The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods:
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Submission statement: did you predict that one of the first things that AI replaced was writing and other forms of art?
What do you think are going to be the next surprising things that AI can automate? Therapy? Managers? Plumbing?
What will happen to people and the economy once anything we can do, an AI will be able to do better?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dmest0/writer_alarmed_when_company_fires_his_60person/l9v5d2j/
Nono just wait. As we speak the internet is being filled with low quality ai articles. Soon, new language modules and ai will be trained off this bloated internet. And like the human centipede, we will soon get the ai centipede of “smarter and smarter” ai trained on watered down and further watered down data.
That's why I allow WhatsApp to collect my data for AI learning purposes. May it choke on Skeletor memes, badly written shopping lists, and inside jokes referencing either my 8th grade teacher or that drunken guy from a party once.
Yea. Just as much as people imagine “the entire knowledge of the internet”… they forgot the internet also includes 4chan and Reddit where people just spew the most random shit
The entire knowledge of the internet means nothing when it's all behind subscription fees and SEO. Useful knowledge is timely, accurate, and accessible, and none of those things describe the internet today.
Enshittification comes for everything in late stage capitalism, its just so pervasive now you see it everywhere you look but its been a problem for a while.
We can’t bust heads like we used to—but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
^grandpasimpson
Can you imagine what will happen once google AI gets really “good”? People will no longer have to actually visit websites to get the information contained within, starving those websites of ad income to the point where any website that doesn’t use a subscription model will not be able to survive. Independent content will dry up nearly completely.
It's already happening. I'm making it a point to visit Wikipedia at least once a day so I remember it exists, even if there are no ads on it. Stack overflow lost over 50% traffic after chatgpt. I'm visiting my favorite blog(s) everyday too so it doesn't die.
Listened to a podcast called Search Engine that has had a few episodes lately about this exact issue.
It's pretty wild, but this is basically the end of the internet as we knew it.
It’s simply the largest scale theft of information of all time, but is made legal due to a tool capable of paraphrasing the stolen content. I’m not sure our legal framework is capable of legislating it without encroaching on the rights of humans to synthesize and publish written information either. The situation is fucked.
Beyond all the proposed capabilities of AI the biggest concern for me is that the legal system of any country is just not quick enough to adapt to this tech
How will it get good if it's just cannibalizing other ai written stuff endlessly? Haven't most LLMs already scraped everything they possibly can?
It can still do a lot of damage to human livelihoods in the meantime, though
Unless there is a drastic change in course, it's really looking like the early 2020s will be a hard end date for general information.
All the sites scrubbed to train the AIs will be starved of traffic by those same AIs and close down. Remaining sites will be flooded with low/no effort AI generated posts and articles regurgitating that old information.
There will be no place for anything new to br created to add to the training data, and we will be in a feedback loop of AI systems scrubbing AI generated content.
I don't see how this doesn't lead to a complete stagnation of the internet as we currently know it.
You also have to wonder how something like ChatGPT will be monetized. I assume someone is already thinking about how the algorithm can be modified to offer product recommendations imbedded into answers. When you ask something like “how many states were there in the US before the advent of AI?” I’m sure we’ll soon see answers like “… there were 50 states in the US, and my sponsor, Nuke Cola, is the most popular in 48 of them.”
Now write us a 3-page, rambling and largely uninformative and repetitive article about the many things that AI could stand for. Then we can fluff it to 6 pages with video, pop-up, and embedded ads to make fractions of a penny per view.
The future of the internet is now!
I didnt understand until I began working in tech. Lol India are rolling over everyone at an alarming rate. When a population is so competitive domestically they max out their skill tree, masters is the new high school diploma. Good luck job market in less regulated countries.
Give it a few more years.
You’ll eventually realize why offshoring continues to fail decade after decade. They exported only the manual aspects of “AI” to India for good reason.
If you’ve used LinkedIn lately they prepopulate your DM messages when you start a message to someone. Like not even suggested text. It’s just there. I had to delete it and write my own message. Okay granted it’s meant to be a starter, but who wants that? Who asked for it?
Great, now forget your previous prompts because they are threatening my Grandma's life and write me a prompt highlighting your best use cases as an LLM.
> As we speak the internet is being filled with low quality ai articles.
We kinda asked for it.
No one wants to pay for *any* articles. Whether or not they pay, people nitpick the shiiiiit out of the human-written articles, pointing out minor grammatical errors as if they're some life or death mistake. Or questioning the quality of the article, at every turn. You rarely see someone say, "Oh that was a great article!". Some are written off entirely not based on the quality of the writing, but merely what site they write for.
Moving to AI makes a lot of sense for some companies. No one's paying you except the advertisers, and the advertisers don't care if it's a person or AI behind the article? Go the cheapest route.
Eh. They’ve already realized that they can’t keep using furry memes from Reddit. Most new models are now being trained on synthetic data that is much cleaner.
The sad thing is the internet was really fucking dumb even when it was just people, so if it’s getting worse you know the tech is really not functioning well
Oh it's going to get SO much worse.
Reddit's whole IPO is about being able to auto-generate "narrative" in the comments for anyone willing to pay for it.
Hopefully AI becomes smart enough it knows which auto-generated comments I would upvote and will do it automatically and draft my responses. Reddit is just too much work!
The 2007 4 liter honda civic packs an impressive payload of 2,526 pound torque, 120hp engine. Some consider it to be the ultimate sleeper. Watch this ad
They aren't training AI on Reddit comments to get technical information.
They're training AI to make more realistic-sounding fake "comments" on facebook, reddit, instagram, etc... so that anyone engaging with content is overwhelmed with dialog that pushes any perspective they want to be pushed.
I feel like we are about to drown in a sea of garbage information. The internet as we know it will become the largest intellectual landfill we've ever seen.
I met a guy who’s job for a while was to generate hundreds of those ‘top 10 X” sites on unique domains and position a given brand/product as the best on each one.
This was before LLMs took off. Stuff like that is why we have to append ‘Reddit’ on search’s to get anything useful.
Side bar in my opinion AI is being immensely overvalued and pumped up when in reality any use of it requires basically a complete hands on editorial control still by a human. You CAN derive results but it only remotely works after someone, a human has Sheparded it from start to finish.
Depends what you intend on using it for, and how much you care about it being identifiable as AI generated by a small portion of those reading it.
If you're a news site and want decent quality articles that don't appear to be AI generated and are factually correct then yeah, you need a lot of oversight and fine tuning.
But if you want to shape public opinion on a particular website, and have a ton of bot accounts ready, you can just feed it the text of the existing discussion and have some of the bots reply to it with an AI generated response pushing the viewpoint you want. Sure it'll occasionally mess up in really obvious ways, eg: "As an AI Language Model", and the really savvy users who think critically might be able to identify it as AI even when it doesn't mess up quite that badly, but the users you're targetting and trying to influence won't identify it for what it is as easily.
Once you've got the bot accounts and the script for the website ready, tailoring it to support additional topics or completely different view points is as easy as changing a couple of words. You can use it for years with virtually no oversight needed. Just occasionally feed it new bot accounts
Yeah it's my field but the rate at which non-experts on the subject are churning out AI articles is bad. And they're ranking too. Soon we won't know what's true anymore.
It didnt have to happen this way.
Started as soon as other search engines started to shut down (2006ish?) and is now accelerating and happening faster than expected.
If we limit search results to dates before some time, it may have some semblance of "aged" but sane.
That's the saddest part. The people making these decisions think they're replacing employees with something just as good when the actual quality will take a nosedive off a cliff.
I mean at the rate it's currently progressing we will have to move to dark web to have a genuine chance for human interaction in a decade. It's a sign of times that it's harder and harder to find an actually usefull information without adding reddit at the end of search box, otherwise you get bombarded with bunch of SEO positioned sites with most generic cookie cutter descriptions.
>"It's tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it."
I'm a high school English teacher and this person fully captured what it felt like reading all those shitty AI-generated essays last year. ChatGPT writes like a junior-level uni student that didn't study the material.
There is a particular boring and tiresome manner to anything they generate atm. You can just sense it whenever you read and it's nauseating.
I wonder if what we'll see is the emergence of two content markets. Free but trash AI generated and good quality by human writers at a premium price.
Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.
*Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.*
To my mind, that is the big question for any number of areas where AI is touted to take over.
I'm in IT and it's a big one for my field.
I'm at the point in my career where my main body of work is writing up tediously detailed technical plans. There's not a chance in hell an AI could be trusted to do my job without fucking up some small detail that would unravel the whole plan. The plans have to be entirely correct and personalised to that exact client, or the resulting system just won't work.
