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Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

theregister.com

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Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#171

Post by Attrecomet »

BrtByte wrote: post #59
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #15

My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…

Resume-sending is a great example: if everyone's blasting out AI-generated applications and companies are using AI to filter them, the whole "application" process collapses into meaningless busywork

No, the whole process is revealed to be meaningless busywork. But that step has been taken for a long time, as soon as automated systems and barely qualified hacks were employed to filter applications. I mean, they're trying to solve a hard and real problem, but those solutions are just bad at it.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#172

Post by bluefirebrand »

atrus wrote: post #162
DharmaPolice wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a junior developer lies about something important, they can be fired and you can try to find someone else who wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they don't know they've lied.

You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied" though. Being wrong isn't lying .

Inventing answers is lying

If I ask it how to accomplish a task with the C standard library and it tells me to use a function that doesn't exist in the C standard library, that's not just "wrong" that is a fabrication. It is a lie

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#173

Post by ninetyninenine »

lambdaba wrote: post #66
mattlondon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ... Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a desc…

People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks and that will make human creativity stand out even more. I'm expecting more creativity and less cookie-cutter content, I think AI generated content is actually the end of it.

This eye will be a driving force for improving ai until it becomes in parity with real non generated pictures.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#174

Post by xyzal »

erkt wrote: post #164
flmontpetit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.

I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API. It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.

It's happening, though not with ads yet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poi...

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#175

Post by ninetyninenine »

pj_mukh wrote: post #97
WillAdams wrote: post #26

Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator? Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but that's a different conversation).

I don't know. Even with these tools, I don't want to be doing this work. I'd still hire an entry level graphic designer. I would just expect them to use these tools and 2x-5x their output. That's the only changing I'm sensing.

Also pay them less, because they don’t need to be as skilled anymore since ai is covering it.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#176

Post by mattlondon »

lambdaba wrote: post #66
mattlondon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ... Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a desc…

People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks and that will make human creativity stand out even more. I'm expecting more creativity and less cookie-cutter content, I think AI generated content is actually the end of it.

People already know what the ads are and what is content, but yet the advertisers keep on paying for ads on videos so they must be working.

It feels to me that the SOTA video models today are pretty damn good already, let alone in another 12 months when SOTA will no doubt have moved on significantly.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#177

Post by JoshTko »

erkt wrote: post #164
flmontpetit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.

I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API. It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.

My bet is that free versions of models will become sponsor aligned.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#178

Post by bluefirebrand »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #157
quickthrowman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all it costs is $0.01

I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It’s understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that only looks real.

It's also something so trivial to determine yourself.

It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading any critical thinking to AI

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#179

Post by Attrecomet »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #71
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #15

My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…

Im not sure this is a great example... yes the infrastructure of posting and applying to jobs has to go, but the cost of recruitment in this world would actually be much higher... you likely need more people and more resources to recruit a single employee. In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world. Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may no longer exist because anyone and their moth…

I'm not sure that is actually a bad thing. Being a competent employee and writing a professional-looking resume are two almost entirely distinct skill sets held together only by "professional-looking" being a rather costly marker of being in the in-group for your profession.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#180

Post by DebtDeflation »

The study looks at 11 occupations in Denmark in 2023-24.

Maybe instead look at the US in 2025. EU labor regulations make it much harder to fire employees. And 2023 was mainly a hype year for GenAI. Actual Enterprise adoption (not free vendor pilots) started taking off in the latter half of 2024.

That said, a lot of CEOs seem to have taken the "lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second" approach.

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