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Show HN: Death by AI

160 points by demondragong 4y ago

I recently created a simple but efficient tool to help document writers generate a list of acronyms and definitions. Here comes chatGPT. At home, it’s all fun and games until I realize this thing might be able to do exactly what my “dumb” website does: "Give me the list of acronyms used in the previous text and their definitions"... It had a good-looking answer. Of course... At first I was bummed, but quickly realized that even though the output looked neat, it was also not reliable (missing some acronyms, adding some that were not in the original text, albeit related to it). Anyway, the next day I stumbled upon https://killedbygoogle.com and the two things collided in my head: other people probably feel like AI is going to "kill" them or their product too. Why not make a list of these things? A shameless clone later (it's open source ) https://deathbyai.com was born. I was initially going for a more serious tone, but it soon felt impossible to give a fair story for each item in ~5 lines, so I went for something lighter and, hopefully, more fun. This is neither an attempt to criticize AI nor one to bury its "victims." On the contrary, I hope this page can highlight the potential of AI while showing that the "old ways" can still be relevant. Hope you like it. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

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blfr 4y ago
Unparsable submission title but a cool site.
- dpflan 4y ago
  Indeed: maybe: "Death by AI -- a 'Killed by Google' clone but for AI"
- hamilyon2 4y ago
  An AI would write a better title
- netsharc 4y ago
  The "RIP-off" is a terrible pun that someone would utter and say "Get it, do you get it, because it involves death, and it's a copy, a rip-off!". Don't try to be too cute, OP (submitter's username is the same as the github username linked at the bottom of the webpage, and the RIP-off (har har har) pun is also at the bottom)...
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Yah I was wondering why Google would, via RIP-off, kill a site focusing on things AI is threatening.
- dang 4y ago
  Submitted title was "A Killed by Google RIP-off focusing on things AI is threatening". We changed it.
- demondragong 4y ago
  Me: Can you write a short title for a forum post about a humorous website that lists things that people think AI is threatening to replace. Bonus points if you can give credits to "Killed by Google", a website that inspired it. ChatGPT: Here is a possible forum post title that combines humor with a reference to the website "Killed by Google": "AI Taking Over the World? Here are the jobs (and hobbies) it's gunning for (with a nod to 'Killed by Google')" [...] Me: The same but not trying to be too cute. ChatGPT: Here is a more straightforward forum post title that gives credit to the website "Killed by Google": "AI Threats: What is Artificial Intelligence Endangering? (Inspired by 'Killed by Google')"
kgeist 4y ago
You probably should add "Show HN"
- dang 4y ago
  I've added it. Thanks for watching out for a fellow user!
  - demondragong 4y ago
    Thank you! It's my first post and I have to admit the rules confused me a bit. In Show HN rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead" => felt like this would be categorized as a list but I'm glad you promoted the post as Show HN.
    - dang 4y ago
      Actually you're right - it could be categorized as a list. I guess we'll call it a borderline case. Thanks for thoughtfully considering the rules, on your first post no less! If only everyone would...
morisy 4y ago
Great backstory! Been playing around with a very similar tool (for a specific, niche context: context for archives of government documents) and then was excited for GPT-3 to help solve it versus other options and have run into the same experience: Good, very expensive way to get what feels like a great solution and then you start noticing the many cracks.
quaintdev 4y ago
I thought it's going to take decades to dethrone Google. Lo and behold a chatbot funded by Microsoft is giving some serious competition to Google. Bing might finally beat Google in case they don't rename Bing or launch completely different product!
- visarga 4y ago
  Google is toast. It has been in continuous regression for the last 10 years. On the other hand, language models are progressing by leaps and bounds. It is likely that within the next year, a new open chatGPT model will emerge that is comparable to "ClosedAI", to be used as the next stage after search. This model, along with others in its family such as Stable Diffusion and Wisper may become integral components of browsers and operating systems and could potentially be used as the main interface for accessing the internet. As people become tired of ads and spam, they may turn to language models as a way to shield themselves from these distractions. These local models may also serve as personal creative spaces, allowing individuals to work and explore ideas without outside interference.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Google can trivially duplicate the research and compute needed for their own version of GPT-3 if they want to. Given the size of the company, I wouldn't be surprised if several people or teams have done so without them all knowing about each other. Google also has at least two generative models of their own that they, like OpenAI is criticised for, don't publish "just in case"; one for duplicating voices, and the LaMDA chatbot that got in the news before ChatGPT. People will get tired of ads, but I bet someone will use a text agent to rewrite stories and scripts so heroic characters always enjoy the great taste of $beverage while saving the day, the lead romantic opportunity is $consumer_gender_preference and likes wearing $fashion_brand.
    - dvngnt_ 4y ago
      google already has this technology and have submitted their own research. this is just hard to deploy at google scale. chatgpt is millions, google is billions and many companies rely on that entire ecosystem/ads
