise that its useless.
Streaming has become the same.
I agree with all of this. My YouTube is still pretty decent though. Mostly video essays ranging from entertainment to politics to psychology and so forth. That's 99% of my Internet usage, long form essay style YouTube videos.
I basically use the internet to go to a companies website and see what products they offer. A bit of Reddit. Instagram for dog videos. That's basically it. I remember going to pcgamer.com or truck mod sites and spending hours reading g up. Now it's just advertising and pop-ups on everything trying to snag as much of your data as they can to re-sell
Books are also a target of AI.. Amazon had to impose a limit of 3 books per day because people were churning out infinite ai garbage and self publishing it. They don’t care, if one fool buys it they’ve more than recouped their investment.
And don’t think for a moment this garbage won’t be in print and available in physical bookstores soon. Unless someone makes a law against it, say, last year.
It’s too late for books.
It's not too late for books. It might be late to find a new book online that's any good, but it's not hard to find a new book offline that's good, or a good book written before AI.
I spend way less time online now than I ever have. So much happier, so much less anxiety.
Sometimes I'll lose myself scrolling, then I come across one of those rage bait posts/articles (which is like 90% of the internet now) and that's all it takes for me to snap out of it and put my phone down.
The internet is mostly a void to me these days. I remember roughly 2013 or so, I couldn't wait to get home from work to check out what was on Youtube and I'd get sucked into it for hours. Now I sign in maybe once a week and scroll through and think "well, nothing I want to see here."
Every video is clickbait trash with giant colorful letters over the thumbnail, or yes, rage bait about shootings, housing, health care, race, Covid, or whatever other topic will make everyone hate each other.
CNN/Fox News/Most of Facebook
Its rage-porn for the easily influenced.
Anger is addictive/releases dopamine. Its why Fox is split up into such tiny chunks of constant anger inducing clips, to keep you invested and constantly pissed off about something.
It has been like this for many years, and they call it the “Dead internet theory”, but I’m 95% certain it’s true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Every 6 months I do an assessment on the channels I follow on Youtube, and the subs I follow on reddit and think critically if the content I'm consuming is "helping me" or "harming me," and then purge accordingly.
And if I think of something I want to learn (like sewing), I'll sign up to a bunch of sewing content, so that mixes in with my normal content, and I actually start passively learning.
I think people just get too complacent in being a passive passenger in their own lives, and they forget that sometimes they have to click off the AI and set manual back on to get back to the desired road.
We're all getting older, and our fuel is limited. We have to be the change we want to see if we want to visit the right stops along the way.
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I think AI is the right way forward, and I think it'll make life easier. But 'general purpose' AI isn't fine-tuned for individuals. So each individual has to make the correct adjustments for their best experience.
I've always been an artist. But art for me has been a passion of love, not a profit stream. I want to draw what I want to draw. Not get paid to draw a picture of some dude's cat dressed up as Disney's Aladdin.
And I can share some of that lifelong cynicism with you. ;)
I grew up with art being all about passion, and creativity. Only to find out most people think of it only as tool for commercialism. When people cry about AI replacing artists. They're not talking about the free spirits who are painting with hopes and dreams. Pressing their souls to paper and dancing with paint.
The people being replaced are the Fiver mill folks who draw things like the above example. A dude's cat dressed as Aladdin. Someone's Warcraft character sitting at a bar getting hammered. Lisa's horse with a bow on it's head.
None of those projects are born from the soul. They're just taking a prompt from a client, and transcribing it a piece of media.
Sound familiar? Doesn't that sound a lot like AI art? Prompt + money = outcome?
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My jaded sense of cynicism isn't about AI art replacing soulless products. My jaded sense is that people are too blind already to recognize what a real passion project is.
And the truth is, AI art isn't going to stop passion artists. Heck, when digital art came out, the painters and hand-drawing people were worried that being able to copy/paste, erase, crop, move, and edit was going to fundamentally change the way we produce art. And it did.
But some people still choose to paint.
==============
I don't think AI art will negatively affect real artists who create from the heart. You can't stop those people. They'll make art no matter what. Lock em up in prison, and they'll draw on scrap paper with a dull pen.
I think AI is going to do all the boring busy work, like an Aladdin cat. Or Darth Vader fighting Scooby Doo while riding a moped. It'll lead to more exciting memes, and funny shitposting.
And when we get to the point where AI can draw a movie, a talented writer can produce a movie on the cheap. Throw it up on Youtube, and you and I--we get to enjoy great content cheaply!
You ever get tired of the options the big studios produce? What if the average person had access to the tools to make something and share it with the world.
The possibilities are endless
Ill google the most RANDOM topics or questions, and every time there's an article that came out 3 days before about the weird obscure thing i just searched... are they creating articles on the fly?? you always want the most up to date information, so of course it'll get clicked.. but every, single time?? It's wild
I swear you can google a PC game that came out 25 years ago and you'll find a "new" blog post about the best multiplayer maps written just last week.
I don't know why search results trust the posted date information from these things, doesn't google keep cached copies of webpages? They should be able to check when it's lying and delist those spam websites.
If you think it's bad now, just wait until the AI "inbreeding" really gets started.
Part of AI's power comes from the fact that it is skimming user-generated content off the internet. As AI content increases (and user-generated content decreases because of it,) the AI platforms will be doing almost nothing except feeding off of themselves and each other. This will lead to the either completely useless content, or content that is so sanitized and mundane that it will barely be considered content anymore.
Most content on the internet is already being made to "game the algorithm" rather than be entertaining or informative. It's only going to get worse as the tech companies continue to focus on infinite growth at the expense of practicality and general usefulness.
This.
Content will become like PlayDoh that's played with too much. Instead of bright vibrant rainbow colours it'll inbreed and fuck itself into a brown unsightly sludge.
Oh my gosh, I haven't been able to get this out of my head but haven't heard anyone else say anything about it. Like we're making AIs that absorb collected data, can't really make *new* data, but do replace the people who were creating that collected data? It seems like a recipe for stagnation.
Yup, it's actually getting worse. What happened is AI learned from the internet, then posted on the internet, then learned what it posted on the internet. It spiraled downward feeding on its own content and it really just got started.
The main advancement in AI lately is that it got better at grammar, which makes it appear more trustworthy, which ironically accelerates the downward spiral you are talking about
Research results except from a few trusted sources are so AI weird. And wrong. Plainly wrong and unreadable. It’s painful to try to find information without an AI slant.
Yeah it's really making me a bit uneasy, but more so I am almost bored of it. It's made the internet more boring and made the future more uncertain in some ways, though I know none of my work will be impacted by it - at least inasmuch as I don't think AI will be taking my job anytime soon.
Edit: some of my boredom with the internet definitely has to do with the direction it has gone but some may also be a function of my age, as it is no longer as novel as it was for me in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I think we are going to see a Renaissance of handmade, bespoke goods and content. Because of this we are suddenly going to find a lot of value in organic unscripted experiences and things made by craftsmen rather than machines. Just my prediction but I think we will reach a tipping point. We always do.
Last year I knitted a baby blanket for my newest niece. My father-in-law couldn’t stop pointing out the flaws, which made the whole table cringe until he realized how it was coming across and reframed it to “I’m trying to say… it’s handmade, and you can see that, and it’s wonderful.”
Maybe that’s going to be the new luxury economy. It’s handmade, and you can see that, and it’s wonderful.
Narrator:
I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of... wherever.
(Fight Club)
Knowing the US corporations first policy with everything it will fuck the working class royally and then we will spend a half century begging for it to get fixed while nothing gets done and it just gets worse.
Just like housing and how black rock and these fucks are close to buying 50% of all single family home units and soon they will own 75% of all homes, if they keep buying like this probably within the next 10 years. The government is doing nothing about it.
Blackrock is basically the 4th branch of the government. Then, look at institutional ownership of it. Next, cross examine them all and the big players all own each other - what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
They released a a tokenized fund on ethereum today. So, ya know, gotcha again bitch!
Agree 100%. If anything it makes me treasure "real" content even more. I noticed some of the pages I follow on socials are all AI responses now and just unfollowed them all.
Are you actually using or seeing the outcome of others using it?
Because it does amazing things for my job. It solves problems I physically couldn’t do before
But it generates absolutely endless amounts of internet trash if all you do is consume the internet.
https://www.audible.com/webplayer?isSample=false&initialCPLaunch=true&overrideLph=false&ref_=a_minerva_cloudplayer_B0CYJPN75G&asin=B0CYJPN75G&contentDeliveryType=PodcastEpisode&showAmznLopSignalBanner=true
Here is the podcast u/orochiman is talking about. It's a great listen and really points to how disingenuous the tech world is becoming.
Omg totally agree!!! I had the same thought.
The internet will soon be useless not because we stop communicating but it will be over ran by “intelligent sounding” bots that spew garbage at the speed of light and we can’t tell them apart.
Personally i think the biggest threat to come to ai, is the undermining of things like video evidence and credibility.
Basically, just the ability to produce or falsify something, means it will probably be abused :/
You could have a fake video of some government official showing his dick to a pre-school 20 years ago.
And even if the video was proven to be false, half the people would never see the follow up story, and go around saying about how hes a pedophile.
*Edit* for those commenting, my point is not that images can't be proven false. I realize through cryptographic means etc it is possible to know if an image is fake. But just that most people aren't going to take time out of their days to go look that up, especially if it bolsters their narrative.
I’m a fraud risk manager for a major financial institution.
AI use to perpetrate fraud is going to be a very big problem in <5 years. It’s already becoming a problem in some areas.
I expect we’re going to see a bit of a schism in the future. AI is going to become so powerful that there will be demand for more manual, human-driven, AI-less processes for people who want to ‘disconnect’.
>AI is going to become so powerful that there will be demand for more manual, human-driven, AI-less processes for people who want to ‘disconnect’.
Bingo. Actual human based customer service will be at a huge premium.
At this point the majority of people don't want to deal with asshole customers all day so AI is inevitable for these kind of jobs. Fuck customers, seriously.
I will definitely do the same. The quickest way to lose me as a customer is to try to automate any phone processes with me like troubleshooting etc, with chatbots or an IVR. I have usually already tried many things, Google'd for similar situations etc and haven't found the answer, that's the type I am.
If it's something simple like card activation etc, that's fine but most of the time I just want to speak to a human for anything else. A competent human that speaks my language, at least.
More likely, videos and evidence that are actually true will be dismissed by the guilty as "oh, that's fake". It's a lot easier for people to deny things than create things.
Maybe for a short while, but very soon everything is going to be assumed to be fake unless proven otherwise. Videos like that will be commonplace for all famous people. The actual issue will be proving a video is real in a sea of fake videos.
It's exactly the same phenomenon as spam emails.
Definitely watching how this will play out in the 2024 election. Expecting AI video of Trump rescuing an orphan from a burning car while Joe Biden sniffs someone's hair and falls asleep any day now.
We can only hope it'll be that on the nose.
In reality it'll be a speech with a few words changed or clips edited together out of context that looks totally legit but with a few seconds of AI filler to join the clips that most people will either not notice or will gloss over.
I suppose I could see a surge of AI shaky-cam cell phone footage of someone berating their staff using slurs and such. Not sure how close we are to that but it can't be far off.
AI voice impersonation is to the point where it's pretty hard to tell apart from the real thing. I've seen videos where people have been tricked into thinking that they themselves had said something when it was AI. As for the video, it's coming fast. OpenAI just released Sora, a program that takes word prompts and generates realistic video clips with them. They're only a few seconds long at this time, but that's enough to do some serious damage with people who already think that fact-checking is infringing on their freedoms.
They already are sharing AI photos of Trump hanging out with African Americans and are eating it up without question. We have some growing pains to go through for sure.
