Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin.

A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the reduction in quality and switches vendors; new entrants underbid the market further; firms start to differentiate on quality at a price premium, further eroding low end margins; the money saved on this is invested in new roles for to ensure marketing quality control.

The error is to believe that a given state of the world is static. It never is. Every day, millions of very smart and capable humans apply their minds to figure out how to make money by selling a product or service that satisfies. And everyday, what it takes to satisfy customers changes a little bit.

Posts like this drop all the context that led to such a job even being possible in the first place.

As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.

wait until it starts training on its own output

and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam

With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary

To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?

I both strongly agree (“content is a plague”) and strongly disagree (artisans, even digital ones, make society better).

I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today.

That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.

> It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.

More likely outcome is that people will consume even more content. Because it will be more addictive and tailor made for them.

Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.

But is the idea of "content" really all that?

When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI.

But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say.

Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".

Context is certainly important. Atleast for people who lived through times when art took human effort and was rare.

But what if upcoming generations see it just as something antique? Old concept thats dead because their concept of art/media has always been tailor made and generated for them.

Also who says the AI wont also generate the context. You will get some medival music with authors backround and everything. You might not even know the person didnt exist. The way AI is developing now nobody will care about AI just making things up on the way.

Live performance hasn't gone away. I live outside a village (in Ireland) with around 1000 residents and there's live music in one or other of the pubs 4 nights (or more) a week

Irish trad scene is unique in this regard. There are Irish trad sessions everywhere in the world (I was able to visit some in quite faraway places like Moscow, Istanbul or Santiago de Chile), and in Ireland there are a few in every village, and then some.

But that's just it, Irish trad. Frenchies have something similar with balfolk, but not so epic, and while there are other strong European folk scenes, none of them is on the scale of Irish trad. Alas.

Source: I play jigs and reels for fun.

It's not just trad though really - there's a bit of trad (and a fair few ballads) in my local pub but you could also hear pretty much any popular song from the last 50 years.

(... for anyone who's curious - "trad" usually means traditional dance music like jigs and reels, "ballads" mostly means Irish-y sounding songs sung in English)

Although circleofavshape's observation applies equally well to my part of the US. Even very tiny towns around here have live music multiple nights per week.

> I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked

Probably not.

If I like some content, why would I care it it is "fake"?

The past 30 years have resulted in an erosion of in-person experiences. People used to be social: clubs, bowling, movies, whatever. Now people even work from home.

People prefer to be in their houses on their computers and to interact with “others” (people, bots, videos of people doing things) from their favorite chair.

I don’t think in-person experiences are coming back any time soon unless there is some sort of major cultural shift that nobody could predict. A lot has been written about this trend.

The problem with in-person experiences is other people. If we could solve that problem, the experience would be greatly improved. :)

> artisans, even digital ones, make society better

The word "content," when applied to digital media, usually carries some implications of artlessness. Content is something that fills a container.

Music that moves you and changes you is art, and is unlikely to be automated any time soon. Music that plays in an elevator (or fills the silence in an elevator) is Content, and is highly likely to be automated soon.

A lot of 'content' to me is worse than elevator music. That at least tries to somewhat improve my experience (though you may not like it). A piece of 'content' as an intro to a recipe is there primarily to make the page longer and contain keywords for SEO purposes, but it makes my experience worse.

I don’t know about that. The way I hear it used, every YouTube video is content, even the very good stuff. HBO and Netflix are content. NBA Games are “live content”. It’s just a catch all for digital media

People do use it that way, which is a real shame because -- like the commenter you're replying to -- "content" to me implies something inferior.

Well to the suits at ESPN, HBO, Netflix, and YouTube, those video files are indeed content. They are the contents of their platform.

But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.

Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.

Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.

> if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense

This. And when I hear creative types use the word "content" to refer to their own work, I feel pity for them. And am much less inclined to check their work out, because it it seems that their mindset is to produce a product rather than art.

Especially if they refer to their audience as "consuming" their "content".

> How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creator?

I can tell you don't use TikTok and don't understand how quickly the trends adapt and depend on human understanding of hyper niche cultural trends.

Nothing about GPT indicates it can engage in this without heavy human interference.

At most it'd at least depend on being able to replicate human generated videos on prompt (which it's far from doing without horror show uncanny valley but sure... one day eventually in the indefinite future, which is the least interesting problem) let alone all the niche cultural stuff... and critically reputation signals already strongly required. Humans are deeply intwined in all of these, with automation playing a marginal optimisation role not anything near replacement.

Cheap imitations will remain a novelty for a long time. Just like how deepfakes and GPT news articles were oversold as a serious problem in the near term but haven't borne out beyond niche failures and journalist FUD posting.

If anything, Tik Tok trends are perfectly imperfect, which makes them feel more like what can be generated from any 13B or better LLM.

People are bad at modeling and scale. LLMs don't suffer from that, but the way people interact with LLMs obviously doesn't indicate they can conceptualize what a billion people interacting with the same model with the same parameters and having a billion unique experiences implies.