srajabi 4y ago
Great site! I feel like it's missing some things though: * Data Entry -- OCR and the like * Data Retrieval -- Don't search engines still qualify as AI * Sorting mail? * Other factory use cases like removing undesirable tomatoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is * Many others I'm not thinking of...
- harshreality 4y ago
  Is OCR that good yet? From what I've seen, it's good if you have uniform text in a single standard-looking font. When layout or font varies widely, or there's extraneous stuff on the page (for instance: headers, footers, page numbers, marginal notes, same-page footnotes, low quality source material with marks on it, or scan artifacts), quality degrades. Good OCR engines I've seen can still OCR all the things and present them in a somewhat readable text format, but general intelligence (human or AGI) allows quick, automatic recognition of different sections of text that a narrow OCR AI struggles with. A human or AGI knows this text and that text are both blockquotes, or marginal notes, and instinctively attaches semantic meaning to each area, font, style, color encountered. An OCR engine struggles to get beyond blocks of text each with their own margins and no semantic meaning attached, leading to markup hell. To highlight the limitations, look at an OCR'd version of a technical book with code samples and different fonts and styles that have different meanings, and that has both footnotes and endnotes. The text will be readable, but disorganized, probably inconsistent styling, and even if some footnotes and endnotes are linked by a good engine, I suspect that's less than fully reliable. For the purposes of reading the book, I'd rather have the scanned pdf with page images for reading, with the OCR'd text as the text layer for searching. Lower-quality source images seem to cause major problems for tesseract, and even ABBYY judging from archive.org text conversions. Those engines confuse more ambiguous letter or punctuation combinations, while humans can still read the images without much trouble.
- demondragong 4y ago
  Thanks! It's definitely a short list at this point. I had a few more items in mind but was too eager to share it. I will add some of your suggestions in the coming days.
- 4y ago
sb057 4y ago
>Stack Overflow >People realized that they could simply ask a bot their question and that it always had an answer. >Turns out the answer is sometimes completely wrong. To be fair, it's already achieved parity.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  You say that as a joke, but I actually think it's a very relevant point. People keep pointing to mistakes the AI makes in order to make an argument that there will always be a place for people doing that kind of work. The website in this post also does this. But often they fail to take into account that people make mistakes all the time as well. And the success rate of AI is only going to get better.
watt 4y ago
"Maybe dispersion will understand your accent ". Is that intentional? @demondragong
- gs17 4y ago
  Siri misheard them saying "this person".
dale_glass 4y ago
I don't think it's quite right. AI is much better as a helper than as something that does the whole job. It also doesn't actually think, so replacing doctors with it would be a terrible, terrible idea. I asked it to write a poem and got this: https://imgur.com/DBHjki5 https://imgur.com/DBHjki5 Now, as an assistant, that's amazing. As an actual finished result, it's not good. It needs tweaking and fixing, to make everything work right. Same goes for AI images. So here's what I think AI will actually endanger: stock photography. If you're writing a blog and need to stick a random illustration on an entry for extra appeal, the AI is perfect. You don't care if it fits in a theme, or if it's quite right. You need a picture of a cute cat, so most any cute cat will do. Doing actual, specific illustrations with an AI is hard work and you'll find beating your head against it quite frequently, especially if you need more than one, and if you need something that's not quite well covered in the dataset. AI works much better to compliment a human artist that can guide it to generate what's needed, and fix the problems in post.
- xg15 4y ago
  To be fair though, that's the poem it produced when the entire prompt were the words "ode to a space lizard". It's like with describing a commission: If you just give basic info, then there is a lot left for the artist to guess, and they might be inclined to err on the safe side. I often got better results when I included more info in the prompt. E.g., here that could be: What is a space lizard? What's so amazing about it? What should the general emotion of the poem be? Should it be of some particular style? etc etc.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    So the skill lies in knowing how to make a good prompt. Sounds like human work.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    True, I was intentionally trying to make it do something weird to see how it'd fail. But it's not just a lack of information. A tail might help with swimming but won't propel you through the void. And "anything deployed" is awkward. And what's an "intergalactic norm"? And so on. I think more information would result in something more interesting, but I don't think it'd fix the problem that some of the concepts used just don't add up, because it's not actually a thinking machine, just very fancy statistics that work surprisingly well.
rvz 4y ago
This list significantly affects journalists, writers, illustrators and digital artists and especially StackOverflow which programmers both senior and junior will be impacted and less roles going around for both of them. As for paramedics, doctors, lorry drivers and Google, etc the impact of AI is hardly a threat to them and this website has greatly exaggerated their own predictions.
thorncorona 4y ago
Great job! Why don’t we expand this next to all jobs killed by technology. We can start including computers (the people), mail sorting, telephone operator, and the community shaman.
