America Already Has an AI Underclass | Hacker News Reader

America Already Has an AI Underclass

theatlantic.com

30 pointsjdkee21 comments

Verbose garbage. The essence is: "low skilled workers don't earn much money."

This is basically a Marxist criticism: the owner class of AI systems take advantage of the proletariat class "AI raters." The classes are not equal in renumeration so this is bad.

Since they seem to imply the definition of 'underclass' means 'people that earn less than their employers,' America had an 'AI underclass' as soon as RLHF started being used.

No solutions are offered to this 'problem,' just some bashing of corporations to make the audience feel good at having someone to be angry at.

This author has taken the AI topic du jour and ran with it, see:

"ChatGPT Is Already Obsolete" - story is basically 'novel tech improves quickly!' "Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend" - story is basically 'LLMs can be used to make propaganda!'

Seems to have worked at making you angry.

Well, triggering the embedded anger at the world anyway

Sorry grubhub doesn’t deliver all the answers and you have to dig at the world yourself some

Not angry, just frustrated at journalists who care more about stoking outrage than improving the world. Journalists are meant to do the digging for their readers. If they claim something in society isn't good, I don't think it's unreasonable that they should be expected to at least look into proposed solutions.

Journalists need to get paid. Newspapers made a huge mistake back in '96 and went online for free. So now we're trained to think of news as free and ad-supported. But to be ad-supported they need clicks, and humans click more on things that make us angry/outraged/sad/etc. So journalists have to write articles that cause those emotions in order to get paid.

It's all shit, but blaming the journos isn't the solution. If we want to get "real" journalism, we have to pay for it. We need to become the customer so the advertiser isn't and the journos can go back to being the watchdogs on democracy that we desperately need.

I honestly think the causation is the reverse: people refuse to pay for low quality journalism because they can do a quick search on free sites and figure the story themselves.

If journalists want to get paid, they need to produce something that people really value. It's not up to the consumer to pay for shitty news in the hope that their sacrifice improves it long term.

Plenty of journalists are now self-publishing and getting subscription revenue because they produce content people want. This author choose to play the mainstream media game instead, and so they choose to produce click-bait. No one forced their hand. I don't think blaming Journalists is the solution: the solution is to support good journalists and push back against low quality click bait like this.

This is also true. Except that "figuring out the story for themselves" from primary sources is more challenging than the average reader is capable of ;)

And yes, I believe the future will be self-publishing, but it's a hard road for journos compared to being paid to be in a newsroom. And yes, ultimately it's up to us as readers to resolve this, probably by paying for our news.

The only problem with this solution is that people tend to pay for "news" that agrees with their opinions. There's an obvious financial incentive to pander to people's prejudices here.

I think that problem exists for any solution. Whoever funds the media is going to prefer information that supports their beliefs, whether that is governments or citizens or advertisers. Citizen funded media results in the least centralization of power, so is better imo.

True, much better than relying on billionaires to fund the news as a charity, as we do now :eyeroll:

I wasn’t aware of this, I thought most of the funding was from government/corporations and ads? Which news orgs are charities?

Washington Post is the obvious one - owned by Jeff Bezos and there are indications it changed its editorial stance to be more pro-billionaire since he took it over. It's not exactly charity if the owner uses it to influence government tax policy to your benefit ;)

Seems like a critique of capitalism if you don't like journalists going the optimal way to get paid

See https://archive.is/5zl1U

What they are saying is that AI is not so magical. There is a significant amount of grunt work required to get non garbage/obscene results to queries. What happens when the AI companies need to start making $$? Is this the Internet bubble again?

If you don't want the job, quit

I feel like we should be able to do better than "accept arbitrary exploitation or starve" but I dunno.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com