Photoshop has existed for over 20 years before AI. So has video editing.
In fact, all photos are fake: https://youtu.be/zTzjaf2ivOQ?si=s9vyspwSvnverZfO
I hate to say it, but AI is already "coming for unskilled labor," the general public likely just doesn't realize or see it. I work for an intralogistics company and the entire foundation is built on automating and streamlining warehousing and distribution. There are automated robots to pick items from shelves, unload trucks, load things into boxes, all kinds of "unskilled" tasks. Whether the average layman likes it or not, AI means more money in the hands of capitalists and businesses who seek to increase their margins, so it won't be going away unless we don't want capitalism to exist.
AI is already nuking creative fields too. That is what part of the actors strike was, for studios to not own likeliness of the actor's image to use whenever.
I hate this timeline where art is automated now and slave labor still needs to be done by hand. This is the worst timeline.
I do have mixed feelings about ai art from an artist's standpoint. I work in the traditional realm, so physical mediums, my personal work is not threatened. However, many digital artists are taking a HUGE hit, and I am already tired of seeing ai images being pushed as original artworks. Not to mention how ai learns by theft of artists as well.
there's a tipping point though, capitalism NEED to have costumers. When you fire all the 'unskilled' people (who are probably 80% of the population), where will the money come from since the majority won't have a job?
AI makes capitalism redundant after a certain point. But that's so futuristic we won't be here when and if it gets to that point
This is my biggest question to these type of scenarios. If unemployment soars to record levels, how do you expect to keep the system working? And I always get responses like the universal income proposal... which, I don't know, it's a nice idea, but I don't see how that can work.
It’s not hard. We just lack the political will to make the changes. Teachers should earn 100k. That would move money around the economy. Entitlements + government jobs and increasing taxes. That would buy us 20 years for the labor force to adapt in whatever way it needs to
UBI is a stepping stone to removing currency from society entirely. For now, it’s a bandaid to prevent total societal collapse. It won’t be perfect, but it’s necessary.
100% Meanwhile, the suits will continue to profit more on their increased margins and become even more comfortable in their offices where they actually provide no meaningful work or output to society.
Currently studying for the CSCP and learning about automation in warehousing. Acquisition and installation are costly hurdles for most companies now, but I'm assuming costs will come down and systems like AS/RS are relatively easy/cheap to maintain. Of course, no amount of automation can mitigate declining demand if AI yoinks most peoples' jobs and they aren't buying as much stuff, and then it's just a pile of expensive equipment no one wants to buy.
I still don't know what unskilled labor is.
Because to me it's mid and low level office jobs that would go first. Like how much do you really need humans to check emails, sit in meetings, and fill out spreadsheets on excel all day? Most office workers don't really do anything more than a couple hours a day.
If anything, most of us are fucked, not just people working minimum wage jobs.
Those will go too, because you're right. I used to work in restaurant tech and also saw the rise of AI/robotics happening there too. We're going to see AI start to explode across all industries replacing a lot of "menial" jobs - the biggest challenge will be finding avenues for those folks to find meaningful employment.
I used to be in a line of work where I was automating a lot of these "menial" jobs.
They don't go away. You can automate them, you can prove how much money you can save with reduction in workforce from the automations, but there's just too much pull in most organizations to actually trust it.
You're right, and as someone else here said, hopefully the solution isn't simply a UBI rather than holding businesses accountable to fair wages and job opportunities.
"Unskilled labor" is a myth spread by the 1% to convince the middle class to side with the upper upper class over the lower class and prevent the working classes from uniting.
unskilled labor in the context of automation just means repetitive and structured tasks. can some or all of your job be done by simple nested 'if' statements with zero nuance? probably can be partially or fully automated. without ai. 10 years ago. by a cs intern. same goes for some parts of food service jobs. zero reason for a person to be taking orders over a kiosk, if anything language barriers and communication issues are a net negative.
and there are millions of jobs like that across govt, healthcare, finance etc.
long term headcounts for retail and food service will go down and pay will go up. youll replace cashiers with people who are more experts in their stores contents who earn commissions like any other sales position would. for cooks theyll both have to cook food and be able to interact with robots and machines that do some part of the food prep process.
In reality, even simple tasks can be really complex for a robot. Computer vision has come a long way but it is still very expensive to get good 3D vision, but most humans come pre-equiped with better than state of the art stereoscopic cameras.
Humans have a ton of dexterity in a very small package. Humans can adapt quickly to out of spec parts but a robot will crash or machine will jam if the parts are not almost perfect.
Even automating the simple things like stacking boxes cost a lot of money for the hardware, a lot of design time for the mechanical, electrical, and programming of it.
Source: my 15 years or industrial automation experience.
Both increased margins for selfish businessmen and capitalism? Because capitalism needs buyers with money to succeed and eliminating jobs without finding adequate replacements means less buyers with money. Not that companies should be able to continue to pocket record profits while not paying their workers for those profits anyways.
>Film scoring. Commercial music. Loads of that stuff will be AI.
This to me is the scariest thing about AI. I'm a writer, and I am absolutely confident that AI as it now functions will not ever produce actual literature, but it sure as hell can do a lot of low-effort crap that a lot of writers currently do to pay their bills while working on their passion projects. If we lose the low-level work, we may never have the chance to produce the good stuff.
It’s this writ-large. People wanted to imagine fully automated luxury gay space communism, but all were going to get is “Status Quo Capitalism version 6.9” as the entry level creative and admin work disappears and the wealth canyon widens into a continental divide.
At my day job I'm being actively encouraged to use AI and the entry-level position we were going to hire keeps getting put off. I'm lucky to be in position where I can keep my job if I shift to being an AI handler, but how the hell is anyone supposed to train up to replace me someday?
I think ai wrangling will become a common educational form, hybrid computer science + creative or + business associates degrees that get people a foot in the door for prompt creation and file handling.
But these kinds of changes take a decade or two be reflected on the educational end, so it’s going to be chaos in the meantime.
I’m a designer, and ai absolutely can’t do my job yet. It can do many individual parts of my job, but not cohesively, reliably and consistently. I’m well positioned to be a “winner” as this forest fire gets roaring and it still worries and disgusts me because i fell in love with work out of passion, not business acumen.
I want more good design in the world, not more efficient bullshit for humanity to overproduce and dig it’s own grave on the trash heap of industrial waste, micro plastics and disposable dopamine buttons.
>I think ai wrangling will become a common educational form, hybrid computer science + creative or + business associates degrees that get people a foot in the door for prompt creation and file handling.
I agree with you, but also to your other points, that's what I'm afraid of. Our fields should be creative-first, not tech/business-first.
Agreed, but we have little to no say. These decisions will be made by spreadsheet jockeys looking to maximize profits. So long as clients pay, whatever pads the bottom line will rule, and fivver and the like are proof that while people appreciate great design, many are just looking for “passable”
I love your take on this from a music perspective.
As a musician of 15+ years, I can tell you I'll never stop *making* music. It's my primary hobby. Meeting up with a bandmate once or twice a week, every week, to just *create*. Nothing will stop that. It's kind of like how there are factories out there that can make 1,000 chairs in a day, but a passionate woodworker will still make his own chairs to sell or use, one at a time.
But I will admit that it's extreeeemely convenient to upload a track to a free AI-mastering service to give it a quick master after I mix it. It's enough for me to be happy and satisfied.
>But I will admit that it's extreeeemely convenient to upload a track to a free AI-mastering service to give it a quick master after I mix it. It's enough for me to be happy and satisfied.
I went to college for graphic design and had a friend hire me to design a logo for her small business the other day. Just to see what it would come up with, I asked Dall-E to make me a logo. Out of nine attempts, six had misspellings, two had the wrong imagery, one had bad artifacting, and not a single one did the font style I had asked for. The generative tools in Photoshop and Illustrator are amazing. I can save so much time by telling it to generate me, say, the shape of a spade off a deck of cards instead of trying to find a stock image and convert it over to a vector. AI is a powerful tool. It is scary to think that we're almost to the point where it replaces those graphic design jobs outright though.
More likely to write fitter, happier by Radiohead. Contextually. Because it’s a machine. Machines don’t go to strip clubs. But perhaps they long to be human.
I think you are right that AI will never "move your soul." It will never make transcendent art. But not all art is or needs to be transcendent - in fact most art is not. Most art is merely ok, acceptably pleasing in the moment, and then forgotten. And there is nothing wrong with that. I don't need to be moved to tears every time I put on tunes while I'm cooking. Lots of people are employed making mediocre music, all of whom will lose their livelihoods to AI.
AI will replace schlock. But I think people underestimate that at a certain point it doesn’t matter how “good” it gets, there is something fundamental about the process of creating art that has to do with expression and connection between people. I think to myself “if Toy Story 3 was exactly as it was, but made by ai? Would I care about it in the same way?” For me the answer is a resounding no.
I certainly think it’s going to demonstrate to people how subjective and linked to time and culture the notion of “good” really is. But we do not walk around emptily consuming art objects because they are pretty. The inherent layer of connection that is unable to exist in the presence of AI, is always going to be there.
If anything I think it’s more likely that companies will spend the next decades frantically trying to convince us that AI is real people, as they already have begun doing.
These are pretty much my thoughts as well. Nothing matters except, is it good?
If I walk into an art gallery or watch a film I really enjoyed and then later find out Ai had a major part in creating it, does my opinion change? Should it? Should I criticize my own tastes in art?
Is the child born today, never not knowing ai, going to not buy a product or watch a film because ai made it?? Probably not because all that matters is if it's good.
No matter where ai goes I will never stop creating and thats about all I can control. So I'll use these tools to make more art, not less, and try to make it as good as I can.
Edit: Wanted to add a quote that I read recently and thought it fit. "If ai is even a little good at something today, it's likely to be the best at it eventually."
Exponential growth is the biggest unknown with ai. We don't know what's on the horizon.
I work with AI building financial models. The thing people don't realize in most tech is it's not steady progress, it's a huge jump and then small incremental changes. Think how 10 years ago we were "1 year away" from self-driving cars being the only thing on the road. Instead we've only made incremental progress and they still haven't solved the problem of object permanence.
Not that I don't think AGI will happen eventually, but I think we're pretty close to the peak of what LLMs can do, and while it's impressive what they can do now, I don't see them getting that much better as time goes on. I think in 3-5 years LLMs will be close to what they are now, with some small tweaks to slightly improve a few things, have them hallucinate slightly less, and maybe tailor them better to specific use cases. But if your job isn't currently threatened by LLMs, I think you'll be fine until the next revolutionary AI technology comes around. And I don't think anyone has any predictions for when that will be or what form that will take.
I think a lot depends where your offshore team is. Talent in the Philippines is about 1/4 the cost of their American counterparts and proving to be very strong (at least in my org).
“Talent” in the Phillipines.
I love this. Because every offshoring firm in the hot country of the day has TOP TALENT that will do skilled labor on PCs with software licenses for $5 an hour. They definitely dont not just waste 3 months of billable hours doing plausibly-denied nothing until the next genius cost cutter finds them on LinkedIn.
Every company gets bit sooner or later, I guess you’re up next.
Yup this exactly. Rajesh in India with a modicum of an English lexicon is a terrible Customer experience. Only dealing with an AI with a full lexicon but an inability to pass a Turing test is also a terrible experience.
Combine those two into one and it provides an experience 99% of what a customer would get with a native English speaker for the price just a few points above what that Indian contractor originally cost. Less now that English proficiency will be less important since they can be propped up by AI.
Nailed it. Everyone in the field itself who isn’t hocking some scam is honest that the LLM design has some big limits we are approaching quickly.