- mitchbob 4y ago
  The shamans are still with us. https://www.wired.com/story/health-business-deprivation-technology/ https://www.wired.com/story/health-business-deprivation-tech...
LordDragonfang 4y ago
If the obnoxious ads I keep seeing on tiktok are any indication, replika is trying to take over the "unlicensed therapist" sector (though based on recent ads, they seem to be pivoting towards "sexting"? Unclear.)
0x457 4y ago
I feel like people talking about "Killed by AI" don't understand how Machine Learning works. There are a lot of fields that can be "killed" by current AIs if trained correctly - almost anything menial, repetitive and something that people could answer on their own, but "skill issue" prevented them from. Art? Yes, you can get it to draw something in style of, but it won't be able to create new style. StackOverflow? Well, what are you going to train it all? Current AI is good at answering questions that been already answered by SO. Spotify's recommendations? Absolutely not. Probably the worst recommendations out of all streaming services. Sharing playlists EW not because of AI, but because of music accessibility at unprecedented levels. People don't even make playlists for themselves anymore, let alone share them. Sidenote: 4/5 of my Discover Weekly is insta-dislike because Spotify doesn't get _why_ I liked the song similar to it.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  So what's really going to be killed by AI is originality. The moat to cross to get to anything original will get wider as AI makes it easier to churn out rehash.
  - rglover 4y ago
    That, and civilizational progress. The only real "threat" of AI is it lulling people into apathy and shutting their brains off. When the majority defer their thinking to AI because it's "good enough," civilizational progress will plateau. You can't invent the future using a machine that was only trained on the past (especially if you've atrophied your own ability to think about/interpret what the machine spits out).
  - 0x457 4y ago
    I don't think it will get killed, but I think those models will eventually replace people that work on non-original stuff. Like, I don't doubt AI can "direct" the next 100 CoD games and no one will notice anything.
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Right but my worry is that it will become so cheap to produce 100CoD games/marvel movies/etc that it's going to crowd out anything else.
nemothekid 4y ago
>It's on the tip of your tongue! You're going to remem... too late! Someone pulled out Shazam and you just missed your chance. Man did someone really create a whole page to cry about not being able to impress their date by remembering a song?
- wayeq 4y ago
  no?
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paddw 4y ago
I personally would appreciate a more expansive and less opinionated (forgoing the value judgments about the ultimate good or bad about AI being applied to something) version of this, as a way of tracking AI progress month to month. Maybe crowdsourcing a rating system from 1-10 in each category for how well AI can complete each category of task.
Nexialist 4y ago
I'm generally bearish on AI, but I do feel that there are going to be a surprising number of applications where 'good enough' results are actually perfectly fine. In particular, a couple of industries that I think are likely to get disrupted in the next few years are stock art, and the art-by-commission scene. The ability to use a Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth style setup to easily generate new artwork in the style of your favourite artist that's "good enough" is incredibly powerful. Doctors and Programmers? Not so much, for now.
ozten 4y ago
I think sites with user generated content are accurately flagged. There is a danger that infinite, free, low quality content will lower the value of their platform unless they figure something out. I disagree with occupations getting flagged. For many professions, AI will become human augmentation. Illustrators, writers, and other forms of design will require people to adopt new tools but they will become more creative and more efficient.
aqme28 4y ago
Doctors in general? Definitely not for a while. Radiologists? Probably soon.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Things dying because of AI really depends on how good the prompts are. As someone with a lot of doctors in his family, I can assure you that most patients are absolutely abysmal at offering prompts.
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drdaeman 4y ago
> Spotify knows me better than anyone and every song on my Discover Weekly hits the spot! I'd wish. If there is one area where AI had utterly failed it's ads. Product recommendations are always off for me. I love a joke that goes like "meatbag bought a sofa recently, must like sofas, let show them all the sofas we have" because it's silly but very true. And checking out those items leads you down to a rabbit hole where some smartass decided that if I look at something it means I'm potentially interested in more of that, so a machine must feed me more of "related products". Spotify recommendations are 90% of time provide no value to me - I stopped bothering with their recommendations and "discover" playlists. I actually hate that they start playing music of their choice when my playlists are over. The only reason I keep a subscription is because a) they have a fairly decent collection of things I like and b) it's easy to share a playlist with my wife. Same with Kindle book recommendations. Same with all those streaming services. Same with Steam games. Even though I spend some time there trying to tell all those platforms what I like and what I don't. I always have to browse catalog, checking every single thing individually. Like a quest looking for a good apartment on Airbnb among the sea of places that weren't ever good for living, only crashing for the night. Hopefully there is some user-curated collection to start with - because "related" stuff automated classifiers generate are typically echo chambers full of things I'm not looking for. The problem is, machines recommendation systems fail to understand the reasons for picking one thing over another, because they don't know much about the product they're recommending, only its relationship with other products. They don't read the book (or watch a movie), so they have no clue about its language (or actors play), tropes, and how interesting (or stupid) the plot is. They don't listen to the song so they have no clue about how it sounds like, the vocals, and certainly don't care about lyrics. And so on. /rant
