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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

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Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#161

Post by moron4hire »

agent281 wrote: post #111
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.

TBH, I'm wondering if we need to start using yahoo style curated content directories again. Content aggregators like reddit, hacker news and lobsters already help filter out a lot of noise, but they focus on recent articles. It would be nice to have a searchable/browsable source for interesting content. It wouldn't contain the full internet, but at least it would have better relevancy.

For anything that isn't current events, that's basically Wikipedia for me.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#162

Post by HideousKojima »

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.

I mean any random sample of one of Cormac McCarthy's novels would fail an English test, but his net worth is in the tens of millions. So I wouldn't put too much stock into what most English teachers think in general.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#163

Post by ehPReth »

fatnoah wrote: post #40
devoutsalsa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just keep pressing 0 until a live person answers.

I double down and press 0 while shouting "Agent!"

there’s a rumour that cursing can also help you get to the operator (faster?). not sure how true that is, though

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#164

Post by randomdata »

whimsicalism wrote: post #143
randomdata wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's not use "AI" to mean "machines."

Certainly not. Indeed, all AIs are machines, but not all machines are AI. The kitchen faucet that preceeded the dish washer as the primary tool used to wash dishes is a machine, but has no intelligence. The dish washer expanded upon the concept of the kitchen faucet by adding artificial intelligence to it.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#165

Post by apocalypstyx »

Gare wrote: post #126
yamtaddle wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Recording and photography killed almost all the value (social and financial) of middling artistic talent in music, storytelling, and visual arts, which may well have been what gave a lot of people a significant part of their sense of self-worth before that—plus, maybe, some income. Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.

Most people can't afford top talent to play live music at their wedding or photograph it.

I'm sort of sick of the top talent argument.

My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers.

My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming.

Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#166

Post by ben7799 »

"Show your work", "Correct answer without showing your work earns a zero".

These were things that were extremely common in STEM classes when I was in school and were rare in English classes.

This author/professor has a very solid point that English instructors being less lazy and grading on the process instead of the final result would go a long way in terms of combatting cheating and producing better writers.

Another issue I remember was humanities professors at the college level expecting papers to be padded out to X pages even when you didn't need that length to make a strong argument or prove a thesis. The professor wants extra pages of BS to get the good grade, why not let ChatGPT take your 10 page paper that includes all the correct information and pad it out to 25 pages of redundancy and repetition to meet the weird requirement? I think in some cases it might have been hard to resist if these programs had been around, because I always resented having to write that extra nonsense in a class I was taking as a required elective.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#167

Post by forgetfreeman »

Bullshit. This speaks less to the reality of the situation and more to the author's biases/myopia. Remember when Craigslist was just a quirky little website? Cheerleaders at the time dismissed the notion it threatened anything of value, then it basically killed the newspaper industry, which in turn bricked boots-on-the-ground journalism. Anyone feel like claiming nothing of value was lost there? We're talking about a tool that has the potential to eliminate the trust metric for all online content.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#168

Post by brickteacup »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #74
_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…

Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mean, not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor, all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors: now all of those while still available are significantly mor…

> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors

well, no, you probably didn't listen to much music or see many stories at all because the average person couldn't afford to experience such things more than a few times in their life. shocking that Luddites are still a thing in the 21st century, especially here.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#169

Post by [deleted] »

fhd2 wrote: post #79
_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…

I have the same worry. Another example: Is furniture nowadays more beautiful and durable than it used to be 100 years ago? Is there more variety now? Not in my book. Same goes for a lot of products that are now produced in the cheapest way possible at scale. Looks very much like a race to the bottom dominated by a few big players to me. Consumers don't seem to care that much.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#170

Post by svachalek »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #33
nordsieck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This one really puzzles me. Voice recognition replaced phone trees. And from what I can tell, it's just worse. In this particular use case I don't think it really replaced tier 1 support. Eithe…

I just keep pressing 0 until a live person answers.

I think that's old fashioned. Newer systems I've dealt with just say "sorry, I can't understand you, please try again later" and hang up.
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