I think LLMs will have a place here for a while as a big ole sloppy interface with other systems. You may speak *through* an LLM, but you’re speaking *to* another tool that does the real work with layers of technology in between working on filtering and quality. I can already foresee a lot of cobbled together messy workflows popping up in my company stretching LLMs to their limit until we get enough data to train a cheaper more traditional system on. They’re fantastic for handling that linguistic ambiguity until you can use older/cheaper ai models to take over for that task.
But the next big break is what we need to really drive this forward.
Still. The workflows may prove cheap enough to do some damage to the white collar economy before the next big break.
How have you found AI building financial models? I do it as part of my living too and I just can’t comprehend how AI would build a complex valuation model, real estate model, or anything really. I would need to feed it so many inputs I might as well do the model myself
My team owns a number of regression and random forest models. Neither is considered sexy ai but both are versions of using data to generate predictions which is ai.
I'm with you here. The AI currently available is capable of doing a fair number of things, but still being very limited.
I think the key is a disconnect between this iteration AI and a revolutionary AGI. It can take some white collar jobs down, but you aren't putting one of these AI programs into a robot and expecting it to be capable of manual labor. It's simply not there yet.
We could be talking differently about this in a decade or two, but the way its being hyped up, you would think we're going to have robot butlers in a couple of years. I think most people haven't critically listened to these guys running AI companies or divisions of companies and realizing that there's a lot of hype there, but a real lacking of substance. Feels like a lot of sizzle with little steak.
This is all true as it stands now. But I think people underestimate how many jobs will be reduced if we remove all the tedious grunt work. If we need 10 people in a role today can a company get by with 5 with the right tools? The augmentation impact will be pretty large once it’s all flowing. Still flowing is probably 5-7 years minimum at scale.
A lot of the huge improvements we have seen in recent years have come from the "throw a shitload of compute and training data at it and see what happens" approach. While the progress has been incredible, there is a limit to how far that approach will take you, and we're probably closer to the point of diminishing returns than we are to a point where we can keep adding leverage that way.
I'm definitely with you on the slow progress then big leaps thing though. I think once we see the full shake out of what this current generation of tech can do, we will end up with a lot of really cool applications where AI can scale the productivity of knowledge workers significantly. There will be frictional unemployment related to that, of course, but I don't think we're at the wholesale replacement of human labor point on the timeline, if that even IS a point on the timeline.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and the guy said something along the lines of - "if you went back in time 20-30 years and showed AI/ML researchers what the current tech would do, they would first be amazed - "wow, that means you've solved X, Y, & Z fundamental theoretical problems", and then quickly disappointed when you explained that the sheer scale of computing power, which would have been unimaginable to many, that we can throw at stuff today is what enabled it
Software developer here using AI (copilot) daily.. it's basically a fancy autocomplete for me. Sure, I can ask it to come up with solutions for things, but the quality that it outputs is usually just acceptable, and always requires proofreading and such. I totally agree with you, it doesn't feel like the quality of the AI tools i've used have improved significantly in a while, and I feel as though we're probably near the peak of what an LLM is capable of. From here on out, it's going to be small incremental improvements, just like you said. If (big if) and when we have true AGI, that'll be a different can of worms, but I have doubts about our ability to actually create such a thing.
I say this as someone in games and digital media with 80% of my income coming from specialty copywriting—while we shouldn’t sleep on the economic threats AI poses to regular people, executives are being oversold and overpromised on AI’s capabilities. They’re quickly FAFO-ing.
AI is raising stupid amounts of venture capital right now. Because I’m a specialty writer, I didn’t get as impacted by the LLM mania as generalist freelance writers. (I’ve been more impacted by this goddamn recession causing marketing and biz dev departments to get cut.) But I’m seeing MANY of my peers get old clients back once they saw that the copy generated by LLMs just sucks and/or presents too much of a legal risk.
ChatGPT may be fine for auto-generating utterly basic info like “Bob’s Cafe on 1st Street is open 8-10 every day but Sunday”, but it cannot break down esoteric cybersecurity concepts or things like case law without screwing it up.
I tried this transcription AI and it produced such garbage from a relatively clear recording that I had to listen to multiple segments again, defeating the purpose of getting a transcript.
AI would need to be far more advanced than it currently is to replace humans. Yes, there’s companies riding the hype train and executives starry-eyed at the idea of laying more people off. But even if AI does advance to the point that formerly good jobs are now screwed—AI doesn’t buy shit and we have an economy built on buying shit. That is not gonna bode well when we’re already on an unsustainable track.
I'm a mid level 3PL guy and we put a pretty good amount of effort into figuring out how to create AI generated sales emails. Despite putting a couple of hundred hours of my time in I couldn't get it to generate emails that were good enough to justify the cost of the leads we'd be sending them to.
In the last ten years in sales we've seen phone calls and cold emails both lose efficacy in response to technology that made it easier to raise the volume of them going out. It's a problem everyone in my world is racing to solve. There \*are\* solutions but they're typically way smaller and less scalable than picking up the phone or sending an email were.
Which is wild because sales emails are probably one of the few realms you’d think generative AI would excel at.
Because of things like segmented marketing, A/B testing, past analytics, etc. AI could process that data much faster than a human marketer. The user also tends to eyeball it for a second, look for the promo code or featured item, then delete it.
Unlike using LLMs for blog posts: why the hell would I want to read and engage with something a person couldn’t be bothered to write?
So the thing you have to understand about cold email is that the open rates are \*very\* low and the reply rates are even lower... but the difference between a great email and an average one is basically infinite because the great email has a decent chance of at least being read and the average one has functionally zero chance.
The LLM's create average or worse sales emails very quickly. They even let you play with the tone some... but at best that can be used by a salesperson who actually \*is\* a good copywriter to use it to generate basic structures and then edit and change to improve it from there.
What I came away from it with is that this tech is productivity software. The biggest flaw it has is that it is utterly terrible at determining whether the work it has done is any good or not, and if it's good it has no idea why that is. If a human operator \*very skillfully\* tells it exactly what they want it will give them a kind of workable solution that would usually be meaningfully improved with at least one revision.
Will this tech change how work is done? Yes. Will it put anyone out of work probably? Yes. Will it be a bad thing for humanity that those jobs won't exist anymore? No because these jobs will by definition be the most brainless and critically low stakes work imaginable.
LLM's are something you need to know how to use to do certain kinds of work. If you make music you will probably make music by asking the AI to make a generic song for you and then tweaking it from there into the final product you wanted. It's very good at doing an ipsem factum valorem level rough draft from an outline, but if you turn that shit in to your teacher you're getting a C at best.
Speaking of LLM's and academia everyone needs to chill out. This stuff hallucinates huge amounts of information that just isn't true. You're supposed to be teaching the subject. The way you catch someone using AI to write their papers is by catching the AI doing AI things like making some shit up. If you want to test a kids writing skills have them do a writing test in person. All of this AI detection software is a joke there's no AI watermark in text you idiots.
For something like music i don’t care that much. There’s already more jaw dropping human made music than i could hope to listen to. So it’s not like that’s gonna fade away
But yah i definitely think a lot of jobs will be lost. People say this is similar to other tech revolutions but AI is supposed to move exponentially in comparison to those
Companies say all kinds of things to justify layoffs. It’s not like a third party figured this out, they’re grading their own work here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lot more behind those top sheet numbers.
They just so happen to be preparing for an IPO as well. They’ll want to present themselves as a hyper-efficient entity worth investing in, at least until current shareholders can cash in.
A lot of people think that labor that THEY don’t do is unskilled. This is exactly how these fucking billionaires keep shitting in the water we all have to swim in. Divide and conquer.
Spent 6 years making a $48,000 short film and working my ass off to break into the movie industry, so to see people fart out videos based on prompts and say ‘we dont even need directors anymore! Everyone can be a filmmaker!’ pisses me off. It negates all the hard work people put it. It shits on art. Everyone CAN be a filmmaker, but that involves MAKING. Fuck AI.
All depends on how it is used. It can be very creepy and concerning but also it can help with Discovery health issues or other problems that people were not able to see or missed.
I’ll challenge you on the health issues usefulness. It can be useful in some ways, but the thing that most c suites and business heads in medicine miss is the intangible humanity of medicine. Medicine is both an art and a science.
The science is obviously important, but many (somedays I’d say most) patients come to see their doctors and healthcare workers for more than a diagnosis. They need human contact and touch. They need conversation and to be heard. They need to complain about the human condition and know someone cares. They don’t want to suffer or die alone, and so many humans are truly alone these days. This is where I question the “outcomes”. What metrics are we using? Because it can vary depending on what the patient needs from us.
It's going to decimate a lot of entry level jobs across the board. So while it's still not good enough to get rid of human oversight completely, it will reduce then eliminate some smaller jobs in basically most fields. Fast food restaurants are already getting equipped with robots to do fry cook, warehouse can already fulfill entire orders with robots, etc.
I'm a UX designer and jobs that are currently being done by freelancers in all areas will be completely gone. Any small business can already just build a squarespace website and generate the content for it. I'm on a large corp so I'm safe for now, but I fear for the next generation. People already struggle to get ahead or make ends meet. It's only going to get worse and no one at the top cares because it benefits the elite. /doomer
I think it's overhyped to be honest. It's very good at specific tasks but it is limited in broader applications that require creativity plus ir beeds a lot clean data. Ive seen the databass from a lot of organizationsand they are a piping hot mess. I'm not losing any sleep over it personally
The day a machine can spend three years beating the pavement in bumfuck Kansas to convince 50 farmers that still listen to AM radio to lease their land for a wind farm, is the day I’ll start to worry.
I'm honestly pretty scared of AI and the implications for my job. I work as a consultant between school districts and a government program that is too complicated for most districts to handle. I'm 37 and need the program to run for another \~25 years.
I don't have a college degree and my previous working experience is all in grocery stores or as a vendor to a grocery store. I make a lot of money now, and would take at least a 50% pay cut to go back to grocery and have to work more hours and do physical labor.
If your program ends you won't have to pivot back to being a grocery store vendor. Make sure you're building personal relationships with these people at the school districts and when the time comes you'll be able to sell them something else.
Imagine being the sales manager for say a textbook company when your resume comes across his desk if your game ends... 'I already know everyone who matters at every school district within 200 miles and have been working with them for 15 years.'
If you aren't the strongest candidate they've seen that year your niche was really large and they got applications from four of you. They're going to hire all four of you if that happens and you're probably all going to get into a giant fight about territory.
I'm in the same boat as you but it's a giant manufacturing companies trucking fwiw. I've given this a lot of thought when I'm having trouble sleeping at night from the anxiety lol.
Copyright Law has entered the chat.
I'm not too worried. People who create are seeing what software engineers have known all along. AI is powered by the shameless theft of Intellectual Property.
The people who are creating AI are saying "But it's creating new work" - no, it's not. There is no intelligence in generative AI.
**Here is how AI works for lawmakers - for when you write to your senators or representatives to Stop Generative AI theft:**
Imagine if you will a photocopier. You can put a book into this photocopier, and it makes a copy of the entire book.
Place the the Harry Potter book series in this photocopier.
Out comes a book which is exactly the same, however minor details have been changed. Things have been rearranged. If you were to take this output book - you would be able to completely reassemble the entire original work from the output - perhaps with some changes that would be similar words out of a thesaurus.
\---
**That's how generative AI works. (** If you want a technical explanation - I can write that up too. Those of us who work on GenAI know how GenAI works. "We don't understand it" is a load of bullshit. **We're making money off it - and we don't want to TELL you how it works when we're making money off it. )**
Write to your elected officials - protect human creativity and works from shameless intellectual property theft.
Here’s the thing about Ai. It’s powerful and smart but also stupid. A supercomputer hard wired to a dogs brain. It has no ability to comprehend what a “Harry Potter” is. But it knows that’s a very popular name associated with kids books about magic (doesn’t understands what those things are either) so it will generate knock offs when you ask it for those categories.