- pixl97 4y ago
  Maybe you're just an outlier and AI doesn't show you good ads because it doesn't have a set of good ads that meet your needs that pay a decent amount? Unfortunately with bulk data over populations you are going to have some members that are in the long tail. Instead the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population, even if it has the potential to lose sales for a small part of the population.
rcpt 4y ago
Ignoring the mountains of regulation the issue with doctors is that bedside manner plays a huge role in effective treatment. Patients are often hiding symptoms in order to avoid a scary diagnosis or unaware that something they've been experiencing for years is worth mentioning. There's a very human element involved in extracting the data you need and convincing people to follow treatments.
- pixl97 4y ago
  As people hook themselves up to more AI assistants and health monitoring applications I'm not sure if that will always remain true. Our telemetry devices may start to pick up on these things before we even do.
kazinator 4y ago
> That being said, "House A.I." sounds like the most boring show yet to be produced. Nope; I nominate Doogie Howser, A. I.
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novia 4y ago
It recommends removing video recommendations. Does anyone know a way to do that with the YouTube app?
atleta 4y ago
I miss programmers from the list. For some reason we tend to think we'll be among the last ones to be automated away, while programming is probably the best documented job on the internet, the job with the largest training set. We also see that the machine is coming for us, we just keep telling that nonsense story that it only does the boring/low level stuff and imply that it will be like this for a long-long time which in my interpretation would be several decades at least. (Otherwise I don't get the dismissive tone/remarks.) OTOH recognizing songs can still make you look cool. Like being good at chess, poker or being able to lift heavy weights are still cool even though machines are better than people (or just most people, in case of poker). The only downside is that now you can be caught being wrong ;)
- QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
  If programming is automated but driving trucks still takes a human, someone will tell GPT-5 "Write a program that automates driving trucks". If that doesn't work, programming isn't automated. If it does, it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man.
  - atleta 4y ago
    It's not all or nothing. At least it doesn't make sense to talk about it as if it was. It doesn't have to do away with all programming jobs to make it to the list. (Especially, since the list itself defines differing levels of dangers.) And, of course, it doesn't have to be at the level of producing a perfect solution for the input "Write a program that automates driving trucks". Programmers can't do that either. It's enough if it can produce usable and testable code based on user input and then it can refine the solution based on the feedback and then get to a complete solution with this method. If it can start asking questions, all the better. BTW, ChatGPT can already do some of this without being tailored to do so. You can tell it to create a todo app (I know, that's just copypasta), defining the language and the framework to use. (I went with TS and Vue.) And then tell it to create a backend and to connect the two. Then you can tell to add persistance to the backend (because it does not, by default) and it will update the backend code. Before ChatGPT, I thought that back references like these would be the tricky thing. Sure, in my experiment I didn't talk like a non-tech person wanting an app, so you might say I was programming, but I really wasn't. And that's where things are now. > it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man. Now that's the thing I have always been unsure about. Whether automating programming is far enough from (super strong) AGI for programmers to feel bad about their job :)
aaroninsf 4y ago
Reminder that all argumentation about the impact of AI on society, industry, etc., should be made with great care with respect to prediction. It is a very common trope to see assertions about what AI does and does not do, and how this naturally limits impact in various ways. Every assertion about such limits should be bracketed, always, by, "today." Not because every such limit will fall within some specific timeframe; but because we continue to see advances which make prior arguments of this type appear woefully shortsighted and naive. IMO we as of yet are literally unaware of what the natural limits, should they exist, are. We are aware of a great many problems, always have been; but we are also finding that a surprising number of them fall before "scaling" in ways not many predicted. And computation continues to get cheaper. And resources continue to amass. A useful question for me is what is the relative cost and timeframe to increase the resolution of indistinguishable replication behavior of a system from that of a human agent, in various domains. That is a moving, fractal, shoreline. How fast is the tide coming in? How high shall it get? Those are the questions. Try to frame reasoning about impact in terms of such dynamicism.
amkkma 4y ago
What about "data science" or applied machine learning? Or even ML research?
SergeAx 4y ago
Your repo is 50 files, 20 kLOC. I understand that it is a fork, but boy, does this frontend SPA path led us to a wild forest!