How we interface with LLMs is a deceptive reflection, and if you don't recognize the depth in them, you'll be caught off guard when you fall in, or something larger than you expect comes out.

It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). > Well, and because people love it, many will still be passionate musicians / writers / language savants. They just won't make a living out of it. And thats ok. The intrinsic motivation to do those things is recreational and the focus on monetization contributed to the "content is plague" trend in the first place.

Musicians have also had incomes become way less evenly distributed, after recording started one star could reach millions, before that you needed to see a musician live to hear music. Tim Hartford did a good pod cast mentioning this.

> My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I am not sure I agree with this. The barrier to entry to selling your own music (streaming, youtube) is so low that we see more and more people giving it a shot. Maybe they are not professionnel with a title, but they are musicians. Sure, maybe there are less orchestra performers but there are far more (smaller) groups to choose from. Did they really disappear?

I think that's because for most, it's moved from being a profession to a hobby. Many hobbyists dream of turning their hobby into a profession, and work towards that, yet for most it remains a hobby.

> but they are musicians

I think the GP meant professional musicians.

Recorded audio didn't replace the musicians creating music. It replaced the ones playing it - for example the pianists at the restaurants or the clubs.

In a modern Casablanca remake Bogart wouldn't say "Play it, Sam", he would just select a song from his Spotify playlist and hit play.

In a similar fashion, you don't need to hire a full band for a wedding. A single DJ will provide enough entertainment.

I would say there will probably be more demand for live music since at some point YouTube music will probably have a channel that just makes up music on the fly based on what you like. So your computer can produce any sound or mashup that you want. But there will never be ai live music in the same way as people unless you have undetectable robot people.

This "content" industry is a very recent phenomenon.

It used to be that if you wanted your voice to be heard, you had to either have something unique to say, or some unique way to say it.

We'll likely revert to the status quo - only people whose content will be consumed online will be original voices.

There's also what society values. While I'm no art historian, it looks that after the invention of the camera, painters shifted to different styles that were not replicable by cameras (e.g. landscapes and portraits to abstract), and high society began valuing the new art, while continuing to value the old, the new shifted aesthetics.

I think that as we're progressing into a world where anyone can press a few buttons and get a dubstep banger in 30 seconds, culture will place higher value on different types of expression and experiences.

"We went to see a band play an entirely improvised performance, capacity was limited to 20 people and all recording devices were confiscated upon entry."

'Content' is going to be so much better when it's written by gpt ... lol.

ChatGPT has the answers it has because of all that content people have been posting online. What happens when people stop posting and there is nothing to further train the ai? Ai doesn't have intrinsic value, it has to be trained on something

It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.

Something something 100 monkeys with a typewriter? I'm expecting some margin of error introduced into these models that produces a surreal fever dream era of AI generated content on the internet.

There doesn't need to be new material. Just mechanism to segregate between good and bad and that will always exist if humans are interesting.

LLMs use reinforcement learning once they have a base understanding of words. It's like how modern chess engines don't analyze games, just play against themselves.

LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer

That works because chess is a closed world. Without input from outside, two LLMs training against each other would most likely become raving lunatics -- just as two humans locked in a dark cell together would do.

> LLMs use reinforcement learning > LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer

You're describing RLHF (Reinforcement learning with Human Feedback) used by ChatGPT, right.

I wouldn't say that LLMs use it, but RLHF is used to create a higher level model on top of a LLM.

> A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change.

Only if you focus on long-term macroeconomics, and ignore the impact of microeconomics on real people. Today, this writer is out of a major chunk of their income.

Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.

It’s the same sentiment as being angry the printing press is robbing scribes of their job.

It just might be that technology advances and society no longer has the same need for your skill and you need to adapt.

The printing press was an upgrade, the FTA is a cost cutting downgrade.

If I drive a luxury sports car and I lose my job, I might get rid of the luxury car and switch to a compact. Both are good enough, one is cheaper. That’s the way the world works.

It’s not nice to hear the results of a bot are good enough when you know your results are better. Tough luck.

As someone who manages our own brand's social media, and just started using ChatGPT, I was surprised ChatGPT could provide with captions that are pretty good and moderately inspiring. Try it out yourself. Definitely a timesaver and cost-reduction

Creative writing output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5(and it gets even better with targeted refinement). People say 60% as good or whatever but don't be too surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

I don't think it matters if AI is a better writer. From the post:

"[...] although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin."

So yeah if we consumers of content are lucky we won't see much of a difference, but the web has been in a break-neck race to the bottom for over a decade now. Companies that pay for the creation of content have and will continue to pay as little as they can as long as the content generates clicks. Given that 27.7% of those clicks come from bot farms[1] (and that number is rising) we already see a huge market that's just bots writing content and monetizing it for other bots. We humans will get to sift through that to try to find real content.

[1] https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/b...

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