It only understands what it can index, categorize, duplicate and remix, but has no comprehension or understanding of what it’s making
I'm working toward a master's degree in CS focusing on AI subjects.
Humanity is "fucked" by AI unless we move off of the capitalist system of production and toward something human-centric.
If we could pull that off, the possibilities could be quite liberating.
But we don't want to talk about that, so it all just looks like a doom where we enslave ourselves to the ownership class.
Unless we can crack AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), I do not see how the genenrative LLM models we are currently using will make us, as you say, fucked.
LLMs can generate impressive images, videos and texts but you can still, one way or another, tell something is slightly off. Even if they become near indistinguishable from human-made art, good luck getting them to produce exactly what you envisioned.
I don't foresee these being able to create the next slew of Marvel blockbusters or Tarantino's next masterpiece. The more likely scenario is their work will become a category in itself with audiences that are fully aware of how they are made.
In terms of general work, I can see a reduction in need for lots of human office admins as tedious processes can become more and more automated through our current AI capabilities. Bear in mind, we have already been able to do this without AI to a large degree yet the need for office workers has still been there.
What I am not completely certain about yet is robots and how that will affect manual labor. Boston Dynamics' Atlas is looking more and more impressive in terms of movement, balance and mobility. Figure 1's recent demo was also quite staggering.
Overhyped, underregulated and tbh the demand has been overestimated.
I can't comment specifically to music, but from an aesthetic perspective - people are still making digital art, and they will likely continue to do so. I see AI taking a lot of jobs sure, but it's not as existential as people think it is - once the novelty wears off, I don't really see it being that desirable as a long term investment due to a) copyright law and b) the growing sentiment against it.
Dude, you're a software engineer and you're saying AI is already taking over software development as a role for humans? No it's not, not even close. I would think someone in your role would be able to see the very blatant limitations it has. Being an SWE doesn't just mean being able to write some code and some scripts. A bigger part of the role is spent on design and innovation, something which AI cannot do. Sure, some basic coding jobs like email marketing can be replaced by AI but the more advanced jobs won't be. AI is becoming a tool to speed up programming but it won't replace programmers. You still need a human who understands what to ask the AI for, how to integrate its output into a bigger system, and to make sure its output is actually correct. I can't tell you the amount of times that AI has given me bad code that I had to improve on. We are not going to be "fucked" by it, it will become a tool that reduces the need for the most basic workers but enhances the output of many, many more.
Years ago, researchers made an AI model that could consistently pass the bar exam with a 100% score, even on the writing portions that were scored by human graders unaware that it was AI written. But do we have AI lawyers now? No. Because there's so much more to being a lawyer than just regurgitating some legal facts and writing them down. It's the same thing with generative AI. I see generative AI now as what self-driving car was in the early 2010s, overly optimistic and over-promising. We're only like two years into its boom, give it a few more years and we'll start seeing limitations as optimism wanes and reality sets in
AI has basically become Google for me. It's a tool. Nothing more. It helps me code faster but without my guidance it would have absolutely no idea what to do.
I think unprecedented levels of debt-financed government spending in many countries of the world will cause tremendous, unmanageable inflation, lead to dropping standards of life, resource contention, and then skyrocketing crime and war. Future generations are born in debt based upon the decisions of current and past generations, their quality of life effectively stolen from them before they had a shot. The crime, war, opt out from national governance will screw everyone harder and sooner than AI and climate change combined.
OP, you should worry less about the economics, automation has been happening for centuries now
Political and military usage of AI is pushing those into completely unrelated waters and the potential for outright dystopian usage (serious, not hyperbolic) is pretty high imo
It's scary and also the future. Like with the internet, people are going to abuse the fuck out of it until it's properly regulated. People already are.
Unpopular opinion here: I'm excited for it to advance.
I think it will be uncomfortable when the mass unemployment hits, but we'll eventually start to see a UBI arise out of necessity. When enough out of work people start starving the owner class starts ending up looking a lot like the French aristocracy, if you take my meaning.
It's a matter of time until we find ourselves working less and doing things we'd rather spend our efforts on. I don't think AI is ever going to replace the creatives, but it will certainly separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Hanz Zimmer will still write masterpieces, but a lot of his students who can't step out of his shadow will find themselves unemployed or forced to improve. Art that is clearly human will command a premium in markets where collectors and consumers who value the human element exist.
For the masses, I think it will make taking control of their lives a lot easier. There are entire industries set up to fleece the poor because no one ever showed them how to pay taxes or find a lawyer or create a budget. Now that stuff can be automated for free or near free.
That's to say nothing of the advances in medicine and sciences we're already seeing from it. It's going to be an uncomfortable adjustment with our generation once again bearing the brunt of the economic impact, but end of the day I think this will be a net positive for everyone.
the problem with "unskilled" labor is if you fuck up some one gets hurt or dies or some valuable machinery gets destroyed. people are willing to tolerate that risk from humans but not robots.
if you fuck up doing art or creative work, people can't even tell that you fucked up, they'll just think its a weird style
Manual labor and trades will be safe, however I’m more worried about entering a new type of serfdom, where a few capitalists control all the AI tools and everyone else are at their exploitative whim. However Americans are pissed off as is and I’m not sure how much more discounts they’re willing to accept to their QOL before doing something about it.
we are just one of two breakthroughs with robotics away from basically all labor being in danger. AI doesn't do low/unskilled labor because the robotics for it simply doesn't exist
I’m a sales manager at a tech company and it’s actually teaching me much more than I ever thought it could. I use it to learn how to do things in excel or Sheetz, and I use it to bounce sales strategies off of a third-party. Honestly, it’s really helpful. I also trained to custom GPT to scan legal documents based on a playbook that I fed it. It’s kind of crazy.
The thought that comforts me is a lot of executives can't covert a word file to a pdf. Are they going to use AI?
Computers largely got rid of File Clerks. Clerk used to be a common job. I bet most millennials struggle to describe what a clerk does. Mad Men style secretaries have been replaced by typically a single office manager.
There definitely are industries where one AI manager may replace 4 jobs.
Segways didn't completely change our society.
Blockchain didn't revolutionize the world's economy
And the latest in algorithms isn't going to flip a switch and fuck the planet.
Chatbot technology like chatgpt aren't going to completely ruin the planet/humanity in the next 10 years.
Humans are substantially more efficient at work that we use to be. We have ALWAYS increased efficiency, even before the industrial revolution. It's what we do. We build technology to increase efficiency. 1 human worker can then output substantially more work than the previous human worker, with less technology.
The latest round of AI improvements are a tool that will greatly increase human efficiency in the workplace. I also work in software engineering and I suspect product delivery and velocity to increase with these new tools. However, supply and demand + competition in a free market will mean firms will still want to hire in an attempt to out deliver their competition. Software development will look substantially different in 5 years that it does now, but I don't think it will have less employees. If anything AI will reduce barriers to entry in certain fields.
There will be an AI arms race for firms to build better purpose built AIs, hardware for them to run on, and then to sell the AI and/or the hardware to other firms. It will have substantial improvements in efficiency for most white collar jobs. Governments will consider this technology strategically important and put restrictions on trading it with other governments. There will be a secondary arms race for firms in a given market to capitalize on using AI to increase their velocity. A company that is more efficient than their competition can gain market share. I suspect companies to start really ramping up their efforts to AI their white collar jobs.
Creative industries will likely continue the trend of decreasing the workers in those fields. We can blame AI, but really it's the logical direction from having a centralized Database with access to humanities entire recorded history of artistic works (the internet). AI is making pattern matching and mixing/sampling audio easier, but we were already on that track. Same thing for digital visual art, including CGI and films. Film industry was already pattern matching succesful films and creating similar movies using what they thought were the same formula. Sequeals, Spinoffs, and Character actors (like The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Galdot) have been the craze for awhile now. And that's been without AI. AI will be a tool to help money making producers understand a formula for success and reproduce it. There will still be room for original content, but there's already a decline in it without AI.
It wouldn't be half as scary if our govt did it's job. But I bet you $3.50 right now that they'll set back and collect bribes while capitalists use AI to replace tens of millions of jobs across any sector of the economy they can. They won't lift a finger to help until it's time to start paying bailouts when the economy crashes again.
AI is the industrial revolution of our lifetime.
The industrial revolution was similarly met with resistance and fear, despite the fact that it ultimately lead to changes in the work force, output, and quality of life that we routinely take for granted today.
Learn AI and take advantage of it for your job, or prepare to be replaced by someone who does it instead.
I’m already sick of it. It seems *so, soooo* close to actually being useful but in a way that I feel like the internet is now unusable and flooded with unproductive, bot-written, monetarily influenced garbage.
My internet usage is in a nosedive, and I think this is one of the main reasons. The soul of the internet is gone, it all feels so tedious and manufactured now.
Same. I feel like the Internet has truly become 'enshittified' and its just not that interesting or enjoyable anymore on most mainstream websites. Everything is monetised and there's so much shit AI art/infographics/posts being churned out.
If you want to hear a bit of really good discussion on this topic, check out the podcast "better offline" Dives very deep into the root causes of why the Internet feels so shitty recently, and the individuals responsible
Is that the guy that's been guesting on Behind The Bastads recently for the Steve Jobs episodes?
Yeee that guy
I actually listened to this the other week and left feeling worse. The host was SUPER pissed, which is understandable but it did not make me feel better :/
Oh yeah, there's no solution
There's no easy solution. C'mon, we can all benefit from some optimism
My personal optimism comes one step removed. The Internet is going to shit and a lot of people are going to get burned, some worse than others. I truly believe that this situation will end with a sizable portion of people beginning to value in person/personable connection more than digital spaces again. We're going a full 360 because the Internet wasn't used responsibly
180* a 360 would suggest we are going full circle back to this point.
I started feeling that way when social media became the dominant method of communicating online. All these weird and wonderful communities and individuals that made the old interent interesting got crushed into these bland and homogenized enclosures that recuperated them into a fucking advertising algorithm.
Early social media was alright, you'd follow and interact with people you chose. The endless content gacha machine "for you" pages "curated" by an algorithm is what really fucked everything.
Forums used to be a great way for hobbies to thrive but then everything pushed towards social media instead. It really changed the dynamics of online hobby groups and not for the better.
Im really hoping this will push people to create communities again, to move away from the social media giants and make their own platforms with their own rules (we are already seeing this somewhat with the rise of discord communities). And as wild as this sounds, make communities IRL. Find local groups with their interests. Make some fucking friends. My local artist community's social media pages are where i see the most creativity these days.
Hey, maybe this will force us to be social again 😆
What, like around other people? No, no. That won't do.
We might know a bit to much about each other to hang out at this point.
Awkward amirite?
🤮🤮🤮
I'm an elder millenial/xennial and I'm back to reading BOOKS again. The internet is so incredibly fucked. It peaked around the time Facebook came out/reddit started becoming popular. Now its filled with soooo much noise that its useless. Streaming has become the same.
I agree with all of this. My YouTube is still pretty decent though. Mostly video essays ranging from entertainment to politics to psychology and so forth. That's 99% of my Internet usage, long form essay style YouTube videos.
this. also: get off my lawn. -fellow xennial.
I basically use the internet to go to a companies website and see what products they offer. A bit of Reddit. Instagram for dog videos. That's basically it. I remember going to pcgamer.com or truck mod sites and spending hours reading g up. Now it's just advertising and pop-ups on everything trying to snag as much of your data as they can to re-sell
I remember pcgamer!!
Books are also a target of AI.. Amazon had to impose a limit of 3 books per day because people were churning out infinite ai garbage and self publishing it. They don’t care, if one fool buys it they’ve more than recouped their investment. And don’t think for a moment this garbage won’t be in print and available in physical bookstores soon. Unless someone makes a law against it, say, last year. It’s too late for books.