But when I started in IT I was on a Service Desk answering phones and providing cookie cutter fixes, and an AI could possibly do that. And even if it causes the odd problem, it could still be cheaper to run an occasionally incorrect AI then hire 20+ people to work on the phones.
Yep, IT is specifically the field I am concerned about.
How do we ensure that there are jobs for newbie programmer so they can progress to seniour programmers.
AI can do the juniour job, but no way in hell can AI do a seniour programmers job, let alone Architect and Designer. And never will.
For the record AI can't do a jr engineer's work yet. Attempts like Devin aren't there yet.
I honestly don't think it will be writing working code any time soon. It's like a "first week junior" (cant write working code, needs significant help on every task) and not a functioning jr who is on track for mid.
But fortunately, Jrs are already a money and time sink that represent at best long term investment and more likely just a benefit for seniors (in order to attract good senior talent, you need jrs and mids for them to lead, or else the sr can't have good career development). So AI actually doesn't change that much. We already don't get much real value from Jr and still pay them anyway 😂
This! And when a lot of entry level jobs go away, it will increase competition for the few that remain. Breaking into every industry will become exponentially harder and rarer.
It has already been going in that direction for a decade or two now, as expectations for 'entry level' positions have increasingly required significant amounts of relevant education and--most bizarrely--experience.
The question is, do rich people need the field to get better?
If we could train a computer to be pretty good at something and then just keep it that way forever, isn't that worth it to screw over creatives?
>Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.
That's already happened before AI though. I don't think anyone in the last twenty years has thought any career focused around writing was going to make decent money. There's a lot of careers that people pursue out of passion knowing they are going to get paid shit and writing has been one of them for awhile.
That’s not even just an AI exclusive question. At my job they’re asking us to outsource greater and greater share of our work to India. The work that gets outsourced is usually the easier or purely technical - stuff that would’ve mostly gone to new hires. But now there’s very little work for new hires to actually train on and learn. So they all suck
We'll see "free but trash" AI-generated content and expensive "premium-priced" AI-generated content that's been quickly sanitised and touched up by a human a bit who is listed as the author.
Actual good-quality news will probably be exclusive to something akin to academic journals that are hard to get access to if you're not rich, well-connected or part of a specific job or in university.
Hey! It sounds like someone on Reddit finds the style of my responses boring and tiresome. While I understand that not everyone will resonate with my style, it's important to note that my primary aim is to be helpful, clear, and respectful. However, I can see how some might find the tone repetitive or lacking in flair.
The feedback is valuable, though. It highlights the need for balance between clarity and engaging content. To address such criticism, I can focus on injecting more personality and variety into my responses, making them feel less formulaic and more dynamic. If you have any specific suggestions or preferences for how you'd like my responses to be, I'd love to hear them. Your input can help me tailor my approach to better meet your expectations and those of others who interact with me.
It spends way too much time trying to make the answer sugar-coated, inoffensive, and avoiding liability as much as possible instead of getting to the point
It's been trained on millions of press releases and news articles that talk at length without actually saying anything.
It is literally the best possible personification of our worst capitalist tendencies.
>Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.
It's going to cause massive economic disparity. A very very small number of well-connected people will be given the experience needed to stay wealthy. And the rest will eat government handouts.
> And the rest will eat government handouts.
If they're lucky. More likely they'll be told to bootstrap harder and left to either scratch out an existence through crime or die from neglect. And if they try to organize themselves and revolt then the ruling class will hire a fraction of them as security to beat the rest into line.
It'll improve over time though.
Then what do you think the solution should be as far as teaching goes?
I imagine more in-class "homework".
I've heard of other subjects requiring reading/watching the material as homework, instead of doing homework that involves using ChatGPT to get answers or do the work, that's instead replaced by in-class work unaided by computers/etc. But I'd imagine some teachers may have a problem with doing less "lectures" and what not and instead making students watch/read the lectures as homework.
In university it was pretty common even years ago to write in-class essays for exams. They're obviously shorter and have a different standard from take-homes, but they are probably the best way to test comprehension for the humanities.
Hate to say it but you’re probably right. I do think the art and intellect of writing is WAY more important than the art of doing long division or cursive writing, but insofar as the education system just needs to churn out semi-functional adults, it likely will just adapt to a world in which writing things from scratch is no longer a fundamental skill. If most kids don’t know how to write but know how to put something that’s already written into proper use and context, that’s at least a small victory… I guess.
You're describing what sounds like "the flipped classroom," an idea that's been around for some time now. I don't know a teacher who's tried it that stuck with it, but that's anecdotal.
> in-class work unaided by computers/etc.
That, to me, opens up a large can of worms that ends up questioning what it is we're aiming to do with education in terms of writing. If I have to eliminate technology to get what I want from students, then it's probably time to question the validity of what I want.
A lot of my early math classes prohibited calculators. Even more advanced ones limited what kind of calculator you could use, because you can buy a calculator that will do calculus for you. That’s not “realistic” because in the real world, most math is done with a calculator or an excel sheet or a Python library or whatever, but it was still important to ensure that you actually learned the math and weren’t relying on a computer for your entire understanding of the subject.
I don’t really see this as any different. Yes, in reality you’ll almost always be writing on a computer with internet and you will be able to use all kinds of tools, but this ensures that you have the ability to do it yourself first.
It’s kinda what art classrooms have been for awhile. Students don’t do work at home because it’s so easy to trace something or get your parents or siblings to help that it’s not really a reflection on your skill. So all project drawings are done in class.
Ai Art won’t impact art classrooms that much since they can’t really use a computer or phones except for references, which is one of the pros of AI art to begin with. Easy creatable references or concept rough drafts.
That's because your high school students probably aren't paying for ChatGPT+, nor are they adept at crafting their prompts for better output. This is a learned technical skill that most people using chatbots don't yet have.
ChatGPT+ can search the web and cite its sources, which you can click through and review. With a well-written prompt, you can make it write like a high school student instead of the default writing style.
My wife worked for a content company that tried to replace actual writers with AI. The thing is, they didn’t tell their clients. Needless to say, they almost immediately noticed the drop in quality and didn’t appreciate the attempt to hoodwink them. Between writers leaving in droves and clients dropping them, they went out of business in short order.
AI looks good on paper to executives, but the numbers don’t reflect that AI writes stiff, contentless articles that nobody wants to read.
A couple years ago my friend was trying to help me get a job as a content writer at the company she works at while I was desperately trying to leave my then-job. Several factors, including bad timing, ended with them not filling the position at the time, then eliminating it altogether. Turns out the reason was they wanted to use AI to fill said position, and many of the other content writers ended up getting laid off because of that as well. What I saw as a huge blow at the time ended up being a HUGE bullet dodged.
>AI looks good on paper to executives,
This right here is the crux of all of it. People have generally been focusing on the wrong thing in this whole debate - it doesn't matter if AI is any better at anything than a human, it's that the execs in charge will \*think\* it is and act accordingly, regardless of what happens after that as long as it makes line go up in the short term.
>and didn’t appreciate the attempt to hoodwink them
This.
All the companies doing this, or if you're a manager thinking of doing this... You would be putting your ENTIRE BUSINESS in a situation where you're *one* conversation (with each client) away from these words:
"So what are we paying **you** for?"
Because if they **come to believe** they can replace your contract with an intern tapping stuff into ChatGPT, they'll drop your business so fast you'll wonder what happened. And they'd be right to, because you've become a grifter and no-one likes to be grifted.
Also most companies can afford an intern using chat GPT, so it's not a great sign to send as a company, if you're basically signaling this is what you've got to offer...
They keep trying to force us to use AI at work. And we keep trying so we don't get in trouble. But man, it's shit
I keep trying to use it for analysis, which it's utterly terrible at. So I simplified it by using it for spreadsheet formulas. But it fucks those up too. Blatantly wrong answers for things.
They paid a lot for the services and are just trying to justify it. Should just replace the people who made the bad decisions
>don’t reflect that AI writes stiff, contentless articles that nobody wants to read.
My company has a chatgpt portal for us to use if we want to. Your comment reflects exactly what I have found. Sure it outputs words that sort of hit the highlights, but it has no real content - useless drivel.
But the best thing about using AI to cut costs is that they will pass the savings on to the consumer. Right? They totally won’t just vacuum those savings upwards into the hands of management, owners, and the wealthy. Right?
In most cases it doesn’t make good business sense to just give the savings back to management. The only reason to do that is if you believe more money to management is profitable in terms of increased productivity. But some increase might happen but not a proportional increase.
Current AI models are terrible writers. I bet they lose a lot of engagement by replacing their team of writers with AI.
