ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#131

Post by whimsicalism » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #32

christkv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced?

If history is any indicator, the last group of middle class professionals who decided to take this question into their own hands ended up getting executed by the state or exiled to penal colonies[1]. The rest of them, and their families, ended up dying in utter destitution. That's what "we" will probably do again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response

you are free to not use the technology. the luddites went burning down other people's factories, so not super surprising to me that the state responded with force.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#132

Post by visarga » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

christkv wrote: post #5

elil17 wrote: post #3

Strongly agree. We should have "made the work worth doing" before, but it's even more imperative with LLMs on the scene. However, when will they be able to do work that is worth doing? GPT4? GPT5? There will be a point where we have to grapple with that.

So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced?

> So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today

Funny that bullshitting was the easiest job to automate to perfection. But now everyone can spin up their AI bullshit operation. Anti-bullshit AI would be very valuable in this situation.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#133

Post by lm28469 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #25

causality0 wrote: post #8

I'm coming around to the idea that in general the more bullshit something is the easier it is for AI to disrupt.

Yet when AI learned to wash dishes in the home (among other tasks), freeing up a homemaker's time to join the workforce, it seems the labor market absorbed the influx in people largely by creating bullshit jobs.

> Yet when AI learned to wash dishes

A pump, a motor and a timer

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#134

Post by thanatropism » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

KevinGlass wrote: post #68

Mechanical9 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?

Sometime last year, someone published a guide on auto-generating subtitles using an emacs plugin and WhisperAI. A lot of anime release groups use it so they can get an English subtitled version of a show released a couple hours after it airs in Japan. It's nice to have access sooner, especially for less popular shows that might never get any kind of release outside of Japan, but it's a lot worse then most fan subs an…

I've been getting the advice (but I'm learning German, not Japanese) that the best thing is to watch shows with subtitles in the foreign language to gradually acquire it.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#135

Post by b3morales » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

101008 wrote: post #22

I agree with the article but maybe you are trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT. I am not a native English speaker (as many of you already noticed due to my grammar mistakes), so ChatGPT have been very useful to rewrite my texts, fix grammar and maybe "beautify" them a bit. It's has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I feel much more confident now sending emails and writing important messages knowing that th…

I understand that you would prefer to sound like a native speaker. This is a perspective I've heard from others over the last few weeks too, so I've been considering it. Your writing is fine; the original version is perfectly understandable on its own.

The thing is... the only time that grammatical mistakes actually matter is when they make meaning ambiguous. And since ChatGPT doesn't know what you meant, I would be more worried that it would further distort any mistakes in that area.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#136

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

_petronius wrote: post #14

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by med…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#137

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #20

_petronius wrote: post #14

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by med…

Subtitles got noticably worse now that their generation is often farmed out to AI, especially in translations. Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.

And in return I can get subtitles on literally everything I want now instead of hoping the creator added them. I have no doubt that some places that were paying for transcription decided to go to AI/ML route but for every 1-2 of those there have have to be thousands of examples of subtitles existing where they never would have before.

I always have YT's subtitles turned on and while they aren't perfect they are way better than the alternative (none).

Network/Streaming TV/Movies should absolutely be paying someone to, at a minimum, clean up the first pass by AI and we should demand that but I'm not at all ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#138

Post by jfirebaugh » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

101008 wrote: post #22

I agree with the article but maybe you are trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT. I am not a native English speaker (as many of you already noticed due to my grammar mistakes), so ChatGPT have been very useful to rewrite my texts, fix grammar and maybe "beautify" them a bit. It's has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I feel much more confident now sending emails and writing important messages knowing that th…

It fixed some things (“ChatGPT have”, “It’s has”) but changed the meaning of the first sentence and introduced a misplaced modifier (“As a non-native English speaker, ChatGPT…”).

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#139

Post by lm28469 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

alsodumb wrote: post #36

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #17

It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything that can be monetized. Widespread, good-enough, AI-generated, SEO’d “articles” will push it over the edge.

At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.

chatgpt isn't a search engine, ask it questions about a topic you know about and you'll quickly figure out it's very good at shaping BS into something believable

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#140

Post by whimsicalism » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #42

There was the highly regarded English teacher at my high school in whose class I couldn't get better than a "D" on a test because I just read too much on my own and had too many examples to work with to be able to write essays according to her formula. There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong.

> There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong.

Or you were just really bad at everything else you could do.