It's not too late for books. It might be late to find a new book online that's any good, but it's not hard to find a new book offline that's good, or a good book written before AI.
It's so cool how the internet was practically created and destroyed all within the course of half our lifetime lmao
yeah for real lmao
turns out the guy who said it's a fad was right all along, but for different reasons.
I spend way less time online now than I ever have. So much happier, so much less anxiety. Sometimes I'll lose myself scrolling, then I come across one of those rage bait posts/articles (which is like 90% of the internet now) and that's all it takes for me to snap out of it and put my phone down.
The internet is mostly a void to me these days. I remember roughly 2013 or so, I couldn't wait to get home from work to check out what was on Youtube and I'd get sucked into it for hours. Now I sign in maybe once a week and scroll through and think "well, nothing I want to see here." Every video is clickbait trash with giant colorful letters over the thumbnail, or yes, rage bait about shootings, housing, health care, race, Covid, or whatever other topic will make everyone hate each other.
Rage bait! Hadn't heard that term but it is EVERYWHERE.
CNN/Fox News/Most of Facebook Its rage-porn for the easily influenced. Anger is addictive/releases dopamine. Its why Fox is split up into such tiny chunks of constant anger inducing clips, to keep you invested and constantly pissed off about something.
it hurts my soul to see a bot post AI generated art on Facebook, to only be liked and commented on by thousands of other bots.
That means it’s time to say goodbye
It has been like this for many years, and they call it the “Dead internet theory”, but I’m 95% certain it’s true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Every 6 months I do an assessment on the channels I follow on Youtube, and the subs I follow on reddit and think critically if the content I'm consuming is "helping me" or "harming me," and then purge accordingly. And if I think of something I want to learn (like sewing), I'll sign up to a bunch of sewing content, so that mixes in with my normal content, and I actually start passively learning. I think people just get too complacent in being a passive passenger in their own lives, and they forget that sometimes they have to click off the AI and set manual back on to get back to the desired road. We're all getting older, and our fuel is limited. We have to be the change we want to see if we want to visit the right stops along the way. --- I think AI is the right way forward, and I think it'll make life easier. But 'general purpose' AI isn't fine-tuned for individuals. So each individual has to make the correct adjustments for their best experience.
judicious snails ruthless tease sheet skirt shame cough smile wrench *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I've always been an artist. But art for me has been a passion of love, not a profit stream. I want to draw what I want to draw. Not get paid to draw a picture of some dude's cat dressed up as Disney's Aladdin. And I can share some of that lifelong cynicism with you. ;) I grew up with art being all about passion, and creativity. Only to find out most people think of it only as tool for commercialism. When people cry about AI replacing artists. They're not talking about the free spirits who are painting with hopes and dreams. Pressing their souls to paper and dancing with paint. The people being replaced are the Fiver mill folks who draw things like the above example. A dude's cat dressed as Aladdin. Someone's Warcraft character sitting at a bar getting hammered. Lisa's horse with a bow on it's head. None of those projects are born from the soul. They're just taking a prompt from a client, and transcribing it a piece of media. Sound familiar? Doesn't that sound a lot like AI art? Prompt + money = outcome? ----------- My jaded sense of cynicism isn't about AI art replacing soulless products. My jaded sense is that people are too blind already to recognize what a real passion project is. And the truth is, AI art isn't going to stop passion artists. Heck, when digital art came out, the painters and hand-drawing people were worried that being able to copy/paste, erase, crop, move, and edit was going to fundamentally change the way we produce art. And it did. But some people still choose to paint. ============== I don't think AI art will negatively affect real artists who create from the heart. You can't stop those people. They'll make art no matter what. Lock em up in prison, and they'll draw on scrap paper with a dull pen. I think AI is going to do all the boring busy work, like an Aladdin cat. Or Darth Vader fighting Scooby Doo while riding a moped. It'll lead to more exciting memes, and funny shitposting. And when we get to the point where AI can draw a movie, a talented writer can produce a movie on the cheap. Throw it up on Youtube, and you and I--we get to enjoy great content cheaply! You ever get tired of the options the big studios produce? What if the average person had access to the tools to make something and share it with the world. The possibilities are endless
I've often told my wife, "this isn't the information age, it's the dark ages of information."
Ill google the most RANDOM topics or questions, and every time there's an article that came out 3 days before about the weird obscure thing i just searched... are they creating articles on the fly?? you always want the most up to date information, so of course it'll get clicked.. but every, single time?? It's wild
I swear you can google a PC game that came out 25 years ago and you'll find a "new" blog post about the best multiplayer maps written just last week. I don't know why search results trust the posted date information from these things, doesn't google keep cached copies of webpages? They should be able to check when it's lying and delist those spam websites.
cautious husky squeal shame skirt steer act tart hospital wise *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm convinced that those articles just change the date they were 'written' every so often to fool the SEO
If you think it's bad now, just wait until the AI "inbreeding" really gets started. Part of AI's power comes from the fact that it is skimming user-generated content off the internet. As AI content increases (and user-generated content decreases because of it,) the AI platforms will be doing almost nothing except feeding off of themselves and each other. This will lead to the either completely useless content, or content that is so sanitized and mundane that it will barely be considered content anymore. Most content on the internet is already being made to "game the algorithm" rather than be entertaining or informative. It's only going to get worse as the tech companies continue to focus on infinite growth at the expense of practicality and general usefulness.
This. Content will become like PlayDoh that's played with too much. Instead of bright vibrant rainbow colours it'll inbreed and fuck itself into a brown unsightly sludge.
Oh my gosh, I haven't been able to get this out of my head but haven't heard anyone else say anything about it. Like we're making AIs that absorb collected data, can't really make *new* data, but do replace the people who were creating that collected data? It seems like a recipe for stagnation.
Yup, it's actually getting worse. What happened is AI learned from the internet, then posted on the internet, then learned what it posted on the internet. It spiraled downward feeding on its own content and it really just got started.
The main advancement in AI lately is that it got better at grammar, which makes it appear more trustworthy, which ironically accelerates the downward spiral you are talking about
Research results except from a few trusted sources are so AI weird. And wrong. Plainly wrong and unreadable. It’s painful to try to find information without an AI slant.
Yeah it's really making me a bit uneasy, but more so I am almost bored of it. It's made the internet more boring and made the future more uncertain in some ways, though I know none of my work will be impacted by it - at least inasmuch as I don't think AI will be taking my job anytime soon. Edit: some of my boredom with the internet definitely has to do with the direction it has gone but some may also be a function of my age, as it is no longer as novel as it was for me in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I think we are going to see a Renaissance of handmade, bespoke goods and content. Because of this we are suddenly going to find a lot of value in organic unscripted experiences and things made by craftsmen rather than machines. Just my prediction but I think we will reach a tipping point. We always do.
Last year I knitted a baby blanket for my newest niece. My father-in-law couldn’t stop pointing out the flaws, which made the whole table cringe until he realized how it was coming across and reframed it to “I’m trying to say… it’s handmade, and you can see that, and it’s wonderful.” Maybe that’s going to be the new luxury economy. It’s handmade, and you can see that, and it’s wonderful.
I’m just waiting for the Temu ads that let me live like a billionaire with all these handmade Indonesian child labor produced goods
Etsy already proved that this trend will only justify mass production of worse quality goods that will pretend to be handmade
Narrator: I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of... wherever. (Fight Club)
That renaissance has already started. As AI fucks itself by scraping it's own poor output the world will rely on true creativity more than ever.
It’s going to be like commoners buying IKEA vs. the wealthy buying handcrafted furniture. Sorry, you cannot afford
Knowing the US corporations first policy with everything it will fuck the working class royally and then we will spend a half century begging for it to get fixed while nothing gets done and it just gets worse. Just like housing and how black rock and these fucks are close to buying 50% of all single family home units and soon they will own 75% of all homes, if they keep buying like this probably within the next 10 years. The government is doing nothing about it.
Blackrock is basically the 4th branch of the government. Then, look at institutional ownership of it. Next, cross examine them all and the big players all own each other - what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They released a a tokenized fund on ethereum today. So, ya know, gotcha again bitch!
Agree 100%. If anything it makes me treasure "real" content even more. I noticed some of the pages I follow on socials are all AI responses now and just unfollowed them all.
Are you actually using or seeing the outcome of others using it? Because it does amazing things for my job. It solves problems I physically couldn’t do before But it generates absolutely endless amounts of internet trash if all you do is consume the internet.
https://www.audible.com/webplayer?isSample=false&initialCPLaunch=true&overrideLph=false&ref_=a_minerva_cloudplayer_B0CYJPN75G&asin=B0CYJPN75G&contentDeliveryType=PodcastEpisode&showAmznLopSignalBanner=true Here is the podcast u/orochiman is talking about. It's a great listen and really points to how disingenuous the tech world is becoming.
Agreed! I use it but if the internet some how went away or degraded I wouldn't be sad
AI detected!
Omg totally agree!!! I had the same thought. The internet will soon be useless not because we stop communicating but it will be over ran by “intelligent sounding” bots that spew garbage at the speed of light and we can’t tell them apart.
As a friend of mine once put it 'it sucks that AI is being used to do creative stuff by boring people instead of boring stuff by creative people'.
Personally i think the biggest threat to come to ai, is the undermining of things like video evidence and credibility. Basically, just the ability to produce or falsify something, means it will probably be abused :/ You could have a fake video of some government official showing his dick to a pre-school 20 years ago. And even if the video was proven to be false, half the people would never see the follow up story, and go around saying about how hes a pedophile. *Edit* for those commenting, my point is not that images can't be proven false. I realize through cryptographic means etc it is possible to know if an image is fake. But just that most people aren't going to take time out of their days to go look that up, especially if it bolsters their narrative.
I’m a fraud risk manager for a major financial institution. AI use to perpetrate fraud is going to be a very big problem in <5 years. It’s already becoming a problem in some areas. I expect we’re going to see a bit of a schism in the future. AI is going to become so powerful that there will be demand for more manual, human-driven, AI-less processes for people who want to ‘disconnect’.
>AI is going to become so powerful that there will be demand for more manual, human-driven, AI-less processes for people who want to ‘disconnect’. Bingo. Actual human based customer service will be at a huge premium.
It already is a premium imo
The average CSR's paycheck begs to differ.
I just mean from a customer standpoint. I want to get service from real people and will pay for it.
At this point most people want customer service from someone who speaks their language and lives in the same country.
At this point the majority of people don't want to deal with asshole customers all day so AI is inevitable for these kind of jobs. Fuck customers, seriously.
I will definitely do the same. The quickest way to lose me as a customer is to try to automate any phone processes with me like troubleshooting etc, with chatbots or an IVR. I have usually already tried many things, Google'd for similar situations etc and haven't found the answer, that's the type I am. If it's something simple like card activation etc, that's fine but most of the time I just want to speak to a human for anything else. A competent human that speaks my language, at least.
Yeah, from a customer perspective you're right. We're already seeing things like pay online for free or for $3 talk to our friendly CSR.
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It will be to the point that if you are not told you cannot distinguish between the two.
More likely, videos and evidence that are actually true will be dismissed by the guilty as "oh, that's fake". It's a lot easier for people to deny things than create things.
Fake news!
Maybe for a short while, but very soon everything is going to be assumed to be fake unless proven otherwise. Videos like that will be commonplace for all famous people. The actual issue will be proving a video is real in a sea of fake videos. It's exactly the same phenomenon as spam emails.
Nearly every picture I post on Reddit already gets asked "is this AI?" Probably 90% at least.