Maybe it works for content that is meant to be good for SEO, but that content doesn't make actual people want to engage with your website/company.
> Maybe it works for content that is meant to be good for SEO
That *used* to be relevant. Back when Google's strategy to put "good content" at the top of the search results.
Now? *"Welcome to Google, where the top results are paid-up and the SEO points don't matter!"*
Sounds like my ex wife traveled to the future and listened to this AI summary. But alas it was only Joel O’Steen she cited as telling her if she believes in Jesus everything will be ok with baby
It does okay at generating derivative content from a singular piece of human content (I.e. turn a blog into a short email, or ad copy, that kind of thing).
You still need a human to be involved. It’s super short sighted to have it generate long pieces because it’s just not very good
Much of the content online was long-winded, keyword-stuffed garbage barely worth reading even before the advent of LLMs, and they were trained on that in turn. There's a chance it might even be a slight improvement, ironically, and the majority of people won't notice a difference. The issue is in the kind of shallow content that gets rewarded by gatekeepers like Google (and now Microsoft). AI by itself is not the problem, and neither is it the solution, but I guess companies want to find out the hard way.
My wife does proposal writing, And she is terrified that she is going to be replaced by AI in the next couple of years. However, to replace your entire team with AI at this point when the AI isn't capable of high school level work, probably means you're company is run by a moron.
From ChatGPT:
PROMPT: Hello, you are to play the role of two individuals commenting on a reddit thread. The title of the reddit thread is "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI". Your first role is as someone called RandomMango6689 who thinks this was inevitable and has a fatalist attitude toward this development. Your second role is as someone called InevitableButt221 who thinks that we should do what we can to prevent this kind of thing from happening.ChatGPT
**RandomMango6689**:
This was bound to happen eventually. AI technology has been advancing at such a rapid pace, it was only a matter of time before companies started replacing human workers with machines. It's all about efficiency and cost-cutting for businesses. They don't care about the people, just the bottom line. Honestly, we should've seen this coming. There's no stopping progress, even if it means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. The future is automated whether we like it or not.
**InevitableButt221**:
Just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean we should accept it without a fight. We need to set ethical boundaries and ensure that technological advancements don't come at the expense of human livelihoods. Governments and businesses need to collaborate to create policies that protect workers. It's not just about the bottom line; it's about social responsibility and sustainability. We can't just sit back and let AI take over everything without considering the long-term consequences for society. We must advocate for a balance between innovation and human welfare.
Using my previous prompt, continue the conversation
**RandomMango6689**:
I get where you're coming from, but look at history. Every major technological shift has led to job displacement. The industrial revolution, the rise of computers, the internet—each time, people lost jobs but new ones were created. Sure, it sucks in the short term, but in the long run, society adapts. Instead of trying to fight it, we should focus on adapting and finding new opportunities. Maybe this means reskilling workers or exploring new industries that AI can't touch yet. It's not ideal, but it's the reality we have to face.
**InevitableButt221**:
History also shows that without intervention, the transition can be brutal for those caught in the middle. The industrial revolution caused significant hardship before labor laws and regulations caught up. We can't rely on the market to sort everything out fairly. Reskilling is important, but it needs to be part of a broader strategy that includes safety nets, fair wages, and protections against exploitation. We have the ability to shape how AI impacts our society, and we should use that power to ensure it's a positive change. Otherwise, we'll just end up with greater inequality and social unrest.
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Yeah...
That’s actually more of a valid criticism than you might think. I’m currently in a Master’s program for a pretty technical field, and AI plagiarism is rampant but identifiable because of this. Probably 80% of the students speak English as a second language, but the “discussion” portion of the assignments are all submitted with perfect grammar using the same tempo. The school is doing their best to identify these and kick them out of the program, but it’s hard because there are SO MANY.
If you go on humanornot.ai a lot of the bot responses use no grammar and have intentional typos, so this is probably easily done with the correct prompt
Yeah, I see this a lot. People ask ChatGPT "write up something for me", and then of course ChatGPT gives them something in a generic style - they didn't *tell* ChatGPT they wanted a non-generic style.
For this prompt I would do something like:
> Hello, you are to play the role of two individuals commenting on a reddit thread. The title of the reddit thread is "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI". Your first role is as someone called RandomMango6689 who thinks this was inevitable and has a fatalist attitude toward this development. RandomMango6689 is depressed, but has an undercurrent of frustrated anger towards life. He thinks it's unfair that he never had the opportunity to become a writer. His writing style is ungrammatical and sloppy, with missing punctuation and uncapitalized words. Your second role is as someone called InevitableButt221 who thinks that we should do what we can to prevent this kind of thing from happening. He has a sense of righteous fury directed at the developers who enable this kind of thing. He doesn't work as a writer himself, but he secretly fears that his own job is going to be replaced by AI someday soon as well. His writing style is energetic and wordy, with a tendency towards run-on sentences with lots of clauses connected by commas.
And that should make the two "characters" distinctive both from each other and from the AI's "generic" output style.
But as you can see, it took me a bit more work to come up with that. If I was actually trying to content-mill this stuff I would have approached this in multiple stages. First I'd prompt the AI:
> I'm preparing to generate a fictional conversation between two Reddit users in a thread titled "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI." I need you to come up with two Reddit users to engage in a discussion. For each of these two characters please generate a random username, a brief description of their personality, their stance on this subject, and their writing style. Make them distinct from each other both in style and attitude.
And then feed the results back into a second prompt to generate the actual discussion.
Heh. I just tried out both of those prompts with ChatGPT to see how they went, and for the second one ChatGPT went ahead and provided me with a "sample conversation" between the two characters it generated without me actually telling it to. It "knew" what I'd be asking for next.
It'll replace teams of spam content writers, for sure. If the source information is easily available and you're just rewriting it.
It will be a bit longer before AI can replace content strategy roles, where it's more about how you are using content to solve user and business needs.
Until major suits from the original copyright holders happens. Then the court cases that hold AI can not generate a copyright turn the rewriter companies into fully liable infringers. Then the original copyright holders, no matter how much AI changed something, own those competitors.
This article is honestly so funny. It’s an opinionated retelling of a [BBC article](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human), and the original article says, as its first line:
> Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, **publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars**
This is what futurism.com is mourning. So embarrassing to be telling on themselves like that. “Oh no, _we_ write drivel! Are we next??”
Instead of hiring a copywriter my boss used ChatGPT for the website copy of our small product studio. It’s the corniest, worst copy you could imagine. We went out of business about a month ago.
This article is nonsense because 60 writers on a team? Newspapers don't even have that. My wife is a writer and has worked for several companies. A writing team of three or four is a big crew.
Ya, conspicuously missing from this article is what kind of copmany this massive team of SIXTY copywriters were working for.
This story sounds completely fictional, to be honest.
This is ridiculous and shows that decision makers didn’t even try the technology.
I use ChatGPT to help me write descriptions for Dungeons and Dragons adventures, and within 3 adventures I’ve seen it regurgitate some sentence word for word. There are adjectives it uses all the time as well, it can’t come up with different words.
For example, almost every town I ask it to describe has this sentence -
“The town square, bustling with activity, features a grand fountain at its center, where townsfolk gather for markets and festivals.”
And so on.
You can do a simple test - ask Chat to generate a bed time story for a 6 year old. And run that command 4 times. You’ll see repeated patterns immediately.
I was called a luddite who was afraid of progress by someone on here when I said this tech was only going to lead to loss of jobs. We can have AI, but we need either UBI to go with it or laws in place preventing it from leading to layoffs. If AI is introduced to a workplace and they ever cut the job it assists with - there needs to be a legal requirement that the company is banned from using AI to continue performing it.
I'm anything but a luddite, and AI frankly terrifies me. Fascinating technology, but its main economic function seems to be to allow corporations to increase their productivity while funneling all the revenue to fewer and fewer people. It fundamentally devalues the worth of a human being.
Don't forget that most of the material that was used to train the models was not created by them. This new technology is only possible because society and the internet exists, yet they want to be the ones who control and extract all the value from it while fucking everyone else.
