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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

#391

Post by asadotzler »

voidspark wrote: post #212
ninetyninenine wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate. And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search. If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.

LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches with citations. They have been doing that for a year already. Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI

And yet they still hallucinate and offer dead links. I've gotten wrong answers to simple historical event and people questions with sources that are entirely fabricated and referencing a dead link to an irrelevant site. Google results don't do that. This is why I use LLM's to help me come up with better searches that I perform and tune myself. That's valuable, the wordsmithing they can do given their solid word and word part statistics.

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

#392

Post by Capricorn2481 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #82
begueradj wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about technical debts related to the generated code?

First off, is there any? That's making an assumption, one which can just as easily be attributed to human-written code. Nobody writes debt-free code, that's why you have many checks and reviews before things go to production - ideally. Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be able to review previous generations and improve upon the code. If it needs to, anyway. But yeah, tech debt isn't unique to AIs…

> Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be able to review previous generations and improve upon the code. If it needs to, anyway.

Is that what's going to happen? These are still LLMs. There's nothing in the future generations that guarantees those changes would be better, if not flat out regressions. Humans can't even agree on what good code looks like, as its very subjective and context heavy with the skills of the team.

Likely, you ask gpt-6 to improve your code and it just makes up piddly architecture changes that don't fundamentally improve anything.

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

#393

Post by exe34 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #329
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call." What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..." Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation,…

> "Generative AI is not ..." But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an article from 2 years ago : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki... Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise.…

> globalization would be good for all countries, they just kinda forgot about the massive political instability it could cause

Could you say a few more words on this please? Are you referring to the rise of China?

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

#394

Post by asadotzler »

venantius wrote: post #304

It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3. Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be del…

The dot com boom gave us $1T in physical broadband, fiber, and cellular networking that's added many many trillions to the economy since. What's LLM-based AI gonna leave us when its bubble pops? Will that AI infrastructure be outliving its creators and generating trillions for the economy when all the AI companies collapse and are sold off for parts and scrap?

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

#395

Post by asadotzler »

probably_wrong wrote: post #267
lolinder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small. Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author w…

There is more to entry-level illustrators than SEO posts. In my daily life I've witnessed a bakery, an aspiring writer of children's books, and two University departments go for self-made AI pictures instead of hiring an illustrator. Those jobs would have definitely gone to a local illustrator.

I've seen the same more times that I can count, having been in that business decades ago. Then it was clip art and bad illustrator work, no different than what you're seeing today with AI -- and to a trained professional, the delta between the two "home made" approaches and professional ones is clearly evident. We'll look at the AI slop in 10 years the way we look at clip art from 1995.

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

#396

Post by catlikesshrimp »

jaredklewis wrote: post #360
bredren wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well, I acknowledge this point. However, the parent comment is about an examination of what has happened so far and facts that feed into the paper and its conclusions. I was focused on what I see as important gaps in measuring impact of AI, and its actual (if difficult to measure) impact right now.

The paper analyzes facts re: wages and jobs, which I think are (comparatively) easy to measure as compared with productivity, and are also an area where people have concerns about the impact of AI. Mostly people aren't worried about productivity itself, which would be weird. "Oh no, AI is making us way more productive, and now we're getting too much stuff done and the economy is growing too much." The major concern i…

Won't doing the same job in half the time lead to having to pay half the salary? Indirectly, I mean. You can now hire half the people or pay the same number of people half.

Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I doubt.

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

#397

Post by ravenstine »

asadotzler wrote: post #388
ravenstine wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I really have been more clear? I am not talking about whether I have to pay more or less for anything. My problem is not paying . I want to pay so that I don't have to make something myself or waste time fiddling with a free template. What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human being is less likely to be at the other end of the transaction when I want to spend money to avoid sacrificing my time. Su…

For your amateur use case, maybe. For real professions in the real economy, the article you're commenting under disagrees.

> real professions in the real economy

That's both pompous and bizarre. The "real" economy doesn't end at the walls of corporate offices. Far from it.

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

#398

Post by 7qW24A »

rightbyte wrote: post #367
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Generative AI is not ..." But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an article from 2 years ago : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki... Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise.…

> economic analyses done that said it took decades for the PC to have a positive impact on productivity I honestly think computers have a net negative productivity impact in many organizations. Maybe even "most".

It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. If you use the BLS’s definition of productivity, then computers seem to be a net drag on productivity:

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-labor-productivity-and...

Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth declined during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that free money and product less?

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

#399

Post by [deleted] »

datpuz wrote: post #374
bredren wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the study, "users report average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools. That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week. Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this. It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings). My use of LLMs often mean…

IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.

[deleted]

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

#400

Post by Sammi »

venantius wrote: post #304

It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3. Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be del…

People overestimate what can be done in the short term and underestimate what can be done in the long term.
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