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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

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Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#111

Post by CuriouslyC »

keiferski wrote: post #59
Nevermark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are…

Sorry but I don’t think this is much evidence of anything. The point at which an AI can imitate a live-streaming human being is decades away. By then, we will almost certainly have developed a “real Human ID” system that verifies one’s humanity. I wrote about this more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928 The idea that AI is just going to eat all human creative activity because technology accelerates q…

AI is already eating their way up the creative ladder, this is 100% irrefutable. Interns, junior artists, junior developers, etc are all losing jobs to AI now.

The main problem for AI is it doesn't have a coherent creative direction or real output consistency. The second problem is that creativity thrives on novelty but AI likes to output common things. The first is solvable, probably within 5 years, and is going to hollow out creative departments everywhere. The second is effectively unsolvable, though you might find algorithms that mask it temporarily (I'm not sure if this is any different than what humans do).

We're going to end up with "rock star" teams of creative leads who have more agility in discovering novelty and curating aesthetics than AI models. They'll work with a small department comprised of a mix of AI wranglers and artisans that can put manual finishing touches on AI generated output. Overall creative department sizes are probably going to shrink to 20% of current levels but output will increase by 200%+.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#112

Post by keiferski »

refulgentis wrote: post #104
keiferski wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true at all. Fame for no reason or dumb reasons is hardly a 21st century phenomenon.

No dog in this fight, I don't know what exactly you're doing, but I'd cautiously point out that it is, in fact, novel to the internet era to watch rando microcelebrities doing makeup step by step, no matter how long we delay acknowledging that with microquibbles. I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90 minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia…

I didn’t interpret the original comment to be about micro celebrities, but about people supposedly wasting time today in ways they didn’t beforehand. I agree that micro celebrities are a new phenomenon somewhat (although they are also sort of a return to more regional distribution of fame.) But that wasn’t the point being made.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#113

Post by Workaccount2 »

The article might give the impression of some kind of LLM SOTA model being slotted in, but visiting the website of the company they used, Caledo, it looks like they are using 2014 level technology.

Poorly animated CGI newscaster reading an "AI" written script. Really their tech looks awful and dated.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#114

Post by iainctduncan »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #88
datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up…

You articulated my view perfectly. I just don't get the buy in from people who should know better than trust vc funded talking heads.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#115

Post by phreack »

datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

I honestly believe this specific case is a Pareto situation where the first 80% came at breakneck speeds, and the final 20% just won't come in a satisfactory way. And the uncanny valley effect demands a percentage that's extremely close to 100% before it has any use. Neural networks are great at approximations, but an approximate person is just a nightmare.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#116

Post by 93po »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #88
datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up…

This is confusing. We've never had a ChatGPT-like innovation before to compare to. Yes, there have been AI hype cycles for decades, but the difference is that we now have permanent invaluable and society-changing tools out of the current AI cycle, combined with hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at it in a level of investment we've never seen before. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of AI research yourself, or one of the people investing billions of dollars, it is really unclear to me how anyone can have confidence of where AI is not going

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#117

Post by edm0nd »

vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

How would you go about eating said stovetop hat?

Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#118

Post by tdeck »

Nevermark wrote: post #54
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have probably written this comment about a dozen times on HN already, but: I agree completely, because people don't listen to podcasts purely for information, they listen for information plus community, personality, or just a basic human connection. If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as much as possible. Preferably your physical…

> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are…

This makes me think about attention span. Scenes in movies, sound bites, everything has been getting shorter over the decades. I know mine has gotten shorter, because I now watch highly edited and produced videos at 2x speed. Sometimes when I watch at 1x speed I find myself thinking "why does this person speak so slowly?"

Algorithmic content is likely to be even more densely packed with stimuli. At some point, will we find ourselves unable to attend to content produced by a human being because algorithmic content has wrecked our attention span?

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#119

Post by dageshi »

sourcepluck wrote: post #40
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening products and saying out loud t…

I'm pretty sure humans have been finding ways to unproductively waste time for millenium...

I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?

Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#120

Post by SiempreViernes »

nsavage wrote: post #97
lawn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting old but there's an xkcd for your kind of reasoning: https://xkcd.com/605/

Isn't this essentially the same argument as "there are only 10 covid cases in this area, nothing to worry about"? It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.

No, because as you rightly point out we know exponential growth is very possible with Covid but we don't know if that will happen with AI.

In fact, the only evidence we have for exponential growth in AI is the word of the people selling it to us.

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