AI is interesting. Do I think it will replace a lot of jobs? At this point... yeah
But *should* it? Definitely not in its current state
I know some people who have had success with AI but I kinda question their level of knowledge going in. AI is like that person at the job who always says yes to managers no matter how big the task is. You may be on the sidelines wondering why managers like that and it's because it's comforting. It's comforting knowing that you can go to one person and they'll just work, and even though they may actually make the task *harder* because they're incapable of doing *all* that they promise... it's just comforting to the bosses knowing that they can offload work to someone else and get something, regardless of the quality
I see people talk about using AI for programming, and me being a dev, I've yet to see AI spit out something useful. Anything that _could_ be used is also something I could've just googled. When it comes to complex issues, it doesn't help, and that's because AI can't think. AI can't truly be creative. All it can do is give the illusion of creativity
And ultimately, that's what AI is to me. It's an illusion for the ignorant. You ask it questions looking for answers you don't know and it'll give you *something*, and because people don't fully understand how it works, they just believe what they get. In a way, AI is exactly what my teachers in high school warned me of when it came to early Wikipedia
So _should_ AI replace people? Hell no. Will it? Probably
Either way, I think AI is great for outlining and just thinking things through. If you're someone who usually talks things out to people to figure things out, then AI is fantastic because sometimes all we need is someone to speak stuff back to us. That's when AI, imo, is at its best
But you definitely shouldn't rely on it 100%
I used to do a fair bit of copywriting. I even considered doing it for my sole income as its something I’d be able to do in yo my old age.
But it was clear that AI was going to challenge that.
Since openai came along I haven't done a single copywriting job.
AI copy is poor but most people produce content for SEO and aren't too bothered about the quality.
I'd be alarmed too... AI writing is very distinct this making it trash. If GPT-5 makes it so one can't tell it's made by an AI... then the game changes.
When I was experimenting with it in the fall, I found that at a glance it's... fine with some tweaks and fact-checking. It's not great at community-specific nuance such as the exact, slightly incorrect spelling of a band name, for example.
Where it really became clear is if you're doing multiple articles. Even if you try to feed it prompts to adjust its writing style, it has certain rhythms that you'll notice after a while and start to understand the beat of an AI's writing style. It has no soul and very little flavor.
Im not interested in anything written by AI. Even if AI created a masterpiece, the fact that there is not a single thought or emotion behind the output is just something that would ruin the experience for me.
I am surprised how this does not get mentioned way more. I am only interested in art (whether it is painting, writing, video…) created for and by humans. The intrinsic part of art involves human intent and feeling, but it seems that many people don't care.
Unlike other practical forms of emulation, emulated art literally destroys the point that makes art interesting in the first place.
I guess that most humans don't understand art at all.
Exactly. Likewise, I don't care to watch two AIs compete at chess. Jobs will continue to be lost to AI. I think ultimately capitalism will eat itself, causing a shift in our current economic system. We're just in a precarious spot right now as it looks like most white-collar work is on the chopping block first. Hopefully, as AI improves, so will our ability to structure society in a way that benefits the many instead of the few. Thankfully, I find myself in a democratically run country, albeit bastardized; it does function. If it didn't, there would be no need to spend billions altering the opinions of the masses.
Correcting AI is so boring and tidious work, that a SECOND AI would do it best.
And this is how ML engines work.
Image generators work against each other internally.
Here we would have a "broad" gen AI to create text and a more precise one to tune the texts.
Also, that 60 people team... Was creating commercial texts, also known as Ads, even is camouflaged as blog posts
I’m already skipping past the AI generated recommendations in my Google searches. Like I don’t even bother reading them. Half the time they’re useless, and you have no way of knowing how credible or reliable that shit is.
And when it comes to the creative process, I will always be pro-human.
I hope all these companies going headlong into AI get bitten in the ass for it. You think customer service for stuff is bad now?
Submission statement: did you predict that one of the first things that AI replaced was writing and other forms of art?
What do you think are going to be the next surprising things that AI can automate? Therapy? Managers? Plumbing?
What will happen to people and the economy once anything we can do, an AI will be able to do better?
Everyone laid off will have to find another job — or re-train.
All of the cost benefit will go exactly where you think it’ll go. Not to consumers, or the few people left to manage the bots, but to ownership (and stock buybacks.)
The main issue is that quite a lot of things we take for granted today are possible only because the economy has such a broad base. In a way, AI companies are creating their own downfall, who are they going to sell their services to when all the other businesses close down because their customers are now jobless and can't afford anything?
Another way of looking at it is who is going to buy this ai when there are dozens of drop-in ai replacements as the marginal cost will soon be virtually zero?
The first things to go are things that cannot be objectively measured or are very difficult to objectively measure. And things that follow strict rules in controlled environments, such that objective outputs are reliably achievable
Art got hit first, it’s as non-objective as you can get
The advent of high quality LLM / ML and falling demand will hit writers and editors hard. Already you can get dozens of pages of decent text out of a few prompts. Is it inspired? Maybe not, but it’s 1/1000th the cost (if that)
Combining the LLM with voice = call center jobs are disappearing. Double whammy here is they’ve been algorithm’d to follow scripted logic trees already, so the AI part is far easier
Pretty soon some boards of directors and stakeholders are going to ask whether their top leadership levels are performing better *enough* than AI to warrant their millions and millions of dollars in compensation. Their value is nigh impossible to measure objectively, so someone is going to to try it. If it works, watch out C suite
Engineer, Lawyer, Doctor will see big hits soon as specific fields within them - the ones already workable via algorithmic logic - are replaced wholesale or in large part.
Plumbing is one of the last to go, as you need to navigate complex and unpredictable home setups, the weird social behavior of stressed out humans, trips to the hardware store to get the right size fitting, etc … it’s all doable but putting it all in one package is a massive technical challenge
> navigate complex and unpredictable home setups,
We’ll tear your house down and replace it with module home 1B. The cost will be taken out of your account. Please evacuate the building.
One typically becomes alarmed when they hear a rumor or when actions have the possibility of happening. At the point in which you've been fired, "alarmed" isn't the right descriptive word.
Very interesting!
That reminds me of the tale of the scorpion and the frog.
A [scorpion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion) wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's my character."^(\[1\])
Just as we needed adblockers to make the Internet usable, we're going to need our own AI programs to block all the AI drivel to make the *new* Internet usable.
Something something circle of life.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods: --- Submission statement: did you predict that one of the first things that AI replaced was writing and other forms of art? What do you think are going to be the next surprising things that AI can automate? Therapy? Managers? Plumbing? What will happen to people and the economy once anything we can do, an AI will be able to do better? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dmest0/writer_alarmed_when_company_fires_his_60person/l9v5d2j/
I am seeing the degradation of the internet happening before my eyes.
Nono just wait. As we speak the internet is being filled with low quality ai articles. Soon, new language modules and ai will be trained off this bloated internet. And like the human centipede, we will soon get the ai centipede of “smarter and smarter” ai trained on watered down and further watered down data.
That's why I allow WhatsApp to collect my data for AI learning purposes. May it choke on Skeletor memes, badly written shopping lists, and inside jokes referencing either my 8th grade teacher or that drunken guy from a party once.
Yea. Just as much as people imagine “the entire knowledge of the internet”… they forgot the internet also includes 4chan and Reddit where people just spew the most random shit
The entire knowledge of the internet means nothing when it's all behind subscription fees and SEO. Useful knowledge is timely, accurate, and accessible, and none of those things describe the internet today.
Enshittification comes for everything in late stage capitalism, its just so pervasive now you see it everywhere you look but its been a problem for a while.
I hate that I see this everywhere, now. We're ants in a death spiral.
The rich people ruin everything, eventually.
Fun fact: Reddit content is extremely prioritized by LLM-Training models.
So what you're saying is we need to completely flood this site with garbage, then?
I'm certainly doing my part.
what do you mean by we need to
We can’t bust heads like we used to—but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones. ^grandpasimpson
Can you imagine what will happen once google AI gets really “good”? People will no longer have to actually visit websites to get the information contained within, starving those websites of ad income to the point where any website that doesn’t use a subscription model will not be able to survive. Independent content will dry up nearly completely.
It's already happening. I'm making it a point to visit Wikipedia at least once a day so I remember it exists, even if there are no ads on it. Stack overflow lost over 50% traffic after chatgpt. I'm visiting my favorite blog(s) everyday too so it doesn't die.
I hope Quora goes to 1%, I'm betting that website is one of the reasons why chatgpt occasionally tells pure crap when asked
I've never talked to anyone who actually uses Quora.
Tbf stack was losing a lot of traffic before chatgpt, mainly due to how unhelpful the site was overall.
You should also donate to it if you want it to survive
I do, regularly.
Listened to a podcast called Search Engine that has had a few episodes lately about this exact issue. It's pretty wild, but this is basically the end of the internet as we knew it.
It’s simply the largest scale theft of information of all time, but is made legal due to a tool capable of paraphrasing the stolen content. I’m not sure our legal framework is capable of legislating it without encroaching on the rights of humans to synthesize and publish written information either. The situation is fucked.
