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> Additionally, I think it's good to remember that among the people most threatened by this future, it's those who write for a living. Journalists, script writers and lawyers, essentially.

An anecdote:

I live in a non-english-speaking country. Most people in academic fields can speak and write English, but not as good as a native speaker. It's a common practice here before submitting an essay, you send it to a professional editor to fix up / flesh out your broken English.

The whole thing has been gone. The workflow just have vanished in less than 2 years. So I just shrug when people tell me that AI won't actually replace any job.

How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years?

This was a middleman job anyway, so it was just waiting to be removed, like travel agents.

> How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years?

I'm not sure how to answer this, because the compatibility gap between Grammarly and ChatGPT (even 3), in terms of English writing, is just too large. So large that I can barely categorize them as "the same kind of tools".

I can only confidently tell you one fact: before ChatGPT, people here were aware of Grammarly's existence. Yet they still sent their drafts to professional editors at a price of ~$0.1/word.

> This was a middleman job anyway, so it was just waiting to be removed, like travel agents.

You can say programmers are middlemen between specs and implementations. But that's not my point.

Indeed, I think it's middlemen all the way down. Everything eventually boils down to one of: survival, pursuit of happiness and pursuit of meaning. None of these actually require any actual "job" to be performed, and I can absolutely imagine us dealing with them in a post -scarcity world.

This is a nit-pick, but:

Travel agents are still around, but they’re not nearly as common as they used to be.

They are absolutely fantastic to have around when you want to discuss rather than plan the rote particulars of, for example, a “we saved for this one” vacation. A good travel agent has near-direct booking access to $GDS, has relationships, and vets and cross checks everything with a level of detail and experience that you really only get by doing it every day.

It has become something akin to the concierge industry.

My wife uses chatgpt for this. The only problem is the output might be better English and less grammar mistakes but it reads downright cringy to a native English speaker. I think it’s easily identifiable as being passed through an LLM too by anyone familiar with the usage.

Has she tried specifying the kind of English she wants? I find for translation, even just saying something like this gets good results: "Please translate this so it sounds like a native speaker with an above-average vocabulary who is writing a business email to a colleague with whom she has a longstanding professional relationship. Do not make it sound too stilted or formal."

The real question is "is it good enough for the job"?

The broken english of original was clearly not enough, but a bit cringy alas correct may do the job fine and just like that another whole category of work is gone and same number of editors have to compete in ever shrinking market.

Journalism is an interesting one as, in a way, the most important thing isn’t being correct/accurate/imformative etc, it’s getting clicks

AI is already very good at writing clickbait nonsense, and if an AI can pump that out faster than a real person can, it’s game over

Actual journalists, like the people that go out and follow leads, interview people… ya know, investigate—they’ll be a little harder to replace with AI since their job happens in the meat-space. Hot-take writers and other people whose job is opinion having might have more trouble.

Basically AI can replace the garbage easily.

It isn’t all garbage, it is a filtering-up process or something. People do things, then the results get summarized and broadcast. IMO our system has too much focus on the summarize and broadcast stage (probably because our communication networks got so good, the people summarizing can draw from the whole planet, resulting in a system that can sustain a very deep tree of summaries-of-summaries).

If AI gets good enough (not certain, for sure), maybe it’ll spur on a race-to-the-bottom for the upper levels of the tree. More focus on doing, rather than summarizing, might be pretty good.

My experience of journalists has been that they often just email you to ask questions. LLMs can do that.

I can imagine there are lots of cases where that might work. But for example, if you are covering a small town police scandal or something, you might end up wanting to talk to people who’d rather not comment online or might not even have a super strong online presence/identity.

I don’t know you, but lots of people on this site do internet stuff, if you are for example an open source contributor worth reporting on, academic, or somebody like that, you probably are exactly the sort of person that an LLM would be best at contacting, right?

Yes, it can't work that way for all things, but you'd be surprised how many journalists don't leave their offices even for stuff like talking to police. Some do but they tend to be the more serious ones working on a big project where they want to do in depth face to face interviews. The idea of shoe leather is as bit old fashioned I'm afraid. And LLMs have the massive advantage that they work a lot faster, and can work 24/7 without complaining.