160 points by demondragong 4y ago

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blfr 4y ago

Unparsable submission title but a cool site.

dpflan 4y ago
Indeed: maybe: "Death by AI -- a 'Killed by Google' clone but for AI"
hamilyon2 4y ago
An AI would write a better title
netsharc 4y ago
The "RIP-off" is a terrible pun that someone would utter and say "Get it, do you get it, because it involves death, and it's a copy, a rip-off!". Don't try to be too cute, OP (submitter's username is the same as the github username linked at the bottom of the webpage, and the RIP-off (har har har) pun is also at the bottom)...
bee_rider 4y ago
Yah I was wondering why Google would, via RIP-off, kill a site focusing on things AI is threatening.
dang 4y ago
Submitted title was "A Killed by Google RIP-off focusing on things AI is threatening". We changed it.
demondragong 4y ago
Me: Can you write a short title for a forum post about a humorous website that lists things that people think AI is threatening to replace. Bonus points if you can give credits to "Killed by Google", a website that inspired it. ChatGPT: Here is a possible forum post title that combines humor with a reference to the website "Killed by Google": "AI Taking Over the World? Here are the jobs (and hobbies) it's gunning for (with a nod to 'Killed by Google')" [...] Me: The same but not trying to be too cute. ChatGPT: Here is a more straightforward forum post title that gives credit to the website "Killed by Google": "AI Threats: What is Artificial Intelligence Endangering? (Inspired by 'Killed by Google')"

kgeist 4y ago

You probably should add "Show HN"

dang 4y ago
I've added it. Thanks for watching out for a fellow user!
- demondragong 4y ago
  Thank you! It's my first post and I have to admit the rules confused me a bit. In Show HN rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead" => felt like this would be categorized as a list but I'm glad you promoted the post as Show HN.
  - dang 4y ago
    Actually you're right - it could be categorized as a list. I guess we'll call it a borderline case. Thanks for thoughtfully considering the rules, on your first post no less! If only everyone would...

morisy 4y ago

Great backstory! Been playing around with a very similar tool (for a specific, niche context: context for archives of government documents) and then was excited for GPT-3 to help solve it versus other options and have run into the same experience: Good, very expensive way to get what feels like a great solution and then you start noticing the many cracks.

quaintdev 4y ago

I thought it's going to take decades to dethrone Google. Lo and behold a chatbot funded by Microsoft is giving some serious competition to Google. Bing might finally beat Google in case they don't rename Bing or launch completely different product!

visarga 4y ago
Google is toast. It has been in continuous regression for the last 10 years. On the other hand, language models are progressing by leaps and bounds. It is likely that within the next year, a new open chatGPT model will emerge that is comparable to "ClosedAI", to be used as the next stage after search. This model, along with others in its family such as Stable Diffusion and Wisper may become integral components of browsers and operating systems and could potentially be used as the main interface for accessing the internet. As people become tired of ads and spam, they may turn to language models as a way to shield themselves from these distractions. These local models may also serve as personal creative spaces, allowing individuals to work and explore ideas without outside interference.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Google can trivially duplicate the research and compute needed for their own version of GPT-3 if they want to. Given the size of the company, I wouldn't be surprised if several people or teams have done so without them all knowing about each other. Google also has at least two generative models of their own that they, like OpenAI is criticised for, don't publish "just in case"; one for duplicating voices, and the LaMDA chatbot that got in the news before ChatGPT. People will get tired of ads, but I bet someone will use a text agent to rewrite stories and scripts so heroic characters always enjoy the great taste of $beverage while saving the day, the lead romantic opportunity is $consumer_gender_preference and likes wearing $fashion_brand.
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    google already has this technology and have submitted their own research. this is just hard to deploy at google scale. chatgpt is millions, google is billions and many companies rely on that entire ecosystem/ads

srajabi 4y ago

Great site! I feel like it's missing some things though: * Data Entry -- OCR and the like * Data Retrieval -- Don't search engines still qualify as AI * Sorting mail? * Other factory use cases like removing undesirable tomatoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is * Many others I'm not thinking of...

