Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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AI = productivity goes up, quality goes down
I think the bitter lesson here is that there's a bunch of jobs where quality has zero importance.
If you take for example, content marketing, SEO, and ad copy writing... It's a lot of bullshit, and it's been filling the web with gpt-grade slop for 20 years now. If you can do the same for cheap I don't see a reason not to.
Fair point. There are lot of morons who should be replaced. But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling. But it got worse since AI rise up.
But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling
Most SEO is done by freelancers (at least in my industry). When i talk about content marketing i mean anybody who writes blog posts and LinkedIn posts for companies. It was already shit long before AI arrived.
I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn't stop to think or do any research.
Yeah I'm not bashing anybody, my wife did that for a couple years I know how it is. There was a kind of golden period where it would even pay enough to let you do some quality stuff but when VC money stopped raining the market slumped almost immediately.
I think the quality definitely degraded, but that's exactly what capitalism wanted. It's going to darwin a big chunk of us through climate change that's accelerated by the electricity needs.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings
Maybe, but hard disagree that software is being automated away.
It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I'm not even that old and it's super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It's not that we're doing more with less, it's a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
Yep. Life does just seem... permanently enshittified now. I honestly don't see it ever getting better, either. AI will just ensure it carries on.
It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.
But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.
No amount of "we can train AIs on AI-generated content" is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI's don't have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.
“we can train AIs on AI-generated content”
and 20yrs from now polydactylism will be the new human beauty standard
But humans also need input as well.
The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can't steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.
It’s the same in many fields. Trainees learn by doing the easy, repetitive work that can now be automated.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that's how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look "right" on a first glance.
I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.
Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.
This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!
Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.
I use it for software, but you really need to know what you are doing to understand what is wrong and ask it to redo it in a different way. I still think it saves time, but the ability to generate fully realized applications is a ways away.
The headline says "digital freelancers," so maybe it's talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
Well at least the buggy software will eventually generate more jobs because they need more hands fixing everything while AI can’t do it.
They just pass those problems on to their customers these days.
I was traveling this week, and saw a couple very obviously AI-generated billboards for the city's downtown. Something about downtown eats or something. They were, and I'm being extremely nice here, absolutely hideous. I have never, in all my life, seen such ugly billboards. And, while they were different, they were basically the same thing (does that make sense? Them being different, but the same? Not really sure how else to describe it). I was actually looking for a place to eat, and those things deterred me from going downtown. Ended up finding this cute little coffeeshop in some random side road. No food, but holy crap the coffee and crepes were good!
Are crepes not a food?
I mean.... they do have protein, fruits, and such, so, yes. But I was craving some pasta. I guess a crepe is like a sweet pasta. I did feel the craving vanish... ...
Precisely what designers do - they make the visuals Pleasing. Doesn't mater if it's for goat sacrifice service or granny's muffin shop.
It is a skill that can barely be learned by a person. Often very good designers have 'talent' or 'good eye'.
Even though art is subjective, you can still pretty much rank designers.
This is one area where I am vehemently in support of IP protection for all the writers and artists' works being used. Unfortunately, unlike when it comes to suing individuals who copy something, the wholesale theft of generations of art and writing by AI companies is just being let slide.