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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

#361

Post by Yizahi »

FireBeyond wrote: post #214
tokioyoyo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.

Similar on IG, which is why a lot of the photographers on my feed will post five or six images, "Which is your favorite, 1-6? Comment below!" because they get the engagement, synthetic or otherwise, of you clicking through each image, and then commenting.

Youtubers also adopted this trick. The best pattern currently is to voice a random question in the middle of the video or present themselves as "I'm not sure about this, please correct me in the comments" as transparent plan to entice people to comment. I even bought it a first few dozen times, but now when every single creator does it, it is kinda tiring.

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

#362

Post by sumedh »

vunderba wrote: post #65
bilater wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X while being proved repeatedly wrong.

Everybody trots out this argument. GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago. Have they gotten more COHERENT ? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY ? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content. Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine…

> I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future.

That is like saying the plane invented by Wright brothers will never go the moon.

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

#363

Post by eszed »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #336
iambateman wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.

Problem is, I doubt many people overcome this hurdle - that "juvenile trick" is pretty much the defining quality of articles and books we consume.

Indeed. We need better English teachers. :-)

We won't get them unless we appreciate both teaching and the Humanities more than we do. I was good, but by no means the best (75th percentile, maybe?). I loved doing it, but changed careers to IT because I'd never have been able to support a family on what I was paid.

A culture which pays teachers poorly, treats them with disrespect ("those who can do..."), and relentlessly emphasizes STEM, STEM, STEM is one that's slowly killing itself, no matter how much shiny tech at inflated valuations it turns out.

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

#364

Post by eszed »

xivzgrev wrote: post #316
eszed wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbit…

Wish my high school English teachers had taught that. I remember fluffing essays to get to a minimum College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.

Don't get me started on college admissions essays. Rich kids pay other people to write them. Poor kids don't understand the class-markers they're expected to include. If AI consigns them to the dustbin of history it might be the first unalloyed good that tech ever does.

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

#365

Post by eszed »

iambateman wrote: post #317
eszed wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbit…

> Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.

Thank you! That's the most beautiful compliment I've received in a while.

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

#366

Post by snapcaster »

NemoNobody wrote: post #274
snapcaster wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will take time though, if the internet had completely disappeared in the mid 90s nothing would have fundamentally changed

Wow. Just the fact that the Internet existed at the library was enough for me to know I could know anything as a child - once we got that Internet in 95 and Win 95 PC, everything changed for me. I was quite natural to the online world by Win 98. MY entire worldview and daily life habits would have changed. You must be older than me.

I don't mean it would have no impact, it's just that we hadn't reorganized society around it yet

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

#367

Post by jprete »

INTPenis wrote: post #149

This is an extreme example, also this person would never lose their job that easy if there were laws protecting workers. But what I have seen here in Sweden is AI voiceover used in news reports where people have hidden identities. So clearly this has taken a job from someone who used to do this voiceover. But it's working, we have to adapt to these small changes that AI is bringing.

I think it's really the AI content that people care about. Devices to disguise a voice have been around for a long time, so I don't think it was a particularly widespread job in the first place.

(And maybe technological changes in that space have always been about style and perception instead of effectiveness? I mean you can always get a paid actor to pretend to be the disguised interviewee and use a radio to relay the answers the show wants.)

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

#368

Post by arolihas »

Lerc wrote: post #220
arolihas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What machine learning algorithm have you worked on that leads you to believe they are capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation anywhere close to any sentient conscious animal?

If you pick any well performing AI architecture, what would lead you to believe that they are not capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation? The Transformer, well... transforms, at each layer to produce a different representation of the context. What is this but an internal representation? One cannot assess whether that is rich or cognitive without some agreement of what those terms might mean. LLMs…

If you think we're only our observable behaviors or that is the only relevant thing to you then I don't think it's worth getting into this argument. Consider this excerpt from https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094#comment-1947377

> Most animals are goal-directed, intentional, sensory-motor agents who grow interior representations of their environments during their lifetime which enables them to successfully navigate their environments. They are responsive to reasons their environments affords for action, because they can reason from their desires and beliefs towards actions.

In addition, animals like people, have complex representational abilities where we can reify the sensory-motor “concepts” which we develop as “abstract concepts” and give them symbolic representations which can then be communicated. We communicate because we have the capacity to form such representations, translate them symbolically, and use those symbols “on the right occasions” when we have the relevant mental states.

(Discrete mathematicians seem to have imparted a magical property to these symbols that *in them* is everything… no, when I use words its to represent my interior states… the words are symptoms, their patterns are coincidental and useful, but not where anything important lies).

In other words, we say “I like ice-cream” because: we are able to like things (desire, preference), we have tasted ice-cream, we have reflected on our preferences (via a capacity for self-modelling and self-directed emotional awareness), and so on. And when we say, “I like ice-cream” it’s *because* all of those things come together in radically complex ways to actually put us in a position to speak truthfully about ourselves. We really do like ice-cream.

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

#370

Post by sfn42 »

eszed wrote: post #363
TeMPOraL wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, I doubt many people overcome this hurdle - that "juvenile trick" is pretty much the defining quality of articles and books we consume.

Indeed. We need better English teachers. :-) We won't get them unless we appreciate both teaching and the Humanities more than we do. I was good, but by no means the best (75th percentile, maybe?). I loved doing it, but changed careers to IT because I'd never have been able to support a family on what I was paid. A culture which pays teachers poorly, treats them with disrespect ("those who can do..."), and relentless…

I don't know how it is elsewhere, but where I grew up we had minimum word limits on pretty much all essays. Doesn't matter if you can say what you want to say in 6 sentences, you need 4000 words or 2 pages or whatever metric they use
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