At what point would any one trust an AI to do a job versus just giving advice. even when you have it "write" code it's really just giving advice.
even customer service bots are just nicer front ends for knowledge bases.
Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
201–210 of 503 posts
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#202Earlier 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.
I'm an AI pessimist, yet I don't see this happening (at least not without some major advancements in how LLMs work).
One major problem is the payment mechanism. The nature of LLMs means you just can't really know or force it to spit out ad garbage in a predictable manor. That'll make it really tricky for an advertiser to want to invest in your LLM advertising (beyond being able to sell the fact that they are an AI ad service).
Another is going to be regulations. How can you be sure to properly highlight "sponsored" content in the middle of an AI hallucination? These LLM companies run a very real risk of running a fowl of FTC rules.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#203Have 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).
> Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator? "Equip yourself with skills that other people are willing to pay for." –Thomas Sowell
The general thought works good until it doesn't.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are develo…
> As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad…
> Trust but verify is still a good rule here
I wouldn't have a clue how to verify most things that get thrown around these days. How can I verify climate science? I just have to trust the scientific consensus (and I do). But some people refuse to trust that consensus, and they think that by reading some convincing sounding alternative sources they've verified that the majority view on climate science is wrong.
The same can apply for almost anything. How can I verify dietary studies? Just having the ability to read scientific studies and spot any flaws requires knowledge that only maybe 1 in 10000 people could do, if not worse than that.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't this assume that a resume has no actual relation to reality?
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#206Earlier 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 matters a lot how much of the market they capture before then though. Oracle and Google are two companies that have spent years torching their reputation but they are still ubiquitous and wildly profitable.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#207I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…
It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are develo…
I trust cutting edge models now far more than the ones from a few years ago.
People talk a lot of about false info and hallucinations, which the models do in fact do, but the examples of this have become more and more far flung for SOTA models. It seems that now in order to elicit bad information, you pretty much have to write out a carefully crafted trick question or ask about a topic so on the fringes of knowledge that it basically is only a handful of papers in the training set.
However, asking "I am sensitive to sugar, make me a meal plan for the week targeting 2000cal/day and high protein with minimally processed foods" I would totally trust the output to be on equal footing with a run of the mill registered dietician.
As for the junior developer thing, my company has already forgone paid software solutions in order to use software written by LLMs. We are not a tech company, just old school manufacturing.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#208I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…
The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn’t going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway.
This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved…
> Global connectedness is holding steady at a record high level based on the latest data available in early 2025, highlighting the resilience of international flows in the face of geopolitical tensions and uncertainty. https://www.dhl.com/global-en/microsites/core/global-connect... Source for counter argument?
Source for counter argument is in the page that you just linked here. You have cherry picked one sentence.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options. Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on. Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local l…
So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you would trust the outcome?
Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a car mechanic?