Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

But now we're talking about a world where it's super cheap to do that.

> But I'll happily sit in your living room with you to help you build one for yourself. Provided that you'll compensate me for my time and effort.

I'd pay the market rate, which would be basically zero due to oversupply.

> but people stubbornly like human touch in that role.

A point of view I can definitely relate to. :) "ChatGPT, please summarize the heartfelt message my aging mother sent me."

Students also tell me this. When I discussed the whole idea of AI teacher "avatars" with them, their main feedback was that it was extremely disrespectful to them. They know how to use AI. They came to school to learn more than AI could teach them, from people who are better at teaching than AI is.

Admittedly, genAI is a pretty goddamn good teacher. But the best human teachers are better. And man, I would definitely prefer to read human-produced material, but it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff today.

> My point is, jobs can be invented out of thin air if there's money around to spend. And they were. And they will be.

I agree with you, but those jobs don't necessarily have any value if there's an oversupply of workers. And this is especially true for jobs that are easy to learn and perform.

Groundskeeping will pay zero. Food prep will pay zero. Even trades that are more challenging to learn (like electrical or welding) will pay zero when 20% of the population is a welder.

So I have the same question: where is the money going to come from? No money is economic collapse.

> Am I to take pride in my skill of directory naming? Am I to tie my self-worth with that? I don't think that's prudent.

Personally, at this point, my recommendation is that you tie your self-worth (when it comes to monetary production ability) to anything and everything you possibly can. Tie it to anything that gives you any edge whatsoever.

> Don't be afraid to experiment. It might be bad, but you might have ideas how to make it a bit better. You can tell agent your ideas and see how they pan out.

Yeah, I've done a lot of this. I'm impressed at how well it can get nearly up to par, but really unimpressed by how poorly it exceeds it. I mean, it's good. But it's not standout.

But in this case, I don't like how it would strip away the you part of your message. If all I cared about was raw information, I wouldn't even be here now. I'd just have my secretary-bot summarize and write a response. I want this conversation to be with you, human scotty79.

What is your job, out of curiosity, if you're willing to share? And if it's tech, what do you plan to do after that market is gone?

No… No they cannot.

This is why people say LLMs are rotting your brain. It’s not currently possible to distinguish LLM content from human content automatically and asking the slop machine to do it won’t achieve anything.

You would know that if you understood the problem domain. That is exactly why it is important to build real knowledge as a human, instead of relying on LLMs to do all your thinking for you. Give it a shot sometime.

Yes, so I imagine the value of idea (and being "idea guy") only grows in such world, because now the idea has way higher chance and lower cost of becoming materialized. And unmaterialized ideas are and always were worth zero.

> I'd pay the market rate, which would be basically zero due to oversupply.

That entirely depends on the demand. If someone can afford a fitness coach to help them work on their body, they can afford personal AI jokey to help them work on their own personal web browser or fitness app. It's not that different from how I started my career. There was this newfangled thing called the internet and I bet my future on the belief that people (individuals and small companies) might want to do something with that at some point so I can be there to share what I know thus far.

Every moment when each individual person is pissed at software, in their living room, is your potential business opportunity now. And people are pissed at software a lot.

>> but people stubbornly like human touch in that role. > A point of view I can definitely relate to. :)

I don't really mind that sentiment. I'm a human so if they are willing to pay extra for a human it might be good for me in whatever context. It also keeps lines to automated checkouts and order kiosks short, which I absolute love.

> Students also tell me this. When I discussed the whole idea of AI teacher "avatars" with them, their main feedback was that it was extremely disrespectful to them.

I think that's fair. They paid (?) good money for a human. Bait and switch is rarely welcomed. But also Khan academy exists and for many people is way more effective. And so AI driven education software is going to be at some point, probably, imho.

> They know how to use AI. They came to school to learn more than AI could teach them, from people who are better at teaching than AI is.

School ultimately rarely is the dream fulfillment. But I imagine paying for school and being put in front of an AI you are perfectly capable of putting yourself in front of feels bad. It's as if the entire curriculum consisted of the address of the public library.

Most teachers don't really know what to do with AI. I think smart students will figure it out first.

> Admittedly, genAI is a pretty goddamn good teacher.

Oh? I don't really track what's the progress in teaching. My own style of learning has always been "pull" based, and "as needed". I would like to create software to teach me German at some relatively close point in the future.

> But the best human teachers are better. And man, I would definitely prefer to read human-produced material, but it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff today.

Encountering even a single great teacher is a grat luck and privilege. Not everyone is this lucky.

> those jobs don't necessarily have any value if there's an oversupply of workers.

