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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

biblioracle.substack.com

171–180 of 363 posts

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#171

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…

> Trading quality for price

Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example:

> not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor

If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible.

> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians

If you could afford to go to concerts.

> all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors

If you could afford to go to the theatre.

> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents

Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target instead of having to wear homemade; sure, not the same as a custom tailored suit, but good enough. Now they can buy digital recordings of world class musicians and theatre actors for much, much less than it would cost to see them live.

> ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts

That already happened decades ago, as soon as mass produced recordings became widely available. It's already next to impossible for any artist who isn't world class (or, more precisely, is not publicized so that people think they're world class) to make a living at their art. ChatGPT and the equivalent in other arts aren't going to affect that much.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#172
post #6

I'm by no means a professional writer per se, but I've been paid for work that involves writing. Because of this, a version of ChatGPT that could do my writing for me would be helpful. In my admittedly half-hearted attempts, I've really struggled to recreate anything close to what I wrote.

why would it help you? it would just replace you in those opportunities entirely.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#174

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…

Plus he's talking about This Version of ChatGPT. And it's not just ChatGPT that's happening - we are getting image generation, voice generation, code generation...

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#175

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…

> allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service

Does it, really? I find that most of the time that while people can spot the difference between facts and a sales pitch, repeating the pitch enough still changes the common discourse.

People can say things like "technology x may be more expensive but saves development time" (where X can be anything from the latest frontend framework to microservices to voice recognition) while in fact there is no data that it saves any development time at all.

Is it even true that voice recognition reduces the amount of customer service compared to a simple menu system? If it isn't, the premise doesn't hold.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#176

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.

I've worked tangentally to some of the orgs trying to do these types of things. Having a person review everything especially when some titles are only up for 3 to 6 months and they only get a few days notice is really difficult.

Public numbers for prime is around 60,000 titles in 2021. Those are most likely going to be in four languages. And there's going to be at least two versions of each of those depending on what regions are playing in. That also assumes that a title is only one piece of content not a TV show if we assume that 50% of the titles are TV shows and each of those has a minimum of 10 episodes and we assume every title is around an hour including movies so that'll average out with shorter shows longer shows and longer movies. That ends up being around 4.8 million hours worth of content.

Let's just assume that the rate of title entry is one-to-one with the length of content though it's much more likely 1.5 to 1 or 2 to 1 given that people have to pause go back and fix things. That gives us with the average worker working 2,000 hours a year 2400 person years to data enter the entire catalog. Manual entry also obviously leaves rooms for poor workers or fat fingering. So if you wanted really high quality you would spot check other workers and so you might bloat that up to 3,000 people years.

So if you hired a brand new team of unskilled workers train them for 6 months with 3,000 people and then spent them for a year you would be able to backfill all of Prime's catalog right now.

But what happens when you on board say 10,000 titles from getting a new licensing deal with searchlight films?

You want that content up as fast as possible and people actually like it less if it doesn't have titles on it then if they're bad as some other comments have said.

Also just running the numbers let's say you pay someone around $30,000 a year to do this data entry at a very low wage double that for facilities and support HR and all that crap. 3000 employees at that wage for a year is 180 million. That training alone is 90M.

Should each of the streaming services take a large chunk of their budget just to make sure that a human reviews the subtitles possibly at an accuracy rate only slightly higher than the machine learning can do currently. Would you rather have 5% human coverage or 100% 90% accurate AI coverage.

From my understanding most content doesn't actually have subtitles on it unless it was on a premiere TV network that was required for government regulations to subtitle their shows such as a BBC TV show. That means that the streaming networks are actually doing this out of customer interest as opposed to being required to do so so they're actually backfilling work for the people that produce the videos in the first place. And from the little bit that I've worked in broadcast subtitles sharing isn't all that standard and Netflix for instance may have added subtitles but that doesn't mean that prime video or Hulu is going to get those subtitles if they take on that content later the video producers aren't that interested in pulling the information back into their catalog they don't have the tech support to do stuff like that.

Also almost all of this was dictated via Google voice AKA subtitles via ai and the only mistake I noticed was it didn't understand tangently it instead put 10 generally.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#177
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…

How long until all conversations will start looking like they're authored by the same person?

Curious question. This makes me think ChatGPT is to English what gofmt/Prettier is to Go/JavaScript.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#178
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also have to consider the kicking of the ladder away. Nobody gets to excellent without passing through the lower stages. Hard to stay motivated if it'll be 5 years just to see if maybe you have something a computer can't offer. Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.

This. How are people going to learn/become better if all the base work is being done by an AI.

Reminds of the Empire in Asimov's Foundation where they knew just enough to keep the current tech running, but not enough to fix it if something major breaks or create new tech.

When the AI breaks something, we will be missing the people who knew how all this s$%T works.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#179

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.

I got grades much better than "D" in most of my other classes and got perfect grades on the English SAT and Physics GRE.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#180

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.

And yet his writing style works in some stories and not in others.

When he is writing a story that largely consists of internal dialog and a character mostly in isolation his writing is brilliant.

His style is painful in the Passenger and an English teacher would be write to criticize him. That book has long passages of dialog and his style is a detriment in that book. It just causes the reader to have to work extremely hard to decipher the conversations. I have not read Stella Maris yet, hopefully it has less back and forth dialog where his style suffers.

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