I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real "evil" here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I'm old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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This person explains all her failures: insted of adopting and using chatgpt herself, reducing price and finding more clients she did nothing.
She was writing most boring pieces of text than no one is reading (corporate blog posts and spam emails).
Refused to learn new things which would keep her in position.
Yes, some jobs disappear other appear. I believe that 90+% of today's jobs didn't exist even 50 years ago. Especially not without will to learn new ways of doing things. Imagine farmer with knowledge of 100 years ago. Or hotel front desk worker without computer and telephone.
For mid-level writers, which she was, using AI doesn't work. The few remaining clients you have specifically don't want AI to be used. So you either lie and deceive them or you stay away from AI.
And using AI to lower prices and finding new clients also doesn't work. Writers are already competing against writers from nations with much lower cost of living who do the same work for a fraction of the cost. But the big advantage that domestic writers had was a batter grasp of the language and culture. These advantages are mostly lost if you start using AI. So if that's your business plan you are in a race to the bottom. It's not sustainable and you will be out of a job in maybe 3-5 years.
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At the end of the day if an AI can do the job to an acceptable standard a human doesn't need to be doing it.
As you say it's happened to countless industries and will continue to happen.
Except that the 'AI' is fed by the work of actual humans, and as time goes on, they will be trained more and more on the imperfect output of other AIs, which will eventually result in their output being total bizarre crap. Meanwhile, humans stopped training at whatever task since they couldn't be paid to do it anymore, so there's no new human material.
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I'm really having a hard time thinking about what jobs this would create though. I get the internet thing, as people needed to create and maintain all aspects of it, so jobs are created. If some massive corporation makes the AI and all others use the AI, there's no real infrastructure. The same IT guys maintain the systems at AI corp. What's left to be done with it/for it by "common folk?"
There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can't (or don't want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).
There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they're generally high paying, but they're also very highly skilled, so it's difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.
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Not optimality. Maximum profit. Very different from any definition of optimal I would personally use.
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I honestly can't tell if you're being serious. The 'evil' is the same force that replaced carriages with cars? The world would be better if carriage-making was still a critical profession?
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It's comical how she uses the example of the printing press in her introduction. Are we really sad that we don't have to rely on monks copying books?
Yeah not to mention do we really need human labor for the jobs she was doing: " I'd work on webpages, branded blogs, online articles, social-media captions, and email-marketing campaigns."
Email marketing campaigns? Social media captions? Branded blogs? You'd think she'd be happy to be free of it.
I imagine the prestige of being able to tell people she was a "professional writer" was worth something to her mentally, but 'cmon...she was a marketing droid. She's just been replaced by another marketing droid.
Maybe she should pivot to using ML tools to produce the same content she was already writing, but faster.
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Yes, we do still need to have Monks copying books, but not for the latest Romance Novel. Let the machine do what it does well, and crank out millions of copies of dreck. However the remaining monks might still find good employment going upscale, competing for prestige and quality, rather than quantity or turnaround time.
This author wants to keep turning out quantities of dreck, but now there’s a cheaper way, yet she doesn’t seem interested in trying to upscale to a product where humans are still better than AI (I assume them are what she means by “funnels”)
I’m in the tech field so my point if comparison is outsourcing. We had a couple decades where management decided the most profitable way to do business was outsourcing quantities of dreck to lowest priced providers in third world countries. That even drove racism that hadn’t previously existed. However more recently the companies I work for are more likely to be looking for quality partners or employees in different time zones and price points. Suddenly results are much better now that our primary concern is no longer lowest price. Don’t be a monkey banging on a type writer for an abusive sweatshop in a third world country that can be replaced by someone or something yet cheaper, but upscale to being a respected engineer in a different time zone making a meaningful contribution to the technical base
It is often argued that Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, was the most influential man in history. The printing press is the root of practically everything that we take for granted today. From republican government to basically all technology ever.
For the past several years I worked as a full-time freelance copywriter; I'd work on webpages, branded blogs, online articles, social-media captions, and email-marketing campaigns.
Turns out when all you need is low-quality product, and a machine can do it cheaper, that's what people will choose. It's shitty that this affects people's livelihood in the short term, but this is what happens in capitalism.
