I Promoted AI for Years and Automated Myself Out of a Job
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Also, large part of what used to be done with stock images. No need to search for the perfect stock image when you can just create it.
You know graphic designers who instead of designing would pay someone else to do it? That sounds like a cook who serves food bought from another restaurant or a carpenter who sells furniture bought from a store.
Maybe there’s detail missing from your explanation (perhaps you meant they outsource illustrations?), but if you’re paying someone else to do the core of your job can you still stay that’s your profession instead of being a middleman?
Exact example I was thinking of: graphic designer does social media post for BigCorp, let's say Christmas themed. They're going to get an illustration from somewhere, do a bit of photoshop, add some text over the top, and then post it to social media (oversimplified, I know).
Especially for a small shop where they don't have full time illustrators a lot of the illustration work gets outsourced. These days, some of it gets outsourced to Midjourney.
>As an apostle of digital transformation, a prophet of workflow orchestration, I gushed with messages from the gods of tech about how products like AI and RPA would allow corporations to be born again—or at least generate higher earnings.
>And then, earlier this year, things started to go a little quiet. When you’re a freelancer, a slowdown is never good, but I grew more alarmed as a client notified me that they would no longer require my services because they were switching their content writing to AI. Others simply dropped me and didn’t send a note. Several more accused me of using AI in my writing, so why would they pay me?
This is a skill issue. If your writing is indistinguishable from AI, it has negligible value
On the contrary, I think many such freelancers are way ahead of LLMs, but they are just too expensive in comparison. No amount of quality is worth the extra cost.
All this does beg the question of what happens when bots are talking to bots on either end.
What dynamics and sub-dynamics would arise?
An hour goes by, like a century for us.
A strange dystopia.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
Yes, now. But the point is, that wasn't the case before.
Something similar I thought[0] would be happening.
Not only commercial LLM operators abuse copyright, take away profit and turn every author into a ghost writer for their products—but they also make your (now former) audience not believe you have done original work that was expropriated from you, usually without your consent.
In case of Hugh Taylor this meant tarnished reputation. Over longer term, it means elimination of incentives to share information openly, as you stand nothing to gain in terms of respect if the next person automatically assumes that you have simply paid for some LLM.
I've experienced this.- PS. One of the (most) worrisome aspects of AI might just be this: The general "depreciation" of writing, as with the "depreciation" of "truth" in this "post-truth" age, when absolutely everything can be assumed to have non-human origin.-
Another avenue is that of influencer on social media.
If we was mainly doing writing articles, then that made him easy to replace.
If we can train AIs faster than human beings can learn new things, there's no way for people to keep up. Even if AIs are a bit slower that's still an issue. Imagine getting a new masters degree every 5 years.
At some point, we're all pretending to work 100% of the time, and can just... stop.
If I write a text in the style of, say, Vonnegut, is that stealing? Why is it stealing when an AI does it?
AIs don't steal any more than a human who has read someone's writings is stealing when writing. Whether we want AIs or not is a completely different discussion, and a valid one, but "we don't want AIs, therefore we'll claim they're stealing" is not valid, in my opinion.
Vonnegut gets no money from you learning, but nothing bad or illegal happened.
But they didn't do that
> Or checked them out from the library.
But they didn't do that either.
For AI, they pulled massive amounts of data off the internet. For any copyrighted material, I would consider this fair use, seeing as they used trillions of words of training, any individual work is a tiny fraction. Plus if you ask ChatGPT to give you the text of Cats Cradle, it won't do it, so there is no direct copying happening. Maybe the analogy is walking into a bookstore, reading his books, and then leaving without paying. But it doesn't really matter, because they can retrain without any of that without affecting the model quality all the much, the real magic is transformers + RLHF.
I suspect they definitely did as this is just an analogy we invented in this thread.
And in real life, I’m guessing that people training LLMs are definitely buying ebooks and not pirating them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/dealbook/extreme...
Not to mention that the article's author called it "stealing" even though the articles in question are free to read.
If “be ok” means that legally they are limited because someone bought their book and chose to use it by feeding into a training algorithm, then yes. If I steal a book from your house, it doesn’t matter if I stole to read myself or to feed into an algorithm.
But if I buy a book, or borrow it from a library, then it’s legal for me to have a computer scan it and feed into a training program. I just can’t distribute copies or otherwise infringe on the copyright.
I rely on Upwork when I run low on time to find the next gig quickly between work on my own startup.
I believe that within a few years they may start going a little along the path of Stack Overflow. They will have a whole section of AI "staff" that are literally competing with the real people on the site for many types of jobs. This will enrage the current users even more than what has happened with Stack Overflow.
But I don't think they really have a choice. They may already be working on it.
If Upwork doesn't do it then there will likely be another site along those lines specializing in "AI employees".
Although I think if you are willing to work for relatively low rates like me, being in the US makes you stand out and possibly easier to get hired.
Upwork does have an option to post jobs that only allow US contractors. And you can search for only those types of jobs if you are in the US. But often I take that off because it restricts the search quite a bit.
I think the reality is that since more and more people are working remotely, it's a global talent pool and kind of a race to the bottom in terms of rates.
I just wish that there was more competition in terms of sites like that.
That's probably an ill-advised attestation to give from someone deeply familiar wtih AI. All of the grammar tips that Word and other English language editors give you, or context-aware spell-checking? Those are already (or soon will be in the worst case) using AI.
To the extent that your final word choice is influenced by these AI agents, you're using AI in your writing.
> All of the grammar tips that Word and other English language editors give you, or context-aware spell-checking? Those are already (or soon will be in the worst case) using AI.
Will you also count any ML algo that recommends some book, podcast or video which affects what the author writes? How far back do you want to go?
In practice "using AI in writing" means a simple thing: "you give a prompt and get text written for you".
Its funny how 10 years ago the luddities were usually seen as out of touch or just greedy dumb while the CEOs was seen as pioneers.
And now slowly we see people sympathize with the luddities.
What I wonder is will this automation cause yet another labor movement? If so how different will it be?
This was never and wont ever be the point of a job though. Its what the market demands, not what people want out of a job.
Again the last time this happen we got the labor movement in protest of how terrible the transitioning was.
People always learned from others and just because ai can do it much better doesn't change this.
And yes the 'why would I make myself obsolete ' is some type of fallacy.
Your skills should not be easily exchangeable otherwise you don't have a skill relevant to the might god of capitalism. That's how capitalism optimizes.
You either up skill or start pushing for a global income.