harshreality 4y ago
Is OCR that good yet? From what I've seen, it's good if you have uniform text in a single standard-looking font. When layout or font varies widely, or there's extraneous stuff on the page (for instance: headers, footers, page numbers, marginal notes, same-page footnotes, low quality source material with marks on it, or scan artifacts), quality degrades. Good OCR engines I've seen can still OCR all the things and present them in a somewhat readable text format, but general intelligence (human or AGI) allows quick, automatic recognition of different sections of text that a narrow OCR AI struggles with. A human or AGI knows this text and that text are both blockquotes, or marginal notes, and instinctively attaches semantic meaning to each area, font, style, color encountered. An OCR engine struggles to get beyond blocks of text each with their own margins and no semantic meaning attached, leading to markup hell. To highlight the limitations, look at an OCR'd version of a technical book with code samples and different fonts and styles that have different meanings, and that has both footnotes and endnotes. The text will be readable, but disorganized, probably inconsistent styling, and even if some footnotes and endnotes are linked by a good engine, I suspect that's less than fully reliable. For the purposes of reading the book, I'd rather have the scanned pdf with page images for reading, with the OCR'd text as the text layer for searching. Lower-quality source images seem to cause major problems for tesseract, and even ABBYY judging from archive.org text conversions. Those engines confuse more ambiguous letter or punctuation combinations, while humans can still read the images without much trouble.
demondragong 4y ago
Thanks! It's definitely a short list at this point. I had a few more items in mind but was too eager to share it. I will add some of your suggestions in the coming days.
4y ago

sb057 4y ago

>Stack Overflow >People realized that they could simply ask a bot their question and that it always had an answer. >Turns out the answer is sometimes completely wrong. To be fair, it's already achieved parity.

cyborgx7 4y ago
You say that as a joke, but I actually think it's a very relevant point. People keep pointing to mistakes the AI makes in order to make an argument that there will always be a place for people doing that kind of work. The website in this post also does this. But often they fail to take into account that people make mistakes all the time as well. And the success rate of AI is only going to get better.

watt 4y ago

"Maybe dispersion will understand your accent ". Is that intentional? @demondragong

gs17 4y ago
Siri misheard them saying "this person".

dale_glass 4y ago

I don't think it's quite right. AI is much better as a helper than as something that does the whole job. It also doesn't actually think, so replacing doctors with it would be a terrible, terrible idea. I asked it to write a poem and got this: https://imgur.com/DBHjki5 https://imgur.com/DBHjki5 Now, as an assistant, that's amazing. As an actual finished result, it's not good. It needs tweaking and fixing, to make everything work right. Same goes for AI images. So here's what I think AI will actually endanger: stock photography. If you're writing a blog and need to stick a random illustration on an entry for extra appeal, the AI is perfect. You don't care if it fits in a theme, or if it's quite right. You need a picture of a cute cat, so most any cute cat will do. Doing actual, specific illustrations with an AI is hard work and you'll find beating your head against it quite frequently, especially if you need more than one, and if you need something that's not quite well covered in the dataset. AI works much better to compliment a human artist that can guide it to generate what's needed, and fix the problems in post.

xg15 4y ago
To be fair though, that's the poem it produced when the entire prompt were the words "ode to a space lizard". It's like with describing a commission: If you just give basic info, then there is a lot left for the artist to guess, and they might be inclined to err on the safe side. I often got better results when I included more info in the prompt. E.g., here that could be: What is a space lizard? What's so amazing about it? What should the general emotion of the poem be? Should it be of some particular style? etc etc.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  So the skill lies in knowing how to make a good prompt. Sounds like human work.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  True, I was intentionally trying to make it do something weird to see how it'd fail. But it's not just a lack of information. A tail might help with swimming but won't propel you through the void. And "anything deployed" is awkward. And what's an "intergalactic norm"? And so on. I think more information would result in something more interesting, but I don't think it'd fix the problem that some of the concepts used just don't add up, because it's not actually a thinking machine, just very fancy statistics that work surprisingly well.

rvz 4y ago

This list significantly affects journalists, writers, illustrators and digital artists and especially StackOverflow which programmers both senior and junior will be impacted and less roles going around for both of them. As for paramedics, doctors, lorry drivers and Google, etc the impact of AI is hardly a threat to them and this website has greatly exaggerated their own predictions.

thorncorona 4y ago

Great job! Why don’t we expand this next to all jobs killed by technology. We can start including computers (the people), mail sorting, telephone operator, and the community shaman.

mitchbob 4y ago
The shamans are still with us. https://www.wired.com/story/health-business-deprivation-technology/ https://www.wired.com/story/health-business-deprivation-tech...