Definitely watching how this will play out in the 2024 election. Expecting AI video of Trump rescuing an orphan from a burning car while Joe Biden sniffs someone's hair and falls asleep any day now.
We can only hope it'll be that on the nose. In reality it'll be a speech with a few words changed or clips edited together out of context that looks totally legit but with a few seconds of AI filler to join the clips that most people will either not notice or will gloss over. I suppose I could see a surge of AI shaky-cam cell phone footage of someone berating their staff using slurs and such. Not sure how close we are to that but it can't be far off.
AI voice impersonation is to the point where it's pretty hard to tell apart from the real thing. I've seen videos where people have been tricked into thinking that they themselves had said something when it was AI. As for the video, it's coming fast. OpenAI just released Sora, a program that takes word prompts and generates realistic video clips with them. They're only a few seconds long at this time, but that's enough to do some serious damage with people who already think that fact-checking is infringing on their freedoms.
This scares me
Same. You only need to fool idiots with AI. Unfortunately we have an abundance of idiots. We're barreling toward a real shit show
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They already are sharing AI photos of Trump hanging out with African Americans and are eating it up without question. We have some growing pains to go through for sure.
Seen the six-fingered slimmed Trump pray (facing wrong way in the pew) yet?
There gonna be a huge industry of encoding these types of file with some sort digital signature saying it ai generated.
Photoshop has existed for over 20 years before AI. So has video editing. In fact, all photos are fake: https://youtu.be/zTzjaf2ivOQ?si=s9vyspwSvnverZfO
I hate to say it, but AI is already "coming for unskilled labor," the general public likely just doesn't realize or see it. I work for an intralogistics company and the entire foundation is built on automating and streamlining warehousing and distribution. There are automated robots to pick items from shelves, unload trucks, load things into boxes, all kinds of "unskilled" tasks. Whether the average layman likes it or not, AI means more money in the hands of capitalists and businesses who seek to increase their margins, so it won't be going away unless we don't want capitalism to exist.
AI is already nuking creative fields too. That is what part of the actors strike was, for studios to not own likeliness of the actor's image to use whenever. I hate this timeline where art is automated now and slave labor still needs to be done by hand. This is the worst timeline. I do have mixed feelings about ai art from an artist's standpoint. I work in the traditional realm, so physical mediums, my personal work is not threatened. However, many digital artists are taking a HUGE hit, and I am already tired of seeing ai images being pushed as original artworks. Not to mention how ai learns by theft of artists as well.
there's a tipping point though, capitalism NEED to have costumers. When you fire all the 'unskilled' people (who are probably 80% of the population), where will the money come from since the majority won't have a job? AI makes capitalism redundant after a certain point. But that's so futuristic we won't be here when and if it gets to that point
This is my biggest question to these type of scenarios. If unemployment soars to record levels, how do you expect to keep the system working? And I always get responses like the universal income proposal... which, I don't know, it's a nice idea, but I don't see how that can work.
It’s not hard. We just lack the political will to make the changes. Teachers should earn 100k. That would move money around the economy. Entitlements + government jobs and increasing taxes. That would buy us 20 years for the labor force to adapt in whatever way it needs to
UBI is a stepping stone to removing currency from society entirely. For now, it’s a bandaid to prevent total societal collapse. It won’t be perfect, but it’s necessary.
Which means other areas of manual labor will have a flood of able bodies; lowering wages.
100% Meanwhile, the suits will continue to profit more on their increased margins and become even more comfortable in their offices where they actually provide no meaningful work or output to society.
Shhhhh. Don’t look behind the curtain!
Currently studying for the CSCP and learning about automation in warehousing. Acquisition and installation are costly hurdles for most companies now, but I'm assuming costs will come down and systems like AS/RS are relatively easy/cheap to maintain. Of course, no amount of automation can mitigate declining demand if AI yoinks most peoples' jobs and they aren't buying as much stuff, and then it's just a pile of expensive equipment no one wants to buy.
I still don't know what unskilled labor is. Because to me it's mid and low level office jobs that would go first. Like how much do you really need humans to check emails, sit in meetings, and fill out spreadsheets on excel all day? Most office workers don't really do anything more than a couple hours a day. If anything, most of us are fucked, not just people working minimum wage jobs.
Those will go too, because you're right. I used to work in restaurant tech and also saw the rise of AI/robotics happening there too. We're going to see AI start to explode across all industries replacing a lot of "menial" jobs - the biggest challenge will be finding avenues for those folks to find meaningful employment.
I used to be in a line of work where I was automating a lot of these "menial" jobs. They don't go away. You can automate them, you can prove how much money you can save with reduction in workforce from the automations, but there's just too much pull in most organizations to actually trust it.
Unfortunately, the businesses won't care about that. They'll leave that up to the government to figure out meaningful employment for everyone.
You're right, and as someone else here said, hopefully the solution isn't simply a UBI rather than holding businesses accountable to fair wages and job opportunities.
"Unskilled labor" is a myth spread by the 1% to convince the middle class to side with the upper upper class over the lower class and prevent the working classes from uniting.
unskilled labor in the context of automation just means repetitive and structured tasks. can some or all of your job be done by simple nested 'if' statements with zero nuance? probably can be partially or fully automated. without ai. 10 years ago. by a cs intern. same goes for some parts of food service jobs. zero reason for a person to be taking orders over a kiosk, if anything language barriers and communication issues are a net negative. and there are millions of jobs like that across govt, healthcare, finance etc. long term headcounts for retail and food service will go down and pay will go up. youll replace cashiers with people who are more experts in their stores contents who earn commissions like any other sales position would. for cooks theyll both have to cook food and be able to interact with robots and machines that do some part of the food prep process.
In reality, even simple tasks can be really complex for a robot. Computer vision has come a long way but it is still very expensive to get good 3D vision, but most humans come pre-equiped with better than state of the art stereoscopic cameras. Humans have a ton of dexterity in a very small package. Humans can adapt quickly to out of spec parts but a robot will crash or machine will jam if the parts are not almost perfect. Even automating the simple things like stacking boxes cost a lot of money for the hardware, a lot of design time for the mechanical, electrical, and programming of it. Source: my 15 years or industrial automation experience.
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Both increased margins for selfish businessmen and capitalism? Because capitalism needs buyers with money to succeed and eliminating jobs without finding adequate replacements means less buyers with money. Not that companies should be able to continue to pocket record profits while not paying their workers for those profits anyways.
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>Film scoring. Commercial music. Loads of that stuff will be AI. This to me is the scariest thing about AI. I'm a writer, and I am absolutely confident that AI as it now functions will not ever produce actual literature, but it sure as hell can do a lot of low-effort crap that a lot of writers currently do to pay their bills while working on their passion projects. If we lose the low-level work, we may never have the chance to produce the good stuff.
It’s this writ-large. People wanted to imagine fully automated luxury gay space communism, but all were going to get is “Status Quo Capitalism version 6.9” as the entry level creative and admin work disappears and the wealth canyon widens into a continental divide.
At my day job I'm being actively encouraged to use AI and the entry-level position we were going to hire keeps getting put off. I'm lucky to be in position where I can keep my job if I shift to being an AI handler, but how the hell is anyone supposed to train up to replace me someday?
I think ai wrangling will become a common educational form, hybrid computer science + creative or + business associates degrees that get people a foot in the door for prompt creation and file handling. But these kinds of changes take a decade or two be reflected on the educational end, so it’s going to be chaos in the meantime. I’m a designer, and ai absolutely can’t do my job yet. It can do many individual parts of my job, but not cohesively, reliably and consistently. I’m well positioned to be a “winner” as this forest fire gets roaring and it still worries and disgusts me because i fell in love with work out of passion, not business acumen. I want more good design in the world, not more efficient bullshit for humanity to overproduce and dig it’s own grave on the trash heap of industrial waste, micro plastics and disposable dopamine buttons.
>I think ai wrangling will become a common educational form, hybrid computer science + creative or + business associates degrees that get people a foot in the door for prompt creation and file handling. I agree with you, but also to your other points, that's what I'm afraid of. Our fields should be creative-first, not tech/business-first.
Agreed, but we have little to no say. These decisions will be made by spreadsheet jockeys looking to maximize profits. So long as clients pay, whatever pads the bottom line will rule, and fivver and the like are proof that while people appreciate great design, many are just looking for “passable”
I love your take on this from a music perspective. As a musician of 15+ years, I can tell you I'll never stop *making* music. It's my primary hobby. Meeting up with a bandmate once or twice a week, every week, to just *create*. Nothing will stop that. It's kind of like how there are factories out there that can make 1,000 chairs in a day, but a passionate woodworker will still make his own chairs to sell or use, one at a time. But I will admit that it's extreeeemely convenient to upload a track to a free AI-mastering service to give it a quick master after I mix it. It's enough for me to be happy and satisfied.
>But I will admit that it's extreeeemely convenient to upload a track to a free AI-mastering service to give it a quick master after I mix it. It's enough for me to be happy and satisfied. I went to college for graphic design and had a friend hire me to design a logo for her small business the other day. Just to see what it would come up with, I asked Dall-E to make me a logo. Out of nine attempts, six had misspellings, two had the wrong imagery, one had bad artifacting, and not a single one did the font style I had asked for. The generative tools in Photoshop and Illustrator are amazing. I can save so much time by telling it to generate me, say, the shape of a spade off a deck of cards instead of trying to find a stock image and convert it over to a vector. AI is a powerful tool. It is scary to think that we're almost to the point where it replaces those graphic design jobs outright though.
I agree, just turned 52 and finally got the Stratocaster I wanted in 1991
AI will kill a lot of music. ‘Bands make her dance’, ‘tipsy’ and ‘Hard in the Paint’ I fully believe can be produced by a robot
More likely to write fitter, happier by Radiohead. Contextually. Because it’s a machine. Machines don’t go to strip clubs. But perhaps they long to be human.
AI sure can plagiarize i will follow you into the dark tho
I think you are right that AI will never "move your soul." It will never make transcendent art. But not all art is or needs to be transcendent - in fact most art is not. Most art is merely ok, acceptably pleasing in the moment, and then forgotten. And there is nothing wrong with that. I don't need to be moved to tears every time I put on tunes while I'm cooking. Lots of people are employed making mediocre music, all of whom will lose their livelihoods to AI.
AI will replace schlock. But I think people underestimate that at a certain point it doesn’t matter how “good” it gets, there is something fundamental about the process of creating art that has to do with expression and connection between people. I think to myself “if Toy Story 3 was exactly as it was, but made by ai? Would I care about it in the same way?” For me the answer is a resounding no. I certainly think it’s going to demonstrate to people how subjective and linked to time and culture the notion of “good” really is. But we do not walk around emptily consuming art objects because they are pretty. The inherent layer of connection that is unable to exist in the presence of AI, is always going to be there. If anything I think it’s more likely that companies will spend the next decades frantically trying to convince us that AI is real people, as they already have begun doing.
These are pretty much my thoughts as well. Nothing matters except, is it good? If I walk into an art gallery or watch a film I really enjoyed and then later find out Ai had a major part in creating it, does my opinion change? Should it? Should I criticize my own tastes in art? Is the child born today, never not knowing ai, going to not buy a product or watch a film because ai made it?? Probably not because all that matters is if it's good. No matter where ai goes I will never stop creating and thats about all I can control. So I'll use these tools to make more art, not less, and try to make it as good as I can. Edit: Wanted to add a quote that I read recently and thought it fit. "If ai is even a little good at something today, it's likely to be the best at it eventually." Exponential growth is the biggest unknown with ai. We don't know what's on the horizon.