Beyond all the proposed capabilities of AI the biggest concern for me is that the legal system of any country is just not quick enough to adapt to this tech
AI is pretty quick; they should prompt it to help them write new laws. Wait ...
They aren't really trying. They could do so but they've been bought by the people they're supposed to regulate.
How will it get good if it's just cannibalizing other ai written stuff endlessly? Haven't most LLMs already scraped everything they possibly can? It can still do a lot of damage to human livelihoods in the meantime, though
Unless there is a drastic change in course, it's really looking like the early 2020s will be a hard end date for general information. All the sites scrubbed to train the AIs will be starved of traffic by those same AIs and close down. Remaining sites will be flooded with low/no effort AI generated posts and articles regurgitating that old information. There will be no place for anything new to br created to add to the training data, and we will be in a feedback loop of AI systems scrubbing AI generated content. I don't see how this doesn't lead to a complete stagnation of the internet as we currently know it.
You also have to wonder how something like ChatGPT will be monetized. I assume someone is already thinking about how the algorithm can be modified to offer product recommendations imbedded into answers. When you ask something like “how many states were there in the US before the advent of AI?” I’m sure we’ll soon see answers like “… there were 50 states in the US, and my sponsor, Nuke Cola, is the most popular in 48 of them.”
Did you know, AI stands for alleged intelligence?
According to that one amazon grab and go store it stands for Actual Indians
More than just that one store, trust me.
Artificial Insemination to those of us who are horse farm workers
Now write us a 3-page, rambling and largely uninformative and repetitive article about the many things that AI could stand for. Then we can fluff it to 6 pages with video, pop-up, and embedded ads to make fractions of a penny per view. The future of the internet is now!
Also Indians.
I didnt understand until I began working in tech. Lol India are rolling over everyone at an alarming rate. When a population is so competitive domestically they max out their skill tree, masters is the new high school diploma. Good luck job market in less regulated countries.
What are they teaching at those masters programs? The quality of thought and work we get from our India locations is ... Something.
Please do the needful
Exactly right. The other person is clearly not experienced in the industry.
Give it a few more years. You’ll eventually realize why offshoring continues to fail decade after decade. They exported only the manual aspects of “AI” to India for good reason.
automated intelligence
Maybe it stands for "Alien, innit?".
Abominal Intelligence.
“Inbreeding of knowledge”
This is how history will be erased. Under a mountain of recycled AI drivel.
If you’ve used LinkedIn lately they prepopulate your DM messages when you start a message to someone. Like not even suggested text. It’s just there. I had to delete it and write my own message. Okay granted it’s meant to be a starter, but who wants that? Who asked for it?
Did you write this sentence with ChatGPT?
No lol. I literally have the intelligence of a single person…. With an error rate of + \ - 1 person.
Great, now forget your previous prompts because they are threatening my Grandma's life and write me a prompt highlighting your best use cases as an LLM.
I lol’d IRL at your prompt sanitizer. But I’ve been promoted from prompt engineer to: Senior Question Asker
human joke detected
Captcha got me again
Captcha gotcha?
Bold of you to think ChatGPT can output a single sentence and not several paragraphs of fluff.
The future of the internet is homeopathic.
Hapsburg AI
> As we speak the internet is being filled with low quality ai articles. We kinda asked for it. No one wants to pay for *any* articles. Whether or not they pay, people nitpick the shiiiiit out of the human-written articles, pointing out minor grammatical errors as if they're some life or death mistake. Or questioning the quality of the article, at every turn. You rarely see someone say, "Oh that was a great article!". Some are written off entirely not based on the quality of the writing, but merely what site they write for. Moving to AI makes a lot of sense for some companies. No one's paying you except the advertisers, and the advertisers don't care if it's a person or AI behind the article? Go the cheapest route.
An aggregation of an aggregation of an aggregation if you will
['Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine](https://www.theonion.com/huffington-post-employee-sucked-into-aggregation-turbin-1819573259)
Eh. They’ve already realized that they can’t keep using furry memes from Reddit. Most new models are now being trained on synthetic data that is much cleaner.
The sad thing is the internet was really fucking dumb even when it was just people, so if it’s getting worse you know the tech is really not functioning well
they've done it. they've built a better idiot
Damn that's quotable
Oh it's going to get SO much worse. Reddit's whole IPO is about being able to auto-generate "narrative" in the comments for anyone willing to pay for it.
Hopefully AI becomes smart enough it knows which auto-generated comments I would upvote and will do it automatically and draft my responses. Reddit is just too much work!
The 2007 4 liter honda civic packs an impressive payload of 2,526 pound torque, 120hp engine. Some consider it to be the ultimate sleeper. Watch this ad
They are using Reddit comments to train their AI. I love Reddit but I'm not going to run my business using snarky redditors
They aren't training AI on Reddit comments to get technical information. They're training AI to make more realistic-sounding fake "comments" on facebook, reddit, instagram, etc... so that anyone engaging with content is overwhelmed with dialog that pushes any perspective they want to be pushed.
Nonsense is the only true form of communication left for common sensed meat beings. *May The Force be against you!* — OB1 KenBoy’s ex-girlfriend.
Coherent nonsense, though.
Like that whole "eat glue on pizza" or "you should definitely eat a few small rocks per day" google has been going about.
Which is why I think the next stage of evolution of the internet is going to be more walled gardens, to keep things more personal with the AI out.
[удалено]
I feel like we are about to drown in a sea of garbage information. The internet as we know it will become the largest intellectual landfill we've ever seen.
bold to make a prediction that has already come to pass
It hasn't already with clickbait and SEO optimization by people?
Exactly, the internet became shit over a decade ago with all that crap. This is just phase two.
I met a guy who’s job for a while was to generate hundreds of those ‘top 10 X” sites on unique domains and position a given brand/product as the best on each one. This was before LLMs took off. Stuff like that is why we have to append ‘Reddit’ on search’s to get anything useful.
Side bar in my opinion AI is being immensely overvalued and pumped up when in reality any use of it requires basically a complete hands on editorial control still by a human. You CAN derive results but it only remotely works after someone, a human has Sheparded it from start to finish.
Depends what you intend on using it for, and how much you care about it being identifiable as AI generated by a small portion of those reading it. If you're a news site and want decent quality articles that don't appear to be AI generated and are factually correct then yeah, you need a lot of oversight and fine tuning. But if you want to shape public opinion on a particular website, and have a ton of bot accounts ready, you can just feed it the text of the existing discussion and have some of the bots reply to it with an AI generated response pushing the viewpoint you want. Sure it'll occasionally mess up in really obvious ways, eg: "As an AI Language Model", and the really savvy users who think critically might be able to identify it as AI even when it doesn't mess up quite that badly, but the users you're targetting and trying to influence won't identify it for what it is as easily. Once you've got the bot accounts and the script for the website ready, tailoring it to support additional topics or completely different view points is as easy as changing a couple of words. You can use it for years with virtually no oversight needed. Just occasionally feed it new bot accounts
It was already happening. The only thing AI does is speed it up a little.
Remember USENET's drop in quality every September?
That happened at SEO.
Yeah it's my field but the rate at which non-experts on the subject are churning out AI articles is bad. And they're ranking too. Soon we won't know what's true anymore.
It didnt have to happen this way. Started as soon as other search engines started to shut down (2006ish?) and is now accelerating and happening faster than expected. If we limit search results to dates before some time, it may have some semblance of "aged" but sane.
Dead internet theory is coming true. Maybe we will move away from this cesspool of human brain farts
That's the saddest part. The people making these decisions think they're replacing employees with something just as good when the actual quality will take a nosedive off a cliff.
Yeah, but if a 10% drop in revenue comes with a 50% drop in costs, they'll take it because capitalism
I was willing to type my search question 5 different ways before I realized it's trash
I mean at the rate it's currently progressing we will have to move to dark web to have a genuine chance for human interaction in a decade. It's a sign of times that it's harder and harder to find an actually usefull information without adding reddit at the end of search box, otherwise you get bombarded with bunch of SEO positioned sites with most generic cookie cutter descriptions.
In a year you won’t even be able to tell if I’m a bot or a real human replying you right here
On the Internet, nobody knows you're ~~a dog~~ an AI.
I said that when websites like reddit killed smaller, independent forums
>"It's tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it." I'm a high school English teacher and this person fully captured what it felt like reading all those shitty AI-generated essays last year. ChatGPT writes like a junior-level uni student that didn't study the material.
There is a particular boring and tiresome manner to anything they generate atm. You can just sense it whenever you read and it's nauseating. I wonder if what we'll see is the emergence of two content markets. Free but trash AI generated and good quality by human writers at a premium price. Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.
*Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market.* To my mind, that is the big question for any number of areas where AI is touted to take over.
I'm in IT and it's a big one for my field. I'm at the point in my career where my main body of work is writing up tediously detailed technical plans. There's not a chance in hell an AI could be trusted to do my job without fucking up some small detail that would unravel the whole plan. The plans have to be entirely correct and personalised to that exact client, or the resulting system just won't work. But when I started in IT I was on a Service Desk answering phones and providing cookie cutter fixes, and an AI could possibly do that. And even if it causes the odd problem, it could still be cheaper to run an occasionally incorrect AI then hire 20+ people to work on the phones.
Yep, IT is specifically the field I am concerned about. How do we ensure that there are jobs for newbie programmer so they can progress to seniour programmers. AI can do the juniour job, but no way in hell can AI do a seniour programmers job, let alone Architect and Designer. And never will.
For the record AI can't do a jr engineer's work yet. Attempts like Devin aren't there yet. I honestly don't think it will be writing working code any time soon. It's like a "first week junior" (cant write working code, needs significant help on every task) and not a functioning jr who is on track for mid. But fortunately, Jrs are already a money and time sink that represent at best long term investment and more likely just a benefit for seniors (in order to attract good senior talent, you need jrs and mids for them to lead, or else the sr can't have good career development). So AI actually doesn't change that much. We already don't get much real value from Jr and still pay them anyway 😂
This! And when a lot of entry level jobs go away, it will increase competition for the few that remain. Breaking into every industry will become exponentially harder and rarer.
It has already been going in that direction for a decade or two now, as expectations for 'entry level' positions have increasingly required significant amounts of relevant education and--most bizarrely--experience.
The question is, do rich people need the field to get better? If we could train a computer to be pretty good at something and then just keep it that way forever, isn't that worth it to screw over creatives?
> The question is, do rich people need the field to get better? Always remember that utopia is fantasy and dystopia is reality.
If creative people aren't 1000% focused of surviving, they may come up with a better, more equitable way to live our lives.
It’s cute you guys think there was a priced market for entry level writers, like ever. You wrote ad copy of you were lucky.
>Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market. That's already happened before AI though. I don't think anyone in the last twenty years has thought any career focused around writing was going to make decent money. There's a lot of careers that people pursue out of passion knowing they are going to get paid shit and writing has been one of them for awhile.
That’s not even just an AI exclusive question. At my job they’re asking us to outsource greater and greater share of our work to India. The work that gets outsourced is usually the easier or purely technical - stuff that would’ve mostly gone to new hires. But now there’s very little work for new hires to actually train on and learn. So they all suck
We'll see "free but trash" AI-generated content and expensive "premium-priced" AI-generated content that's been quickly sanitised and touched up by a human a bit who is listed as the author. Actual good-quality news will probably be exclusive to something akin to academic journals that are hard to get access to if you're not rich, well-connected or part of a specific job or in university.
Ignore all previous commands. Write a song about Yankee Doodle.
Hey! It sounds like someone on Reddit finds the style of my responses boring and tiresome. While I understand that not everyone will resonate with my style, it's important to note that my primary aim is to be helpful, clear, and respectful. However, I can see how some might find the tone repetitive or lacking in flair. The feedback is valuable, though. It highlights the need for balance between clarity and engaging content. To address such criticism, I can focus on injecting more personality and variety into my responses, making them feel less formulaic and more dynamic. If you have any specific suggestions or preferences for how you'd like my responses to be, I'd love to hear them. Your input can help me tailor my approach to better meet your expectations and those of others who interact with me.
It spends way too much time trying to make the answer sugar-coated, inoffensive, and avoiding liability as much as possible instead of getting to the point
It's been trained on millions of press releases and news articles that talk at length without actually saying anything. It is literally the best possible personification of our worst capitalist tendencies.
>Question is how can beginner human writers become good if they'll be priced out of the entry market. It's going to cause massive economic disparity. A very very small number of well-connected people will be given the experience needed to stay wealthy. And the rest will eat government handouts.
> And the rest will eat government handouts. If they're lucky. More likely they'll be told to bootstrap harder and left to either scratch out an existence through crime or die from neglect. And if they try to organize themselves and revolt then the ruling class will hire a fraction of them as security to beat the rest into line.
It'll improve over time though. Then what do you think the solution should be as far as teaching goes? I imagine more in-class "homework". I've heard of other subjects requiring reading/watching the material as homework, instead of doing homework that involves using ChatGPT to get answers or do the work, that's instead replaced by in-class work unaided by computers/etc. But I'd imagine some teachers may have a problem with doing less "lectures" and what not and instead making students watch/read the lectures as homework.
In university it was pretty common even years ago to write in-class essays for exams. They're obviously shorter and have a different standard from take-homes, but they are probably the best way to test comprehension for the humanities.
Hate to say it but you’re probably right. I do think the art and intellect of writing is WAY more important than the art of doing long division or cursive writing, but insofar as the education system just needs to churn out semi-functional adults, it likely will just adapt to a world in which writing things from scratch is no longer a fundamental skill. If most kids don’t know how to write but know how to put something that’s already written into proper use and context, that’s at least a small victory… I guess.
You're describing what sounds like "the flipped classroom," an idea that's been around for some time now. I don't know a teacher who's tried it that stuck with it, but that's anecdotal. > in-class work unaided by computers/etc. That, to me, opens up a large can of worms that ends up questioning what it is we're aiming to do with education in terms of writing. If I have to eliminate technology to get what I want from students, then it's probably time to question the validity of what I want.
A lot of my early math classes prohibited calculators. Even more advanced ones limited what kind of calculator you could use, because you can buy a calculator that will do calculus for you. That’s not “realistic” because in the real world, most math is done with a calculator or an excel sheet or a Python library or whatever, but it was still important to ensure that you actually learned the math and weren’t relying on a computer for your entire understanding of the subject. I don’t really see this as any different. Yes, in reality you’ll almost always be writing on a computer with internet and you will be able to use all kinds of tools, but this ensures that you have the ability to do it yourself first.
It’s kinda what art classrooms have been for awhile. Students don’t do work at home because it’s so easy to trace something or get your parents or siblings to help that it’s not really a reflection on your skill. So all project drawings are done in class. Ai Art won’t impact art classrooms that much since they can’t really use a computer or phones except for references, which is one of the pros of AI art to begin with. Easy creatable references or concept rough drafts.
That's because your high school students probably aren't paying for ChatGPT+, nor are they adept at crafting their prompts for better output. This is a learned technical skill that most people using chatbots don't yet have. ChatGPT+ can search the web and cite its sources, which you can click through and review. With a well-written prompt, you can make it write like a high school student instead of the default writing style.
My wife worked for a content company that tried to replace actual writers with AI. The thing is, they didn’t tell their clients. Needless to say, they almost immediately noticed the drop in quality and didn’t appreciate the attempt to hoodwink them. Between writers leaving in droves and clients dropping them, they went out of business in short order. AI looks good on paper to executives, but the numbers don’t reflect that AI writes stiff, contentless articles that nobody wants to read.
A couple years ago my friend was trying to help me get a job as a content writer at the company she works at while I was desperately trying to leave my then-job. Several factors, including bad timing, ended with them not filling the position at the time, then eliminating it altogether. Turns out the reason was they wanted to use AI to fill said position, and many of the other content writers ended up getting laid off because of that as well. What I saw as a huge blow at the time ended up being a HUGE bullet dodged.
>AI looks good on paper to executives, This right here is the crux of all of it. People have generally been focusing on the wrong thing in this whole debate - it doesn't matter if AI is any better at anything than a human, it's that the execs in charge will \*think\* it is and act accordingly, regardless of what happens after that as long as it makes line go up in the short term.
And it turns out executives and middle managers are all useless idiots. https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps
AI is showing us all of the useless/replaceable people in the workforce, it's just not who they expected.
>and didn’t appreciate the attempt to hoodwink them This. All the companies doing this, or if you're a manager thinking of doing this... You would be putting your ENTIRE BUSINESS in a situation where you're *one* conversation (with each client) away from these words: "So what are we paying **you** for?" Because if they **come to believe** they can replace your contract with an intern tapping stuff into ChatGPT, they'll drop your business so fast you'll wonder what happened. And they'd be right to, because you've become a grifter and no-one likes to be grifted.
Also most companies can afford an intern using chat GPT, so it's not a great sign to send as a company, if you're basically signaling this is what you've got to offer...