LordDragonfang 4y ago

If the obnoxious ads I keep seeing on tiktok are any indication, replika is trying to take over the "unlicensed therapist" sector (though based on recent ads, they seem to be pivoting towards "sexting"? Unclear.)

0x457 4y ago

I feel like people talking about "Killed by AI" don't understand how Machine Learning works. There are a lot of fields that can be "killed" by current AIs if trained correctly - almost anything menial, repetitive and something that people could answer on their own, but "skill issue" prevented them from. Art? Yes, you can get it to draw something in style of, but it won't be able to create new style. StackOverflow? Well, what are you going to train it all? Current AI is good at answering questions that been already answered by SO. Spotify's recommendations? Absolutely not. Probably the worst recommendations out of all streaming services. Sharing playlists EW not because of AI, but because of music accessibility at unprecedented levels. People don't even make playlists for themselves anymore, let alone share them. Sidenote: 4/5 of my Discover Weekly is insta-dislike because Spotify doesn't get _why_ I liked the song similar to it.

EamonnMR 4y ago
So what's really going to be killed by AI is originality. The moat to cross to get to anything original will get wider as AI makes it easier to churn out rehash.
- rglover 4y ago
  That, and civilizational progress. The only real "threat" of AI is it lulling people into apathy and shutting their brains off. When the majority defer their thinking to AI because it's "good enough," civilizational progress will plateau. You can't invent the future using a machine that was only trained on the past (especially if you've atrophied your own ability to think about/interpret what the machine spits out).
- 0x457 4y ago
  I don't think it will get killed, but I think those models will eventually replace people that work on non-original stuff. Like, I don't doubt AI can "direct" the next 100 CoD games and no one will notice anything.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Right but my worry is that it will become so cheap to produce 100CoD games/marvel movies/etc that it's going to crowd out anything else.

nemothekid 4y ago

>It's on the tip of your tongue! You're going to remem... too late! Someone pulled out Shazam and you just missed your chance. Man did someone really create a whole page to cry about not being able to impress their date by remembering a song?

wayeq 4y ago
no?

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paddw 4y ago

I personally would appreciate a more expansive and less opinionated (forgoing the value judgments about the ultimate good or bad about AI being applied to something) version of this, as a way of tracking AI progress month to month. Maybe crowdsourcing a rating system from 1-10 in each category for how well AI can complete each category of task.

Nexialist 4y ago

I'm generally bearish on AI, but I do feel that there are going to be a surprising number of applications where 'good enough' results are actually perfectly fine. In particular, a couple of industries that I think are likely to get disrupted in the next few years are stock art, and the art-by-commission scene. The ability to use a Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth style setup to easily generate new artwork in the style of your favourite artist that's "good enough" is incredibly powerful. Doctors and Programmers? Not so much, for now.

ozten 4y ago

I think sites with user generated content are accurately flagged. There is a danger that infinite, free, low quality content will lower the value of their platform unless they figure something out. I disagree with occupations getting flagged. For many professions, AI will become human augmentation. Illustrators, writers, and other forms of design will require people to adopt new tools but they will become more creative and more efficient.

aqme28 4y ago

Doctors in general? Definitely not for a while. Radiologists? Probably soon.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Things dying because of AI really depends on how good the prompts are. As someone with a lot of doctors in his family, I can assure you that most patients are absolutely abysmal at offering prompts.

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drdaeman 4y ago

> Spotify knows me better than anyone and every song on my Discover Weekly hits the spot! I'd wish. If there is one area where AI had utterly failed it's ads. Product recommendations are always off for me. I love a joke that goes like "meatbag bought a sofa recently, must like sofas, let show them all the sofas we have" because it's silly but very true. And checking out those items leads you down to a rabbit hole where some smartass decided that if I look at something it means I'm potentially interested in more of that, so a machine must feed me more of "related products". Spotify recommendations are 90% of time provide no value to me - I stopped bothering with their recommendations and "discover" playlists. I actually hate that they start playing music of their choice when my playlists are over. The only reason I keep a subscription is because a) they have a fairly decent collection of things I like and b) it's easy to share a playlist with my wife. Same with Kindle book recommendations. Same with all those streaming services. Same with Steam games. Even though I spend some time there trying to tell all those platforms what I like and what I don't. I always have to browse catalog, checking every single thing individually. Like a quest looking for a good apartment on Airbnb among the sea of places that weren't ever good for living, only crashing for the night. Hopefully there is some user-curated collection to start with - because "related" stuff automated classifiers generate are typically echo chambers full of things I'm not looking for. The problem is, machines recommendation systems fail to understand the reasons for picking one thing over another, because they don't know much about the product they're recommending, only its relationship with other products. They don't read the book (or watch a movie), so they have no clue about its language (or actors play), tropes, and how interesting (or stupid) the plot is. They don't listen to the song so they have no clue about how it sounds like, the vocals, and certainly don't care about lyrics. And so on. /rant

