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It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

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Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#211

Post by nicpottier »

gaganyaan wrote: post #119

Adapt or die. Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 We're headed towards…

Yes, right, so much free time to pursue your passions when you are unemployed.

Having some compassion for people losing their jobs isn't uncalled for. Especially when the same is going to start happening with programmers soon.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#212

Post by Sakos »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #179
Sakos wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. How many jobs out there are a combination of esoteric domain knowledge, experience and changing numbers in a spreadsheet? The real news is how callous people are being about the very real threat of many people losing their jobs and it not being clear what new career they can find that is capable of maintaining their quality of life. Companies are driving salar…

> The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr. > There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class? Those problems need solutions regardless of ChatGPT. If new technological unemployment will push powers that be to fix them… well, that would confirm an adag…

> The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr

And they'll still be out of a job and be screwed.

> unemployment will push powers that be to fix them

Governments will suppress their populations at a massive scale to avoid doing anything about it. Just look at France recently. Or Iran. We're seeing a shift of power away from the people that will mirror much of our history before WW1/2.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#213

Post by butternoodle »

gaganyaan wrote: post #119

Adapt or die. Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 We're headed towards…

The following quote was written in 1930, in the New York Times:

"Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure."

Given the advances in productivity over the last century, why do I have to work 5 days a week?

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#214

Post by SanderNL »

GalenErso wrote: post #206
SanderNL wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you'll do will work because everybody will do it. I don't think the market will bear millions of carpenters and plumbers rushing in. My guess is software and everything else will just explode. For now cheap bosses can use GPT, but again everybody is doing that so you will not be competitive in the long run. At some point, every little shop will produce feature-length movies, have amazon-level webshops and you…

There will always be demand for human interaction. Humans in lieu of computers will be a premium product that people will pay for. Hell, being served by humans instead of machines will become a status symbol. "In this rural Massachusetts town, where the children of Wall Street financiers and Hollywood celebrities are educated, all classes are still given by humans in the flesh." "Greenwood Furniture pieces are handcr…

Those are luxuries for the top of the pyramid. Supply will easily exceed demand in the case A(G)I will supplant all of us.

I don't suppose I as a normal guy would suddenly acquire the taste for expensive handcrafted wooden dining tables. So I won't be paying for it, perhaps rich folks, but again those are a minority. Unless we all become rich I don't see this ending well.

But then again, maybe I and my kind will suddenly aqcuire a taste for handcrafted stuff and demand skyrockets. I hope so.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#215

Post by ericd »

dividefuel wrote: post #114

I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job. I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important. Instead, I wo…

You can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#216

Post by mmmmmbop »

Philorandroid wrote: post #195

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications fo…

The frustrating thing is that companies will likely be getting away with stating falsehoods and/or not following through on what the AI claimed they'll do.

Like how in the old days, if you sent a company a contract offer and they accepted it, they would be bound by it. Today, if you send a request to a company's server that they didn't expect and they confirm the contract, they're still later able to renege since you "hacked them" by removing some client-side constraints.

In the same way, I imagine that companies will claim no responsibility for what their AI says, essentially making the experience much worse for consumers. Today, if a customer service rep states something, the company is mostly bound to it. In the future, they'll just claim it was an "AI bug" or a "query injection attack" so they won't honor it.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#217

Post by Shish2k »

nicpottier wrote: post #207
Shish2k wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber I’m not so sure about that. My outlandish prediction for what’s next: We no longer bother fixing household issues - if something goes wrong with the plumbing, we just throw away the whole house and 3D print a new one.

No. This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons. Your example doesn't even work as plumbing is still a manual process even in printed houses. (which are not going to be a thing either) GP is right that at least in the US the trades are a pretty secure job.

> This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons

I label it an “outlandish prediction” because that’s exactly what people said about AI taking creative jobs — based on the technology at the time it was totally impossible, and then one technological breakthrough later, it’s an everyday occurence :P

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#218

Post by UncleEntity »

thenerdhead wrote: post #182

I don’t like to react to Reddit stories. They are often exaggerated to certain extents. I think anyone who could pay $20/mo for premium access to a tool that does 80% of the job will do it. Especially if that person is writing the writing prompts to begin with. This doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me is why some freelance writers haven’t leveraged this tool themselves to do the same if the quality of t…

If the client sent off the spec sheet to the robots and the result was good enough why have a middleman?

Higher end stuff, maybe. Just don’t tell them the AI wrote the majority of it because they’ll wonder where their $80/hr is going.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#219

Post by nicpottier »

Shish2k wrote: post #217
nicpottier wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons. Your example doesn't even work as plumbing is still a manual process even in printed houses. (which are not going to be a thing either) GP is right that at least in the US the trades are a pretty secure job.

> This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons I label it an “outlandish prediction” because that’s exactly what people said about AI taking creative jobs — based on the technology at the time it was totally impossible, and then one technological breakthrough later, it’s an everyday occurence :P

The world of bits and bytes is a lot easier and faster to change than the world of hammers and nails.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#220

Post by pcthrowaway »

cirrus3 wrote: post #109

For writing, maybe I'd be scared... I can't really think of much of anything I have done in the past 20 years of software development that a manager or client could use AI for and get the results they expect.

right now. Give it another 3-20 years.
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