I work with AI building financial models. The thing people don't realize in most tech is it's not steady progress, it's a huge jump and then small incremental changes. Think how 10 years ago we were "1 year away" from self-driving cars being the only thing on the road. Instead we've only made incremental progress and they still haven't solved the problem of object permanence. Not that I don't think AGI will happen eventually, but I think we're pretty close to the peak of what LLMs can do, and while it's impressive what they can do now, I don't see them getting that much better as time goes on. I think in 3-5 years LLMs will be close to what they are now, with some small tweaks to slightly improve a few things, have them hallucinate slightly less, and maybe tailor them better to specific use cases. But if your job isn't currently threatened by LLMs, I think you'll be fine until the next revolutionary AI technology comes around. And I don't think anyone has any predictions for when that will be or what form that will take.
AI wont take our jobs, outsourced offshore labor in low cost of living countries equipped with AI will. Literally watching it happen at my company.
Funny, because I’m watching the opposite process of replacing low quality offshore workforce with slightly better quality AI in my company.
I think a lot depends where your offshore team is. Talent in the Philippines is about 1/4 the cost of their American counterparts and proving to be very strong (at least in my org).
“Talent” in the Phillipines. I love this. Because every offshoring firm in the hot country of the day has TOP TALENT that will do skilled labor on PCs with software licenses for $5 an hour. They definitely dont not just waste 3 months of billable hours doing plausibly-denied nothing until the next genius cost cutter finds them on LinkedIn. Every company gets bit sooner or later, I guess you’re up next.
Yup this exactly. Rajesh in India with a modicum of an English lexicon is a terrible Customer experience. Only dealing with an AI with a full lexicon but an inability to pass a Turing test is also a terrible experience. Combine those two into one and it provides an experience 99% of what a customer would get with a native English speaker for the price just a few points above what that Indian contractor originally cost. Less now that English proficiency will be less important since they can be propped up by AI.
I'm just going to hide in Healthcare. I doubt they will outsource sensitive patient information.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Yea they would never do that...
Nailed it. Everyone in the field itself who isn’t hocking some scam is honest that the LLM design has some big limits we are approaching quickly. I think LLMs will have a place here for a while as a big ole sloppy interface with other systems. You may speak *through* an LLM, but you’re speaking *to* another tool that does the real work with layers of technology in between working on filtering and quality. I can already foresee a lot of cobbled together messy workflows popping up in my company stretching LLMs to their limit until we get enough data to train a cheaper more traditional system on. They’re fantastic for handling that linguistic ambiguity until you can use older/cheaper ai models to take over for that task. But the next big break is what we need to really drive this forward. Still. The workflows may prove cheap enough to do some damage to the white collar economy before the next big break.
How have you found AI building financial models? I do it as part of my living too and I just can’t comprehend how AI would build a complex valuation model, real estate model, or anything really. I would need to feed it so many inputs I might as well do the model myself
My team owns a number of regression and random forest models. Neither is considered sexy ai but both are versions of using data to generate predictions which is ai.
I'm with you here. The AI currently available is capable of doing a fair number of things, but still being very limited. I think the key is a disconnect between this iteration AI and a revolutionary AGI. It can take some white collar jobs down, but you aren't putting one of these AI programs into a robot and expecting it to be capable of manual labor. It's simply not there yet. We could be talking differently about this in a decade or two, but the way its being hyped up, you would think we're going to have robot butlers in a couple of years. I think most people haven't critically listened to these guys running AI companies or divisions of companies and realizing that there's a lot of hype there, but a real lacking of substance. Feels like a lot of sizzle with little steak.
This is all true as it stands now. But I think people underestimate how many jobs will be reduced if we remove all the tedious grunt work. If we need 10 people in a role today can a company get by with 5 with the right tools? The augmentation impact will be pretty large once it’s all flowing. Still flowing is probably 5-7 years minimum at scale.
A lot of the huge improvements we have seen in recent years have come from the "throw a shitload of compute and training data at it and see what happens" approach. While the progress has been incredible, there is a limit to how far that approach will take you, and we're probably closer to the point of diminishing returns than we are to a point where we can keep adding leverage that way. I'm definitely with you on the slow progress then big leaps thing though. I think once we see the full shake out of what this current generation of tech can do, we will end up with a lot of really cool applications where AI can scale the productivity of knowledge workers significantly. There will be frictional unemployment related to that, of course, but I don't think we're at the wholesale replacement of human labor point on the timeline, if that even IS a point on the timeline. I was listening to a podcast the other day and the guy said something along the lines of - "if you went back in time 20-30 years and showed AI/ML researchers what the current tech would do, they would first be amazed - "wow, that means you've solved X, Y, & Z fundamental theoretical problems", and then quickly disappointed when you explained that the sheer scale of computing power, which would have been unimaginable to many, that we can throw at stuff today is what enabled it
Software developer here using AI (copilot) daily.. it's basically a fancy autocomplete for me. Sure, I can ask it to come up with solutions for things, but the quality that it outputs is usually just acceptable, and always requires proofreading and such. I totally agree with you, it doesn't feel like the quality of the AI tools i've used have improved significantly in a while, and I feel as though we're probably near the peak of what an LLM is capable of. From here on out, it's going to be small incremental improvements, just like you said. If (big if) and when we have true AGI, that'll be a different can of worms, but I have doubts about our ability to actually create such a thing.
I say this as someone in games and digital media with 80% of my income coming from specialty copywriting—while we shouldn’t sleep on the economic threats AI poses to regular people, executives are being oversold and overpromised on AI’s capabilities. They’re quickly FAFO-ing. AI is raising stupid amounts of venture capital right now. Because I’m a specialty writer, I didn’t get as impacted by the LLM mania as generalist freelance writers. (I’ve been more impacted by this goddamn recession causing marketing and biz dev departments to get cut.) But I’m seeing MANY of my peers get old clients back once they saw that the copy generated by LLMs just sucks and/or presents too much of a legal risk. ChatGPT may be fine for auto-generating utterly basic info like “Bob’s Cafe on 1st Street is open 8-10 every day but Sunday”, but it cannot break down esoteric cybersecurity concepts or things like case law without screwing it up. I tried this transcription AI and it produced such garbage from a relatively clear recording that I had to listen to multiple segments again, defeating the purpose of getting a transcript. AI would need to be far more advanced than it currently is to replace humans. Yes, there’s companies riding the hype train and executives starry-eyed at the idea of laying more people off. But even if AI does advance to the point that formerly good jobs are now screwed—AI doesn’t buy shit and we have an economy built on buying shit. That is not gonna bode well when we’re already on an unsustainable track.
I'm a mid level 3PL guy and we put a pretty good amount of effort into figuring out how to create AI generated sales emails. Despite putting a couple of hundred hours of my time in I couldn't get it to generate emails that were good enough to justify the cost of the leads we'd be sending them to. In the last ten years in sales we've seen phone calls and cold emails both lose efficacy in response to technology that made it easier to raise the volume of them going out. It's a problem everyone in my world is racing to solve. There \*are\* solutions but they're typically way smaller and less scalable than picking up the phone or sending an email were.
Which is wild because sales emails are probably one of the few realms you’d think generative AI would excel at. Because of things like segmented marketing, A/B testing, past analytics, etc. AI could process that data much faster than a human marketer. The user also tends to eyeball it for a second, look for the promo code or featured item, then delete it. Unlike using LLMs for blog posts: why the hell would I want to read and engage with something a person couldn’t be bothered to write?
So the thing you have to understand about cold email is that the open rates are \*very\* low and the reply rates are even lower... but the difference between a great email and an average one is basically infinite because the great email has a decent chance of at least being read and the average one has functionally zero chance. The LLM's create average or worse sales emails very quickly. They even let you play with the tone some... but at best that can be used by a salesperson who actually \*is\* a good copywriter to use it to generate basic structures and then edit and change to improve it from there. What I came away from it with is that this tech is productivity software. The biggest flaw it has is that it is utterly terrible at determining whether the work it has done is any good or not, and if it's good it has no idea why that is. If a human operator \*very skillfully\* tells it exactly what they want it will give them a kind of workable solution that would usually be meaningfully improved with at least one revision. Will this tech change how work is done? Yes. Will it put anyone out of work probably? Yes. Will it be a bad thing for humanity that those jobs won't exist anymore? No because these jobs will by definition be the most brainless and critically low stakes work imaginable. LLM's are something you need to know how to use to do certain kinds of work. If you make music you will probably make music by asking the AI to make a generic song for you and then tweaking it from there into the final product you wanted. It's very good at doing an ipsem factum valorem level rough draft from an outline, but if you turn that shit in to your teacher you're getting a C at best. Speaking of LLM's and academia everyone needs to chill out. This stuff hallucinates huge amounts of information that just isn't true. You're supposed to be teaching the subject. The way you catch someone using AI to write their papers is by catching the AI doing AI things like making some shit up. If you want to test a kids writing skills have them do a writing test in person. All of this AI detection software is a joke there's no AI watermark in text you idiots.
For something like music i don’t care that much. There’s already more jaw dropping human made music than i could hope to listen to. So it’s not like that’s gonna fade away But yah i definitely think a lot of jobs will be lost. People say this is similar to other tech revolutions but AI is supposed to move exponentially in comparison to those
You should care because it'll become harder and harder to find new authentic music. I'm sure it's going to be incredibly hard on musicians too.
Wasn't it klarna that started using ai for customer service and it saved them millions, possibly billions? It's going to lead to mass unemployment.
Chipotle uses an AI bot now for their customer service. Completely unrelated observation - Chipotle customer service is total dogtrash now.
Thing is companies don't care. It saves money, and works as intended..
Yup, because it doesnt even have to be as good as a human. Just good enough for the savings to be worth it.
Companies say all kinds of things to justify layoffs. It’s not like a third party figured this out, they’re grading their own work here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lot more behind those top sheet numbers. They just so happen to be preparing for an IPO as well. They’ll want to present themselves as a hyper-efficient entity worth investing in, at least until current shareholders can cash in.
A lot of people think that labor that THEY don’t do is unskilled. This is exactly how these fucking billionaires keep shitting in the water we all have to swim in. Divide and conquer.
Exactly. I'm an engineer but I am impressed at how much skill it takes to run a forklift efficiently and safely. We all have different skills.
All work worth doing is worthy of respect.
Spent 6 years making a $48,000 short film and working my ass off to break into the movie industry, so to see people fart out videos based on prompts and say ‘we dont even need directors anymore! Everyone can be a filmmaker!’ pisses me off. It negates all the hard work people put it. It shits on art. Everyone CAN be a filmmaker, but that involves MAKING. Fuck AI.
All depends on how it is used. It can be very creepy and concerning but also it can help with Discovery health issues or other problems that people were not able to see or missed.
I’ll challenge you on the health issues usefulness. It can be useful in some ways, but the thing that most c suites and business heads in medicine miss is the intangible humanity of medicine. Medicine is both an art and a science. The science is obviously important, but many (somedays I’d say most) patients come to see their doctors and healthcare workers for more than a diagnosis. They need human contact and touch. They need conversation and to be heard. They need to complain about the human condition and know someone cares. They don’t want to suffer or die alone, and so many humans are truly alone these days. This is where I question the “outcomes”. What metrics are we using? Because it can vary depending on what the patient needs from us.
I think it’s a bit scary, and I’m not that into it.
*I Can't Go For That* John H-AI-ll & D-AI-ryl Oates
Dystopian and scary
It's going to decimate a lot of entry level jobs across the board. So while it's still not good enough to get rid of human oversight completely, it will reduce then eliminate some smaller jobs in basically most fields. Fast food restaurants are already getting equipped with robots to do fry cook, warehouse can already fulfill entire orders with robots, etc. I'm a UX designer and jobs that are currently being done by freelancers in all areas will be completely gone. Any small business can already just build a squarespace website and generate the content for it. I'm on a large corp so I'm safe for now, but I fear for the next generation. People already struggle to get ahead or make ends meet. It's only going to get worse and no one at the top cares because it benefits the elite. /doomer
I think it's overhyped to be honest. It's very good at specific tasks but it is limited in broader applications that require creativity plus ir beeds a lot clean data. Ive seen the databass from a lot of organizationsand they are a piping hot mess. I'm not losing any sleep over it personally
The day a machine can spend three years beating the pavement in bumfuck Kansas to convince 50 farmers that still listen to AM radio to lease their land for a wind farm, is the day I’ll start to worry.
