Pretty dystopian article.
But this will continue, until oligarchs like Altman, Cook, Nadella etc. start getting put into difficult situations; ones that create very strong incentives for them to show humanity (or at least emulate it).
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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It's never the managers who suffer first, is it?
It's never the upper managent but they don't actually do anything but landlord. Lower managers are being replaced by bots that police the bottom rung workers.
Anyhow when AI was very not working right at all the ownership class were eager to replace creative workers even then, so we we've known for over a year or two they're gunning to end creative work and replace it with menial work.
I don't know what the Mahsa Amini moment is going to be to spark the general worker uprising, but news about the conditions being right comes in every day.
Human condition... The water flows down
That’s not water
When your profession is to be a nice guy, and your protocols of communicating with others are not strictly regulated, replacement is not an easily solvable task.
Bu-ut I think that'll eventually happen too. Or more precisely, things allowing a company to reduce workforce that much allow self-employed people to take a certain niche.
Unless for copyright and CP protection self-employment gets banned.
But these people who are getting paid to humanise AI are fantastic opportunists. Sure, it's not a great job, but they have effectively recognised a new seat at a moment when we're redefining the idea of productivity.
That's fucking soul crushing.
We just fired you to hire this machine, however, if you'd like to stick around and edit for it, we will pay you 1/4 to 1/2 your current rate.
Jesus...fuck that guy.
The human serfs will have to proofread increasingly voluminous, numerous and complex output from ai systems. The product has become the master. Until the systems develop a sense of 'truth' beyond numerical statistics, generative ai is pretty much a toy.
Until the systems develop a sense of ‘truth’ beyond numerical statistics, generative ai is pretty much a toy.
I'll start by saying I am pro-worker, pro-99%, pro-human.
Now, I must refute your assertion for specific domains (and specific working styles), e.g. translation (or a preference for editing over drafting/coding from a blank page). If money used to hit your bank account every two weeks because you translated or provided customer service for a company, and now that money doesn't come in anymore, it wouldn't feel too playful or like a toy is involved.
This is today, not "until" any future milestone.
Re-sharing some screenshots I took a month or so back, below.
November 2022: ChatGPT is released
April 2024 survey: 40% of translators have lost income to generative AI - The Guardian
Also of note from the podcast Hard Fork:
There’s a client you would fire… if copywriting jobs weren’t harder to come by these days as well.
Customer service impact, last October:
And this past February - potential 700 employee impact at a single company:
If you’re technical, the tech isn’t as interesting [yet]:
Overall, costs down, capabilities up (neat demos):
Hope everyone reading this keeps up their skillsets and fights for Universal Basic Income for the rest of humanity :)
Air Canada did that too. Only the lack of precision made offers to customers they weren't prepared to honor.
Have to wonder how much Klarna invested in their tech, assuming they're not big ole fibbers
Fibbing for investors and big tech. Name a more iconic duo?
I think retrieval augmentation and fine tunning are the biggest tools to the results more refined (or better reference a document as a source of truth). The other ironically is just regular deterministic programming.
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Welcome to the new Industrial Revolution, where one person can do the work of many. Sure, mass produced ~~goods~~content aren't as good as handmade artisanal ~~products~~ writing, but there's a huge market for it.
There really isn't though. Very very few writers live off of writing alone.
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Huge market for generated text? Can you point out where that market is?
Absolutely, I maintained a bunch of small business websites in the 2010s and they all had blogs attached to them, they paid people to write generic articles about nutrition or whatever just so they'd get the SEO boost out of it from Google.
No one was reading these articles. No one cares about these articles. But posting them was very important for Google to rank you higher then your competitors.
That's parasitism give or take, I meant - market of some real need.
Yeah that's what i am kinda shooing for. a lot of these jobs related to big tech ad eco system, it is very hard for me to care... but i also know they are coming for everyone too lol
a lot of these jobs related to big tech ad eco system
That's military logic in some sense. That ecosystem makes many people dependent on it. The "I use it like everyone else, but I hate it and I'll stop if it crashes" argument is wrong. The whole mass of that ecosystem is comprised of such people.
but i also know they are coming for everyone too lol
It's an old story. Most of this thing's optimization potential lies in a few niche areas. It can't be put where you need precision or reliability. It can't be put where a statistical guess about human decision is insufficient. And it can't be put where you need a human because of, sorry, smiles and nice bodies being required.
It won't be like the industrial revolution, because that optimized real production, very solid basic necessary jobs. This is optimizing billboard ads and newspaper boys, and people who make things we already try not to pay attention to.
It may make some other workplaces a bit more efficient. And I agree that oligopoly, every piece of base (territory and natural resources) being already owned and technological progress, combined, lead to a bleak future.
Some people dig the holes some people fill them. Everyone greatful for the job.
If search engine fix the bullshit signifers the fake would dry up.
It's more like publishers etc. are believing they can just produce more and more, while not realizing the market of such things are already oversaturated.
That's like spammers trying to find luck in the market of Nigerian letters, TBH. Seems unlikely to lead to anything.
There's a good reason why many call generative AI a scam.
Like he said at the end, nobody is reading the garbege.
I think is something g is written by AI the only way to read it is to make another AI to read it and summerize it. Then you still can decide to read the summary or not.
It's probably replacing garbage written by humans that nobody was reading either.
So in this case, garbage content that nobody reads, AI is probably a good idea.
Yeah, the guy's team was writing "articles and blog posts promoting a tech company".
Letting an LLM mangle that isn't exactly a huge loss.
Was this labor even needed in the first place?
It wasn't. It's the advertising\SEO industry, I think. Which is advertisers scamming clients who want to get clients, without clear feedback, and website owners scamming advertisers by sending their way occasional clicks.
Basically irritating garbage, 99% yielding fucks and adblocker installations, 1% yielding unconscious recognition of product and some monies going back. Apparently it's profitable.
I guess the company was providing a kind of UBI? Not sure what will happen when all of those non-jobs disappear…
There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing quality assurance work, but I think the workers are being fooled into thinking it’s less valuable work than their old job. In fact, based on QA in other industries, I’d say these workers should be getting paid more. This is why unions are important, otherwise people just get fooled or bullied into accepting bad deals
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