I don't think jobs are much about value anymore. Bulk of the value in the economy has been created by machines for a long time now. Needs and wants are manufactured by ad industry. Fulfilling them doesn't really involve value. In their own evaluation many people's jobs don't contribute anything of value to society and some believe they actively bring harm.

> So I have the same question: where is the money going to come from? No money is economic collapse.

For me the money is just an accounting system. Money is not a resource. It is a method for keeping track of how much of the future output of human civilization you are entitled to. How it's awarded and deducted is completely arbitrary. We are currently using markets for seeking optimal allocation but we stray far from the markets already because natural attractor for this allocation method is civilizationally unappealing in many ways. And still our tweeks of this allocation method don't make it gravitate to a lot of desirable outcomes. We probably never replace it wholesale but we might be braver with adjustments in the future. Money and value are two different things. How we organize money affects value production of course. But it's never one to one.

> Personally, at this point, my recommendation is that you tie your self-worth (when it comes to monetary production ability) to anything and everything you possibly can. Tie it to anything that gives you any edge whatsoever.

I don't think it's a good idea. Things will progress. The debris you can hold onto are going to get smaller and smaller as they sink. If you keep holding to the last bits that still stick out of the water you will drown. The boat sunk. This time, that the pieces that still float give you, shouldn't be spent for looking for the piece that will sink last or frantically grasping the closest ones. You should be looking around to find something else entirely or at least a piece of boat that maybe is a hefty swim away but at least looks like it might have positive buoyancy, maybe to even keep you afloat till next event or till your natural death. I'm trying to learn to swim even though I know that also won't last.

> I'm impressed at how well it can get nearly up to par, but really unimpressed by how poorly it exceeds it. I mean, it's good. But it's not standout.

Yeah. I haven't fallen in love with the execution too much. AI haven't built me anything of unseen unique perfection. But it's way better than it used to be and I can draw a straight line on a graph in my head.

What I'm absolutely delighted is that it's good enough to explore 100 times more things than were worth exploring a year ago.

I think the space of ideas is severely underexplored. The only engine we have for exploring ideas at scale is capitalism. And its resources are limited and held tightly to the chest. Business basically takes no risks and aims for rent seeking. Most of the breakthroughs of the last centuries came from risks undertaken by the taxpayers funding science. Variety of capitalism's outputs is superficial. You have 1000 products to choose from when you need nothing, but when you actually need a specific product it turns out nobody sells exactly what you need. AI lets me explore the space in between of what capitalism offers. Things that it wouldn't be able to offer. Maybe it's a stupid analogy that just came to my mind but the market offers real numbers and AI suddenly opened the world of irrationals. Sure, most of them are not that interesting, but there's whole infinity of them in between of every two real numbers. There's bound to be something good there, even if there can't be any market for it. And now exploring that space is viably cheap.

> But in this case, I don't like how it would strip away the you part of your message. If all I cared about was raw information, I wouldn't even be here now. I'd just have my secretary-bot summarize and write a response. I want this conversation to be with you, human scotty79.

I'm not gonna kink-shame. ;-) But I don't share that craving. Although I'm always delighted to talk to someone (?) whose intelligence I can recognize.

> What is your job, out of curiosity, if you're willing to share? And if it's tech, what do you plan to do after that market is gone?

Software developer. According to people I know, a good one, although I have my doubts. My biggest strengths were always in the debugging. I didn't really like to build stuff before AI because I always knew that's gonna be a heap of work and I'm lazy. But the debugging could always keep me hooked. My expertise is pretty common. Webapps (although I dabbled in other things). Full-stack. I always was doing everything I needed to do. Now that thing is AI.

As for my plans for the future. Financially I'm set, but if I lose it, I see myself sharing my findings in the domain of AI wrangling for the purposes of irrational seafaring, with people and companies, for money.

Humans are diverse. There are humans that climb tallest mountain for no objective reason, getting frostbite for life and still feeling unfulfilled. And there are humans that happily and contently live their whole life in one house. There's no universal "human condition".

> There is no light without the darkness.

Human narrations are full of false dichotomies. In metaphorical sense light and darkness are nearly completely orthogonal.

History of our species was filled with incredible amounts of suffering. It's normal to have circuits in the brain and associated narratives that embellish, glorify and legitimize suffering.

> People at the equator will never feel the joy of springtime; one must have known the cold of winter in order to do so.

Yeah, you'll never experience the joy of healing if you don't impale yourself on that sharp object.

You don't have to experience everything in life. This also goes for pain induced pleasures. It's perfectly fine to choose not to experience something (when existence awards you the opportunity to pass on it).