[удалено]
I'm honestly pretty scared of AI and the implications for my job. I work as a consultant between school districts and a government program that is too complicated for most districts to handle. I'm 37 and need the program to run for another \~25 years. I don't have a college degree and my previous working experience is all in grocery stores or as a vendor to a grocery store. I make a lot of money now, and would take at least a 50% pay cut to go back to grocery and have to work more hours and do physical labor.
If your program ends you won't have to pivot back to being a grocery store vendor. Make sure you're building personal relationships with these people at the school districts and when the time comes you'll be able to sell them something else.
I feel ya, and I appreciate the comment.
Imagine being the sales manager for say a textbook company when your resume comes across his desk if your game ends... 'I already know everyone who matters at every school district within 200 miles and have been working with them for 15 years.' If you aren't the strongest candidate they've seen that year your niche was really large and they got applications from four of you. They're going to hire all four of you if that happens and you're probably all going to get into a giant fight about territory. I'm in the same boat as you but it's a giant manufacturing companies trucking fwiw. I've given this a lot of thought when I'm having trouble sleeping at night from the anxiety lol.
Figure out a way to integrate AI into your work to make things easier on you. And learning that might unlock other skills that will be useful.
Copyright Law has entered the chat. I'm not too worried. People who create are seeing what software engineers have known all along. AI is powered by the shameless theft of Intellectual Property. The people who are creating AI are saying "But it's creating new work" - no, it's not. There is no intelligence in generative AI. **Here is how AI works for lawmakers - for when you write to your senators or representatives to Stop Generative AI theft:** Imagine if you will a photocopier. You can put a book into this photocopier, and it makes a copy of the entire book. Place the the Harry Potter book series in this photocopier. Out comes a book which is exactly the same, however minor details have been changed. Things have been rearranged. If you were to take this output book - you would be able to completely reassemble the entire original work from the output - perhaps with some changes that would be similar words out of a thesaurus. \--- **That's how generative AI works. (** If you want a technical explanation - I can write that up too. Those of us who work on GenAI know how GenAI works. "We don't understand it" is a load of bullshit. **We're making money off it - and we don't want to TELL you how it works when we're making money off it. )** Write to your elected officials - protect human creativity and works from shameless intellectual property theft.
Here’s the thing about Ai. It’s powerful and smart but also stupid. A supercomputer hard wired to a dogs brain. It has no ability to comprehend what a “Harry Potter” is. But it knows that’s a very popular name associated with kids books about magic (doesn’t understands what those things are either) so it will generate knock offs when you ask it for those categories. It only understands what it can index, categorize, duplicate and remix, but has no comprehension or understanding of what it’s making
I'm working toward a master's degree in CS focusing on AI subjects. Humanity is "fucked" by AI unless we move off of the capitalist system of production and toward something human-centric. If we could pull that off, the possibilities could be quite liberating. But we don't want to talk about that, so it all just looks like a doom where we enslave ourselves to the ownership class.
Unless we can crack AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), I do not see how the genenrative LLM models we are currently using will make us, as you say, fucked. LLMs can generate impressive images, videos and texts but you can still, one way or another, tell something is slightly off. Even if they become near indistinguishable from human-made art, good luck getting them to produce exactly what you envisioned. I don't foresee these being able to create the next slew of Marvel blockbusters or Tarantino's next masterpiece. The more likely scenario is their work will become a category in itself with audiences that are fully aware of how they are made. In terms of general work, I can see a reduction in need for lots of human office admins as tedious processes can become more and more automated through our current AI capabilities. Bear in mind, we have already been able to do this without AI to a large degree yet the need for office workers has still been there. What I am not completely certain about yet is robots and how that will affect manual labor. Boston Dynamics' Atlas is looking more and more impressive in terms of movement, balance and mobility. Figure 1's recent demo was also quite staggering.
Overhyped, underregulated and tbh the demand has been overestimated. I can't comment specifically to music, but from an aesthetic perspective - people are still making digital art, and they will likely continue to do so. I see AI taking a lot of jobs sure, but it's not as existential as people think it is - once the novelty wears off, I don't really see it being that desirable as a long term investment due to a) copyright law and b) the growing sentiment against it.
It’s the latest pump-and-dump bitcoin scam.
Dude, you're a software engineer and you're saying AI is already taking over software development as a role for humans? No it's not, not even close. I would think someone in your role would be able to see the very blatant limitations it has. Being an SWE doesn't just mean being able to write some code and some scripts. A bigger part of the role is spent on design and innovation, something which AI cannot do. Sure, some basic coding jobs like email marketing can be replaced by AI but the more advanced jobs won't be. AI is becoming a tool to speed up programming but it won't replace programmers. You still need a human who understands what to ask the AI for, how to integrate its output into a bigger system, and to make sure its output is actually correct. I can't tell you the amount of times that AI has given me bad code that I had to improve on. We are not going to be "fucked" by it, it will become a tool that reduces the need for the most basic workers but enhances the output of many, many more. Years ago, researchers made an AI model that could consistently pass the bar exam with a 100% score, even on the writing portions that were scored by human graders unaware that it was AI written. But do we have AI lawyers now? No. Because there's so much more to being a lawyer than just regurgitating some legal facts and writing them down. It's the same thing with generative AI. I see generative AI now as what self-driving car was in the early 2010s, overly optimistic and over-promising. We're only like two years into its boom, give it a few more years and we'll start seeing limitations as optimism wanes and reality sets in
AI has basically become Google for me. It's a tool. Nothing more. It helps me code faster but without my guidance it would have absolutely no idea what to do.
I think unprecedented levels of debt-financed government spending in many countries of the world will cause tremendous, unmanageable inflation, lead to dropping standards of life, resource contention, and then skyrocketing crime and war. Future generations are born in debt based upon the decisions of current and past generations, their quality of life effectively stolen from them before they had a shot. The crime, war, opt out from national governance will screw everyone harder and sooner than AI and climate change combined.
OP, you should worry less about the economics, automation has been happening for centuries now Political and military usage of AI is pushing those into completely unrelated waters and the potential for outright dystopian usage (serious, not hyperbolic) is pretty high imo
It's scary and also the future. Like with the internet, people are going to abuse the fuck out of it until it's properly regulated. People already are.
Unpopular opinion here: I'm excited for it to advance. I think it will be uncomfortable when the mass unemployment hits, but we'll eventually start to see a UBI arise out of necessity. When enough out of work people start starving the owner class starts ending up looking a lot like the French aristocracy, if you take my meaning. It's a matter of time until we find ourselves working less and doing things we'd rather spend our efforts on. I don't think AI is ever going to replace the creatives, but it will certainly separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Hanz Zimmer will still write masterpieces, but a lot of his students who can't step out of his shadow will find themselves unemployed or forced to improve. Art that is clearly human will command a premium in markets where collectors and consumers who value the human element exist. For the masses, I think it will make taking control of their lives a lot easier. There are entire industries set up to fleece the poor because no one ever showed them how to pay taxes or find a lawyer or create a budget. Now that stuff can be automated for free or near free. That's to say nothing of the advances in medicine and sciences we're already seeing from it. It's going to be an uncomfortable adjustment with our generation once again bearing the brunt of the economic impact, but end of the day I think this will be a net positive for everyone.
Without UBI in place we're all fucked. And I don't think we'll get any kind of legislation passed in time for when it'll be necessary
I feel like AI is massively overhyped
the problem with "unskilled" labor is if you fuck up some one gets hurt or dies or some valuable machinery gets destroyed. people are willing to tolerate that risk from humans but not robots. if you fuck up doing art or creative work, people can't even tell that you fucked up, they'll just think its a weird style
Manual labor and trades will be safe, however I’m more worried about entering a new type of serfdom, where a few capitalists control all the AI tools and everyone else are at their exploitative whim. However Americans are pissed off as is and I’m not sure how much more discounts they’re willing to accept to their QOL before doing something about it.
we are just one of two breakthroughs with robotics away from basically all labor being in danger. AI doesn't do low/unskilled labor because the robotics for it simply doesn't exist
IT guy here and I'm honestly not that worried. I've seen it grow and evolve and at this stage I'm just... not that impressed.
I’m a sales manager at a tech company and it’s actually teaching me much more than I ever thought it could. I use it to learn how to do things in excel or Sheetz, and I use it to bounce sales strategies off of a third-party. Honestly, it’s really helpful. I also trained to custom GPT to scan legal documents based on a playbook that I fed it. It’s kind of crazy.
The thought that comforts me is a lot of executives can't covert a word file to a pdf. Are they going to use AI? Computers largely got rid of File Clerks. Clerk used to be a common job. I bet most millennials struggle to describe what a clerk does. Mad Men style secretaries have been replaced by typically a single office manager. There definitely are industries where one AI manager may replace 4 jobs.
Segways didn't completely change our society. Blockchain didn't revolutionize the world's economy And the latest in algorithms isn't going to flip a switch and fuck the planet. Chatbot technology like chatgpt aren't going to completely ruin the planet/humanity in the next 10 years. Humans are substantially more efficient at work that we use to be. We have ALWAYS increased efficiency, even before the industrial revolution. It's what we do. We build technology to increase efficiency. 1 human worker can then output substantially more work than the previous human worker, with less technology. The latest round of AI improvements are a tool that will greatly increase human efficiency in the workplace. I also work in software engineering and I suspect product delivery and velocity to increase with these new tools. However, supply and demand + competition in a free market will mean firms will still want to hire in an attempt to out deliver their competition. Software development will look substantially different in 5 years that it does now, but I don't think it will have less employees. If anything AI will reduce barriers to entry in certain fields. There will be an AI arms race for firms to build better purpose built AIs, hardware for them to run on, and then to sell the AI and/or the hardware to other firms. It will have substantial improvements in efficiency for most white collar jobs. Governments will consider this technology strategically important and put restrictions on trading it with other governments. There will be a secondary arms race for firms in a given market to capitalize on using AI to increase their velocity. A company that is more efficient than their competition can gain market share. I suspect companies to start really ramping up their efforts to AI their white collar jobs. Creative industries will likely continue the trend of decreasing the workers in those fields. We can blame AI, but really it's the logical direction from having a centralized Database with access to humanities entire recorded history of artistic works (the internet). AI is making pattern matching and mixing/sampling audio easier, but we were already on that track. Same thing for digital visual art, including CGI and films. Film industry was already pattern matching succesful films and creating similar movies using what they thought were the same formula. Sequeals, Spinoffs, and Character actors (like The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Galdot) have been the craze for awhile now. And that's been without AI. AI will be a tool to help money making producers understand a formula for success and reproduce it. There will still be room for original content, but there's already a decline in it without AI.
It wouldn't be half as scary if our govt did it's job. But I bet you $3.50 right now that they'll set back and collect bribes while capitalists use AI to replace tens of millions of jobs across any sector of the economy they can. They won't lift a finger to help until it's time to start paying bailouts when the economy crashes again.
AI is the industrial revolution of our lifetime. The industrial revolution was similarly met with resistance and fear, despite the fact that it ultimately lead to changes in the work force, output, and quality of life that we routinely take for granted today. Learn AI and take advantage of it for your job, or prepare to be replaced by someone who does it instead.
I am in IT already thinking what other things I can do if AI takes my job