201–210 of 331 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good thing. One more bullshit job eliminated that only exists to make the numbers go up. This will be hard, but as a society, we need to examine the entire reasoning behind "jobs" and why "more jobs = more gooder". The entire foundation of that line of thought is fundamentally flawed.
Until that jobs is yours, because not everyone is an AI scientist/developer. Prepare for social unrest.
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…
Maybe a human will double check the AI's work in those cases.
For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.
Well, right now, a manager can’t just write a vague description of what they want into a text field and get back working software twenty seconds later that they can deploy by clicking a button. That may change in the coming years, but the situation right now is that you need a human developer for any nontrivial production use case. That’s not the situation for copywriters. Marketing copy doesn’t have an objective thr…
Secondly, people aren't really thinking through the chain of events that follow from being able to get AI to write low quality marketing fluff. It reduces the value of marketing fluff to zero and will flood the market with it, the world isn't just going to stay stagnant, it's going to change. Remember how email used to be just full of spam? Like, unreasonably terrible? We fixed that! That changed. So I think it's important to think about what we're going to change about the world to respond to this - and it may well be these writers have to take a whole new approach to their jobs, but let's not just pretend they're all just going to walk into the ocean.
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…
Maybe a human will double check the AI's work in those cases.
The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong. Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot. Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was ent…
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…
"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 handcrafted by human woodworkers and carpenters, and cost $2,600 on average, or 20 times the average price of machine made furniture. Greenwood sales among Generation F have risen by 40% since 2064, and have acquired a status symbol that young families will pay to have"
This already exists in many industries. The most expensive watches are all hand made and limited edition. Limited edition cars selling for 7 figures.
The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong. Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot. Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was ent…
> 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.
If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
This is already the bargain with intellectual property. What if you can get writing 50% as good as Stephen King? Doesn't matter, because the winner takes all and books are infinitely copyable. What if you can run a 400m in 80% of the world record time? Doesn't matter, because you'll only be paid a pittance. What if copilot can write code with only 50% more bugs than an engineer? Doesn't matter if each bug costs an av…
Is it only in the “AI gonna take my job” discussions that programmers insist on calling themselves “engineers” or is this just a recent phenomena?
A bit off topic (but not really) and I know I’ll get downvoted (because, yeah…) but somehow the tide has turned from “programmer” to “software engineer” to just “engineer”.
Just think it’s strange.
If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
This is already the bargain with intellectual property. What if you can get writing 50% as good as Stephen King? Doesn't matter, because the winner takes all and books are infinitely copyable. What if you can run a 400m in 80% of the world record time? Doesn't matter, because you'll only be paid a pittance. What if copilot can write code with only 50% more bugs than an engineer? Doesn't matter if each bug costs an av…
Not sure what your standard of “recent” is, but I’ve seen the usage and debate of the “engineer” title since I started programming.
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…
And so do humans. Don't forget that there's plenty of SEO copy writing out there about all kinds of dangerous things that is wrong because the writer didn't understand the topic, couldn't be bothered to copy correctly, changed the meaning while "rewriting" a text etc.
The same goes for quality, imho. Everybody thinks they're a terrific writer, but most writing on websites sucks, most documentation sucks, most FAQs are lacking severely and use vague language in answers that add confusion rather than remove it. I'm not sure if LLMs will really lower the average quality there.
I share your concern about correctness, I just wanted to emphasize that "a human wrote this" does not indicate "this is well-researched and was factually correct at the time of writing".