pixl97 4y ago
Maybe you're just an outlier and AI doesn't show you good ads because it doesn't have a set of good ads that meet your needs that pay a decent amount? Unfortunately with bulk data over populations you are going to have some members that are in the long tail. Instead the operators of the system look at the efficiency of the system over larger parts of the population, even if it has the potential to lose sales for a small part of the population.

rcpt 4y ago

Ignoring the mountains of regulation the issue with doctors is that bedside manner plays a huge role in effective treatment. Patients are often hiding symptoms in order to avoid a scary diagnosis or unaware that something they've been experiencing for years is worth mentioning. There's a very human element involved in extracting the data you need and convincing people to follow treatments.

pixl97 4y ago
As people hook themselves up to more AI assistants and health monitoring applications I'm not sure if that will always remain true. Our telemetry devices may start to pick up on these things before we even do.

kazinator 4y ago

> That being said, "House A.I." sounds like the most boring show yet to be produced. Nope; I nominate Doogie Howser, A. I.

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novia 4y ago

It recommends removing video recommendations. Does anyone know a way to do that with the YouTube app?

atleta 4y ago

I miss programmers from the list. For some reason we tend to think we'll be among the last ones to be automated away, while programming is probably the best documented job on the internet, the job with the largest training set. We also see that the machine is coming for us, we just keep telling that nonsense story that it only does the boring/low level stuff and imply that it will be like this for a long-long time which in my interpretation would be several decades at least. (Otherwise I don't get the dismissive tone/remarks.) OTOH recognizing songs can still make you look cool. Like being good at chess, poker or being able to lift heavy weights are still cool even though machines are better than people (or just most people, in case of poker). The only downside is that now you can be caught being wrong ;)

QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
If programming is automated but driving trucks still takes a human, someone will tell GPT-5 "Write a program that automates driving trucks". If that doesn't work, programming isn't automated. If it does, it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man.
- atleta 4y ago
  It's not all or nothing. At least it doesn't make sense to talk about it as if it was. It doesn't have to do away with all programming jobs to make it to the list. (Especially, since the list itself defines differing levels of dangers.) And, of course, it doesn't have to be at the level of producing a perfect solution for the input "Write a program that automates driving trucks". Programmers can't do that either. It's enough if it can produce usable and testable code based on user input and then it can refine the solution based on the feedback and then get to a complete solution with this method. If it can start asking questions, all the better. BTW, ChatGPT can already do some of this without being tailored to do so. You can tell it to create a todo app (I know, that's just copypasta), defining the language and the framework to use. (I went with TS and Vue.) And then tell it to create a backend and to connect the two. Then you can tell to add persistance to the backend (because it does not, by default) and it will update the backend code. Before ChatGPT, I thought that back references like these would be the tricky thing. Sure, in my experiment I didn't talk like a non-tech person wanting an app, so you might say I was programming, but I really wasn't. And that's where things are now. > it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man. Now that's the thing I have always been unsure about. Whether automating programming is far enough from (super strong) AGI for programmers to feel bad about their job :)

aaroninsf 4y ago

Reminder that all argumentation about the impact of AI on society, industry, etc., should be made with great care with respect to prediction. It is a very common trope to see assertions about what AI does and does not do, and how this naturally limits impact in various ways. Every assertion about such limits should be bracketed, always, by, "today." Not because every such limit will fall within some specific timeframe; but because we continue to see advances which make prior arguments of this type appear woefully shortsighted and naive. IMO we as of yet are literally unaware of what the natural limits, should they exist, are. We are aware of a great many problems, always have been; but we are also finding that a surprising number of them fall before "scaling" in ways not many predicted. And computation continues to get cheaper. And resources continue to amass. A useful question for me is what is the relative cost and timeframe to increase the resolution of indistinguishable replication behavior of a system from that of a human agent, in various domains. That is a moving, fractal, shoreline. How fast is the tide coming in? How high shall it get? Those are the questions. Try to frame reasoning about impact in terms of such dynamicism.

amkkma 4y ago

What about "data science" or applied machine learning? Or even ML research?

SergeAx 4y ago

Your repo is 50 files, 20 kLOC. I understand that it is a fork, but boy, does this frontend SPA path led us to a wild forest!