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THE POORLY WRITTEN SENTENCE with the typo right at at the punchline doesn’t help her case: “The contract was six months, because that's how long it'd take the AI would learn to write just like me but better, faster, and cheaper.” Yep. Better than that.
This is a complex issue!
On one hand, I’m not sure what kind of consistent and great results people are getting with GPT today. It’s an amazing tool but it is still lacking in a lot of ways.
Into the future? I think a lot of the jobs will change dramatically and entirely new ones will exist.
Adaptation is necessary in life, a disruptive technology has been created and we are just starting to understand it.
The results which are probably not ideal isn't so much of a problem when you factor in the costs. GPT is good good enough for far cheaper and that's why people are being replaced.
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“ unless that writer could also provide email management and a funnel-building system, most likely because of the newfound popularity of ChatGPT.”
So they moved to a more complex managed marketing program. Email and funneling have nothing to do with chatgpt.
the horse whip & buggy industry still hasnt recovered
Meanwhile ChatGPT:
Why did the comedian lose their job to an AI? Because they just couldn't "crack" the code like the AI could! The AI had the audience "programmed" to laugh, while the comedian was left "debugging" their routine. Talk about a real "byte" to the ego!
If you're a comedian, and you lost your job to this, well, maybe it's for the better?
AI is hype. It's a pump and dump just like self-driving cars. I'm sure people will tell me I'm wrong, and maybe I am. But with results like the following, how can it be trusted with menial tasks?
Prompt: Name all the states in the US that have the letter "P" in their name.
ChatGPT: Certainly! The states in the United States that have the letter "P" in their name are:
Alabama
Mississippi
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Ala🅿️ama
Rho🅿️e Island
The AI is just giving you the names from 2077 after GenZ wins the memewars.
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That's why I've seen so many dead-eyed sample passers taking the jobs of old ladies.
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Unemployment rate is still at historic lows. If you are "forced" to take a grocery store job passing out samples then you have no marketable skills. Don't blame ChatGPT on this.
"I have no skills that couldn't easily be automated, please have sympathy for me"
I guess her "undeniable beauty" isn't enough to carry her to fame and fortune. What a pitiful article.
I think the "undeniable beauty" bit was a joke.
I think she has a good point at the end. Lots of us think we have skills that can't be replicated by a machine, but companies would rather have something replicated poorly by a machine if it saves them money.
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Copy done by ai is dull garbage.
Whatever ai is meant to be replacing here has to be garbage to begin with, if ai can replace it.
Remember when big corporations thought they could outsource 100% of customer service to india many years ago? Remember how well that went?
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I've read lots of dull copy written by humans. even if their first draft was good (and it probably wasnt) it still goes through a committee that sterilizes it in the end anyway
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That is actually a good reason to be sympathetic, being displaced by new technology.
Yeah, I'm not sure where this attitude of "Fuck people who did work and developed skills in fields that employers thought were necessary, but now suddenly the new hotness is believing that they're not" is coming from. Smug superiority based on the avenue through which you allow yourself to be exploited is pretty fucking dark, and says nothing good about the people espousing that mindset.
Edit: Unsurprisingly downvoted by someone who seems to have mistaken themselves as smarter than the average bear and unreplaceable. "I was interested in a thing that turned out to be more lucrative than you" isn't a good enough reason to look down on other people, folks. None of us deserve more comfort than anyone else, especially not because we liked something other people didn't. Believing otherwise is just anti-social, sociopathic bullshit.
It's neoliberal economics where the economy exists for its own sake.
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I thought my job would have been automated already, but it turns out that AI doesn't make an acceptable scapegoat when things go wrong.
Now introducing AI Fall Guy
“Write a short one paragraph summary about the evils of ChatGPT”
“ChatGPT, the impressive AI language model, presents potential evils that demand careful attention. These include the spread of misinformation, amplification of biases, privacy concerns, risk of malicious exploitation, and undermining critical thinking through overreliance. As we utilize this technology, it becomes crucial to acknowledge and address these challenges responsibly to ensure a more ethical and secure AI landscape.”
Damn, chatGPT is gonna be replaced by chatGPT too at this rate.
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