Classical journalism is based on static articles that if updated, are noted in some detail. So that article I read in 2003 in the NYTs is the same today as it was on publishing. But if current and future journalism is dependent on clicks, why would AI not create dynamic journalism where articles are updated based on their reception and honed into a maximized experience?

Prompting an ML tool created from someone’s original works sourced without appropriate licensing or permission to “make sure the output doesn’t violate copyright” is the sad irony of today.

> make me a shopify site to sell cute mini traffic cones that are oscar-the-grouch themed, but make sure they don't violate any copyright themes, make me 100 ads to sell them

Is AI just steroids for drop-shipping?

We’re re-learning that things like art have value beyond the end result. The story and person behind the creation is as important as the creation itself, and this is something AI can never replace by virtue of being artificial. Software is entirely about its end function, and this in many ways more replaceable.

> We'll have a core directable glued-together stack that can take instruction like "make me a shopify site to sell cute mini traffic cones that are oscar-the-grouch themed, but make sure they don't violate any copyright themes, make me 100 ads to sell them" by the end of 2024

lol I’d be VERY surprised if they can do that by the end of 2030.

1. You need relationships with manufacturers to do that

2. You need to validate the physical results prior to a full run

3. These LLMs have no idea about copyright and even the best ones tell you stuff that isn’t remotely true.

These models predict the next construct (phrase, word, etc.) and they’re decent at it. They’ll eventually do images, with text, hopefully both actually relate and make sense. I’d give that 2 years really to refine.

They’re really good predictors, but when you start mixing things and gluing 4-5 things together, the error rate grows exponentially and the understanding equally had a massive drop.

I think you're very wrong about this timeline.

1. I've never sourced hardware, so I can't comment directly on manufacturers. I have done plenty of business in Asia, and, I have purchased from alibaba. One side of those alibaba transactions is definitely using AI translation already. I don't think manufacturers in Asia will care at all "who" is sourcing product from them. For speccing a car - sure, you're right that a relationship is needed (and probably will involve doing some drinking near the factory). For speccing injection mold / printable goods? I'm skeptical that this is cut and dried in favor of humans with IRL relationships.

2. Trivially done by an AI; "Mr. Bossman do you want to validate this sample, or have me hire someone to do it?"

3. This is demonstrably untrue; OpenAI disagrees with you about this, for instance. ChatGPT pre-instructions include multiple paragraphs about this topic already. (here's a link to info about it if you're curious: https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1755122786014724125/photo...)

Generative AI that can spell correctly is here now, although not widely commercially deployed, but is in no way needed to AI CEO things.

My experience as the 'gluer' is that the most recent visual/multimodel models are good enough to, say, fix a CSS bug in HTML they wrote by looking at a screenshot of the output. So, I'd say the opposite is true in my experience -- with multimodal feedback, they are able to self correct.

Anyway, to me this doesn't add up to 2030. Maybe for the snazzy mac app version. But, I think we are VERY close right now, and it is a major engineering effort at OpenAI and Microsoft to get there quickly.

$1000 to the charity of your choice that this isn’t available in any generalizable way before 2030.

Deal! I’m at a graduation right now but I’m responding to keep this in my threads. let’s set up a long bet. If your email isn’t in profile mail me

https://longbets.org/951/

> Trivially done by an AI; "Mr. Bossman do you want to validate this sample, or have me hire someone to do it?"

I honestly don't understant this sentence. If you hire someone to do it then it's not "trivially done by an AI", no?

Not to hijack the thread but I’m curious if you can lay out what is the core message of r/Antiwork? I can’t get my head around what the messages and goals are. (Do they have KPIs and OKRs? /semi-s)

it started as a kind of fully-automated gay space-communism vibe, techno optimist critique of calvinism / "protestant work ethic", how about we don't conflate an individual's worth with their economic productivity

at some point it became consumed by implausible screenshots of SMS conversations between oppressed wage workers and cartoonishly evil franchise managers

nowadays it is strictly eat the rich

I probably walked in during a transition period because there was a lot of disagreement and infighting. I imagine the extremists won and the more level posters left (as usual)

Lawyers aren’t paid to write. They’re primarily paid to be correct, something LLMs struggle with.

https://id.crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-e...