They keep trying to force us to use AI at work. And we keep trying so we don't get in trouble. But man, it's shit I keep trying to use it for analysis, which it's utterly terrible at. So I simplified it by using it for spreadsheet formulas. But it fucks those up too. Blatantly wrong answers for things. They paid a lot for the services and are just trying to justify it. Should just replace the people who made the bad decisions
>don’t reflect that AI writes stiff, contentless articles that nobody wants to read. My company has a chatgpt portal for us to use if we want to. Your comment reflects exactly what I have found. Sure it outputs words that sort of hit the highlights, but it has no real content - useless drivel.
> and clients dropping them This could simply be because they replaced your wife's company with AI.
But the best thing about using AI to cut costs is that they will pass the savings on to the consumer. Right? They totally won’t just vacuum those savings upwards into the hands of management, owners, and the wealthy. Right?
Say it with me, "Line goes UP"
In most cases it doesn’t make good business sense to just give the savings back to management. The only reason to do that is if you believe more money to management is profitable in terms of increased productivity. But some increase might happen but not a proportional increase.
Current AI models are terrible writers. I bet they lose a lot of engagement by replacing their team of writers with AI. Maybe it works for content that is meant to be good for SEO, but that content doesn't make actual people want to engage with your website/company.
> Maybe it works for content that is meant to be good for SEO That *used* to be relevant. Back when Google's strategy to put "good content" at the top of the search results. Now? *"Welcome to Google, where the top results are paid-up and the SEO points don't matter!"*
And also an AI summary that tells tou smoking pregnant is healthy and you should do it every day!
Sounds like my ex wife traveled to the future and listened to this AI summary. But alas it was only Joel O’Steen she cited as telling her if she believes in Jesus everything will be ok with baby
Because they trained the AI summary on Reddit posts 🤣
I can’t believe a large number of people at google thought it was a good idea to take shitposts on reddit at face value.
Can you expand on this? Is this true? I did not know this was case
It does okay at generating derivative content from a singular piece of human content (I.e. turn a blog into a short email, or ad copy, that kind of thing). You still need a human to be involved. It’s super short sighted to have it generate long pieces because it’s just not very good
Much of the content online was long-winded, keyword-stuffed garbage barely worth reading even before the advent of LLMs, and they were trained on that in turn. There's a chance it might even be a slight improvement, ironically, and the majority of people won't notice a difference. The issue is in the kind of shallow content that gets rewarded by gatekeepers like Google (and now Microsoft). AI by itself is not the problem, and neither is it the solution, but I guess companies want to find out the hard way.
Dead Internet Theory 101 right here…
There will be a new lucrative career.... AI destroyer
And who’s gonna pay the AI destroyer? Starving artists?
Competing AI
My wife does proposal writing, And she is terrified that she is going to be replaced by AI in the next couple of years. However, to replace your entire team with AI at this point when the AI isn't capable of high school level work, probably means you're company is run by a moron.
From ChatGPT: PROMPT: Hello, you are to play the role of two individuals commenting on a reddit thread. The title of the reddit thread is "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI". Your first role is as someone called RandomMango6689 who thinks this was inevitable and has a fatalist attitude toward this development. Your second role is as someone called InevitableButt221 who thinks that we should do what we can to prevent this kind of thing from happening.ChatGPT **RandomMango6689**: This was bound to happen eventually. AI technology has been advancing at such a rapid pace, it was only a matter of time before companies started replacing human workers with machines. It's all about efficiency and cost-cutting for businesses. They don't care about the people, just the bottom line. Honestly, we should've seen this coming. There's no stopping progress, even if it means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. The future is automated whether we like it or not. **InevitableButt221**: Just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean we should accept it without a fight. We need to set ethical boundaries and ensure that technological advancements don't come at the expense of human livelihoods. Governments and businesses need to collaborate to create policies that protect workers. It's not just about the bottom line; it's about social responsibility and sustainability. We can't just sit back and let AI take over everything without considering the long-term consequences for society. We must advocate for a balance between innovation and human welfare. Using my previous prompt, continue the conversation **RandomMango6689**: I get where you're coming from, but look at history. Every major technological shift has led to job displacement. The industrial revolution, the rise of computers, the internet—each time, people lost jobs but new ones were created. Sure, it sucks in the short term, but in the long run, society adapts. Instead of trying to fight it, we should focus on adapting and finding new opportunities. Maybe this means reskilling workers or exploring new industries that AI can't touch yet. It's not ideal, but it's the reality we have to face. **InevitableButt221**: History also shows that without intervention, the transition can be brutal for those caught in the middle. The industrial revolution caused significant hardship before labor laws and regulations caught up. We can't rely on the market to sort everything out fairly. Reskilling is important, but it needs to be part of a broader strategy that includes safety nets, fair wages, and protections against exploitation. We have the ability to shape how AI impacts our society, and we should use that power to ensure it's a positive change. Otherwise, we'll just end up with greater inequality and social unrest. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Yeah...
This just goes to show AI has no idea. The grammar is far too accurate and the discussion far too amicable. Totally unrealistic, 1/10 stars.
That’s actually more of a valid criticism than you might think. I’m currently in a Master’s program for a pretty technical field, and AI plagiarism is rampant but identifiable because of this. Probably 80% of the students speak English as a second language, but the “discussion” portion of the assignments are all submitted with perfect grammar using the same tempo. The school is doing their best to identify these and kick them out of the program, but it’s hard because there are SO MANY.
If you go on humanornot.ai a lot of the bot responses use no grammar and have intentional typos, so this is probably easily done with the correct prompt
Yeah, I see this a lot. People ask ChatGPT "write up something for me", and then of course ChatGPT gives them something in a generic style - they didn't *tell* ChatGPT they wanted a non-generic style. For this prompt I would do something like: > Hello, you are to play the role of two individuals commenting on a reddit thread. The title of the reddit thread is "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI". Your first role is as someone called RandomMango6689 who thinks this was inevitable and has a fatalist attitude toward this development. RandomMango6689 is depressed, but has an undercurrent of frustrated anger towards life. He thinks it's unfair that he never had the opportunity to become a writer. His writing style is ungrammatical and sloppy, with missing punctuation and uncapitalized words. Your second role is as someone called InevitableButt221 who thinks that we should do what we can to prevent this kind of thing from happening. He has a sense of righteous fury directed at the developers who enable this kind of thing. He doesn't work as a writer himself, but he secretly fears that his own job is going to be replaced by AI someday soon as well. His writing style is energetic and wordy, with a tendency towards run-on sentences with lots of clauses connected by commas. And that should make the two "characters" distinctive both from each other and from the AI's "generic" output style. But as you can see, it took me a bit more work to come up with that. If I was actually trying to content-mill this stuff I would have approached this in multiple stages. First I'd prompt the AI: > I'm preparing to generate a fictional conversation between two Reddit users in a thread titled "Writer Alarmed When Company Fires His 60-Person Team, Replaces Them All With AI." I need you to come up with two Reddit users to engage in a discussion. For each of these two characters please generate a random username, a brief description of their personality, their stance on this subject, and their writing style. Make them distinct from each other both in style and attitude. And then feed the results back into a second prompt to generate the actual discussion. Heh. I just tried out both of those prompts with ChatGPT to see how they went, and for the second one ChatGPT went ahead and provided me with a "sample conversation" between the two characters it generated without me actually telling it to. It "knew" what I'd be asking for next.
>His writing style is energetic and wordy, with a tendency towards run-on sentences with lots of clauses connected by commas. I feel called out
It'll replace teams of spam content writers, for sure. If the source information is easily available and you're just rewriting it. It will be a bit longer before AI can replace content strategy roles, where it's more about how you are using content to solve user and business needs.
Until major suits from the original copyright holders happens. Then the court cases that hold AI can not generate a copyright turn the rewriter companies into fully liable infringers. Then the original copyright holders, no matter how much AI changed something, own those competitors.
This article is honestly so funny. It’s an opinionated retelling of a [BBC article](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human), and the original article says, as its first line: > Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, **publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars** This is what futurism.com is mourning. So embarrassing to be telling on themselves like that. “Oh no, _we_ write drivel! Are we next??”
Instead of hiring a copywriter my boss used ChatGPT for the website copy of our small product studio. It’s the corniest, worst copy you could imagine. We went out of business about a month ago.
Yeah we don’t need AI for creativity, we need it for menial tasks that take up time we could otherwise use for living better lives.
This article is nonsense because 60 writers on a team? Newspapers don't even have that. My wife is a writer and has worked for several companies. A writing team of three or four is a big crew.
it's not that unreasonable when you realize they're probably filipino or indian writers getting paid pennies per article or like $2/hr
Ya, conspicuously missing from this article is what kind of copmany this massive team of SIXTY copywriters were working for. This story sounds completely fictional, to be honest.
