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
343 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
58713 readers
3995 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(13 replies)
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.
A huge market means there's lots of demand for the products. That doesn't have to translate to lots of jobs for the people producing that product.
Is there demand tho? Once people catch shit is AI they seem to lose interest.
Can't do much of resist anymore because shit sounds like bots half the time. Can't even tell if it is bots tbh but can't shake that feeling either. Lost all interest.
You don't think there's demand for news articles? The comment I'm responding to said there isn't a huge market. That's all I'm arguing against here, that there is a huge market. Whether AI can fulfill it a separate issue, one that we'll see play out.
I don't think people want to read air articles but I could be wrong tbh
Time will tell how general population reacts to it.
If they have an emotional reaction to the headline, (positive or negative) they click. Clicks make money.
Whether they click to read the fluff or click to share the headline doesn't matter, a click is a click.
People still click tracking links?
Yep. To share on Facebook to either outrage about the subject or prop up their own idea of how the word is.
They need to relocate to fedi IMHO
The demand may not be by the end user but by businesses that need to fill stuff with filler text. Say you're working for an automotive company and have to pull off a big email campaign you can use generative ai to help you type up a couple dozen emails, sure they'll be crappy but you finished your work by the deadline so spending the company money for a service like that seems worth it
If most peoples jobs really are this mindless, then i don't know what to say...
We got generation of educated people writing sloppy emails nobody need to be correct?
It's not that they shouldn't be correct it's that people are expected to do the job of multiple people with limited budgets so they contract their work out to services or don't take the time to double check stuff.
When I worked with the marketing people ot was a team of 3 that had to cover the US mexico and Canada, so they would have people on retainer to make things like art or text for a lot of the stuff, but I can see how they could use a service that used ai for those things
Look at what happened with Wacom, so I just see this kind of cost cutting is appealing to businesses that want to cut costs at the expense of quality
https://community.wacom.com/en-us/ai-art-marketing-response/
Again I'm not saying it's good but there is demand for this stuff as shitty as it is
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.
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
view more: next ›