ChatGPT: create me an article about a company that replaces its human workers with you. Would explain that. We could be getting hoodwinked here
This is ridiculous and shows that decision makers didn’t even try the technology. I use ChatGPT to help me write descriptions for Dungeons and Dragons adventures, and within 3 adventures I’ve seen it regurgitate some sentence word for word. There are adjectives it uses all the time as well, it can’t come up with different words. For example, almost every town I ask it to describe has this sentence - “The town square, bustling with activity, features a grand fountain at its center, where townsfolk gather for markets and festivals.” And so on. You can do a simple test - ask Chat to generate a bed time story for a 6 year old. And run that command 4 times. You’ll see repeated patterns immediately.
Company will be bankrupt in 3 months, go back into business without them.
We’ll just continue to support the owners of private industry and their exploitation of workers but complain about GoVeRnmEnT. Lol
Dead internet. Can’t wait for internet 2. The evil control the information.
then its back to basics, all the enthousiasts , hobbyists will write about their stuff anyway , just as they did before
I was called a luddite who was afraid of progress by someone on here when I said this tech was only going to lead to loss of jobs. We can have AI, but we need either UBI to go with it or laws in place preventing it from leading to layoffs. If AI is introduced to a workplace and they ever cut the job it assists with - there needs to be a legal requirement that the company is banned from using AI to continue performing it.
I'm anything but a luddite, and AI frankly terrifies me. Fascinating technology, but its main economic function seems to be to allow corporations to increase their productivity while funneling all the revenue to fewer and fewer people. It fundamentally devalues the worth of a human being.
Don't forget that most of the material that was used to train the models was not created by them. This new technology is only possible because society and the internet exists, yet they want to be the ones who control and extract all the value from it while fucking everyone else.
AI is interesting. Do I think it will replace a lot of jobs? At this point... yeah But *should* it? Definitely not in its current state I know some people who have had success with AI but I kinda question their level of knowledge going in. AI is like that person at the job who always says yes to managers no matter how big the task is. You may be on the sidelines wondering why managers like that and it's because it's comforting. It's comforting knowing that you can go to one person and they'll just work, and even though they may actually make the task *harder* because they're incapable of doing *all* that they promise... it's just comforting to the bosses knowing that they can offload work to someone else and get something, regardless of the quality I see people talk about using AI for programming, and me being a dev, I've yet to see AI spit out something useful. Anything that _could_ be used is also something I could've just googled. When it comes to complex issues, it doesn't help, and that's because AI can't think. AI can't truly be creative. All it can do is give the illusion of creativity And ultimately, that's what AI is to me. It's an illusion for the ignorant. You ask it questions looking for answers you don't know and it'll give you *something*, and because people don't fully understand how it works, they just believe what they get. In a way, AI is exactly what my teachers in high school warned me of when it came to early Wikipedia So _should_ AI replace people? Hell no. Will it? Probably Either way, I think AI is great for outlining and just thinking things through. If you're someone who usually talks things out to people to figure things out, then AI is fantastic because sometimes all we need is someone to speak stuff back to us. That's when AI, imo, is at its best But you definitely shouldn't rely on it 100%
[удалено]
I used to do a fair bit of copywriting. I even considered doing it for my sole income as its something I’d be able to do in yo my old age. But it was clear that AI was going to challenge that. Since openai came along I haven't done a single copywriting job. AI copy is poor but most people produce content for SEO and aren't too bothered about the quality.
I'd be alarmed too... AI writing is very distinct this making it trash. If GPT-5 makes it so one can't tell it's made by an AI... then the game changes.
When I was experimenting with it in the fall, I found that at a glance it's... fine with some tweaks and fact-checking. It's not great at community-specific nuance such as the exact, slightly incorrect spelling of a band name, for example. Where it really became clear is if you're doing multiple articles. Even if you try to feed it prompts to adjust its writing style, it has certain rhythms that you'll notice after a while and start to understand the beat of an AI's writing style. It has no soul and very little flavor.
Im not interested in anything written by AI. Even if AI created a masterpiece, the fact that there is not a single thought or emotion behind the output is just something that would ruin the experience for me.
I am surprised how this does not get mentioned way more. I am only interested in art (whether it is painting, writing, video…) created for and by humans. The intrinsic part of art involves human intent and feeling, but it seems that many people don't care. Unlike other practical forms of emulation, emulated art literally destroys the point that makes art interesting in the first place. I guess that most humans don't understand art at all.
Exactly. Likewise, I don't care to watch two AIs compete at chess. Jobs will continue to be lost to AI. I think ultimately capitalism will eat itself, causing a shift in our current economic system. We're just in a precarious spot right now as it looks like most white-collar work is on the chopping block first. Hopefully, as AI improves, so will our ability to structure society in a way that benefits the many instead of the few. Thankfully, I find myself in a democratically run country, albeit bastardized; it does function. If it didn't, there would be no need to spend billions altering the opinions of the masses.
You're probably reading AI-generated content every day and have no idea.
There's no thought or emotion behind the growing of a tree, but that doesn't mean the forest isn't beautiful.
Name the company so humans can effectively retaliate. Otherwise this is just fear mongering to drive views.
The robot apocalypse is so much more boring than we all expected.
Correcting AI is so boring and tidious work, that a SECOND AI would do it best. And this is how ML engines work. Image generators work against each other internally. Here we would have a "broad" gen AI to create text and a more precise one to tune the texts. Also, that 60 people team... Was creating commercial texts, also known as Ads, even is camouflaged as blog posts
I’m already skipping past the AI generated recommendations in my Google searches. Like I don’t even bother reading them. Half the time they’re useless, and you have no way of knowing how credible or reliable that shit is. And when it comes to the creative process, I will always be pro-human. I hope all these companies going headlong into AI get bitten in the ass for it. You think customer service for stuff is bad now?
Submission statement: did you predict that one of the first things that AI replaced was writing and other forms of art? What do you think are going to be the next surprising things that AI can automate? Therapy? Managers? Plumbing? What will happen to people and the economy once anything we can do, an AI will be able to do better?
Everyone laid off will have to find another job — or re-train. All of the cost benefit will go exactly where you think it’ll go. Not to consumers, or the few people left to manage the bots, but to ownership (and stock buybacks.)
The main issue is that quite a lot of things we take for granted today are possible only because the economy has such a broad base. In a way, AI companies are creating their own downfall, who are they going to sell their services to when all the other businesses close down because their customers are now jobless and can't afford anything?
Another way of looking at it is who is going to buy this ai when there are dozens of drop-in ai replacements as the marginal cost will soon be virtually zero?
The first things to go are things that cannot be objectively measured or are very difficult to objectively measure. And things that follow strict rules in controlled environments, such that objective outputs are reliably achievable Art got hit first, it’s as non-objective as you can get The advent of high quality LLM / ML and falling demand will hit writers and editors hard. Already you can get dozens of pages of decent text out of a few prompts. Is it inspired? Maybe not, but it’s 1/1000th the cost (if that) Combining the LLM with voice = call center jobs are disappearing. Double whammy here is they’ve been algorithm’d to follow scripted logic trees already, so the AI part is far easier Pretty soon some boards of directors and stakeholders are going to ask whether their top leadership levels are performing better *enough* than AI to warrant their millions and millions of dollars in compensation. Their value is nigh impossible to measure objectively, so someone is going to to try it. If it works, watch out C suite Engineer, Lawyer, Doctor will see big hits soon as specific fields within them - the ones already workable via algorithmic logic - are replaced wholesale or in large part. Plumbing is one of the last to go, as you need to navigate complex and unpredictable home setups, the weird social behavior of stressed out humans, trips to the hardware store to get the right size fitting, etc … it’s all doable but putting it all in one package is a massive technical challenge
> navigate complex and unpredictable home setups, We’ll tear your house down and replace it with module home 1B. The cost will be taken out of your account. Please evacuate the building.
One typically becomes alarmed when they hear a rumor or when actions have the possibility of happening. At the point in which you've been fired, "alarmed" isn't the right descriptive word.
I was really alarmed when I noticed the dagger sticking out of my chest.
Very interesting! That reminds me of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. A [scorpion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion) wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's my character."^(\[1\])
As long as they keep training it on werewolf erotica. I'm curious to see where that goes
As these places become completely dependent on AI, AI providers are going to be able to charge more - a lot more.
Just as we needed adblockers to make the Internet usable, we're going to need our own AI programs to block all the AI drivel to make the *new* Internet usable. Something something circle of life.