8 ms·

ChatGPT has already decreased my income security, and likely yours too

74 points by hunglee2 4y ago

XzAeRosho 4y ago
>What AI is already capable of should be celebrated. It's amazing. It can save so much time and enable so much more productivity. But we should all share in that collective productivity increase as it continues to improve. It shouldn't be the case that some people win big while many, if not most, lose. That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen one.
- eggy 4y ago
  Whenever there are large paradigm shifts in culture, business, or technology, there is a shift in winners and losers, so I agree this is wishful thinking.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Calavar 4y ago
  This is exactly what Karl Marx predicted 200 years ago, except he saw things in the context of industrialization and mechanical automation as opposed to AI and digital automation.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  It would also be inconsistent with every previous technological advancement.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I'm kinda happy that I live in this age as an office worker and not in a factory during the industrial revolution. Those jobs all disappeared but do we really miss them? It's the menial work that gets offloaded to machines. I don't see current AI coming up with new ideas for example.
    - aikinai 4y ago
      Certainly not, that update isn’t due for another week!
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      > I don't see current AI coming up with new ideas for example I'd check that carefully before relying on it. I've personally used AI to come up with new ideas for a few projects I'm working on. I've read several articles detailing how people are using it to innovate in their business and I'm 100% certain the reason why ChatGPT is at capacity during working hours every day is because there are droves of people using it daily for work now. I'd even go as far as to say that brainstorming with ChatGPT is one of the most productive use cases.
      - geraneum 4y ago
        > I've personally used AI to come up with new ideas. It seems that you basically agree with the point being made. You are coming up with those ideas with help of ChatGPT as a tool, or is the bot coming up with ideas? If it's the latter, can we remove you from the process and achieve the same result? I don't think so, but I am not saying this will never happen in the future, though.
        throwaway4aday 4y ago
        In a hypothetical scenario where there is a group of people that need to come up with ideas then I think having ChatGPT in the mix would mean that group could be smaller but remain as productive as a larger group. It's certainly been able to fill the position of a sounding board or knowledgeable collaborator when I've used it.
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        I really don't think the current generation of chatbots is capable of creative thoughts. They're just really good at combining stuff that they already know. I'm sure at some point they'll get past that point but it seems a tough nut to crack with current tech.
    - 4y ago
- lm28469 4y ago
  Especially since it's going against everything we did since the invention of the steam engine lol Like yes in a perfect world time saved would go back to workers, it doesn't though. A machine could do in a minute what a knitter would do in a day, it doesn't mean knitters got a 7 minute work week
  - melvinmelih 4y ago
    > A machine could do in a minute what a knitter would do in a day, it doesn't mean knitters got a 7 minute work week That’s why the capitalist class owns the means of production (the owner makes their profit in 7 minutes now).
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    But it does mean that the people who were formerly knitters now have more material wealth than a lot of the upperclass people of their day. In order to buy a pair of shoes, that knitter would have had to work months if not a full year to save enough money. Now even some of the poorest people among us only need to spend a fraction of their weekly income to buy a new pair of very serviceable shoes that are probably much better made and more comfortable than the cheapest pair a local cobbler could have made by hand. I believe that means in a very real sense that the time saved has gone back to workers. We all already share in that collective productivity increase.
    - api 4y ago
      … which for many is all eaten up by runaway inflation in certain key constrained areas like housing. This is why in the US there are hordes of homeless people with smart phones and why the poor generally have no problem having houses full of appliances and giant TVs. Gadgets have indeed gotten radically cheaper. The things that are hard to make cheaper for structural or physical reasons like housing, health care, tuition, and child care tend to inflate so as to eat the surplus. Housing is the worst culprit in many markets.
      - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
- pydry 4y ago
  Wishful thinking would be if they thought it would.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  this is very shallow criticism. I benefit from invention of a car because I can buy a car and be it's owner and only benefactor You cannot buy and own ChatGPT as invididual, you will never even be able to inslect its source code. A car is patent protected. Patents allow me personally to build a car for my personal use. Copyright doesn't allow that. Patents last 20 years, copyright lasts close to 100, depending on jurisdiction. The only reason corporations can make insane profits from this tech is because we granted this category of IP insane priviliges and government is spending tax dollars to protect their IP. Make code like patents - it must be published in a register accessibke by anyone, and loses protections after 20 years. If you don't register it, then the government will not be prosecuting anyone for using it. Suddenly the benefits will be shared
  - 9dev 4y ago
    I like the suggestion; contrary to physical commodities, however, the usage of derivation of code cannot be proven easily, unless the entire supply chain is rebuilt on, I don’t know, hashes of code fragments and remote attestation?
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    Now we start suing OpenAI into oblivion for copyright infringement (uhhh) when it has trained on text that is under copyright... like artists are doing to Stable Diffusion.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      thats abother option. However I believe Art belongs under copyright. It us not functional - our society does not fall apart is a famous piece of art is lost. However our society does fall apart when key piece of technology is lost, thats why Patents have all these safeguards. Code is functional technology, it is not merely artistic.
jddj 4y ago
Been a while since I saw a call for UBI. I think I subconsciously credited an inflationary environment and the wake-up-call that was the things we depend on becoming slightly harder to get because fewer people were working their usual jobs. And the difficulty in getting things done in a malfunctioning labor market. And in general just a lot less magical thinking in commodity squeezes / rising rate environments. But that's not to say that the problem doesn't exist. Just that it's interesting that this particular solution seemed to skulk away for a little while.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  I find this comment interesting but hard to understand, what is the gist of your comment ?
  - jddj 4y ago
    That's fair, it was probably a bit snarky. I read the featured article as a call for universal basic income. My point was mainly that calls for things like that had disappeared slightly over the past couple of years, and in parts of the world we had the brief experiment and the almost immediate result was an overheated economy where none of the boring staples were available anymore. I'll grant that it's not fair because we didn't have robots stocking shelves and the stalled shipping industry played a big part, but I think there was still a lesson learned that these nice-sounding solutions like "just stop burning fossil fuels overnight", and "just give everyone money" started to feel a bit less like quick fixes and we were reminded that the transition will be a long, slow one. It was interesting to see a UBI article with inflation running hot. I had sort of assumed they were from another time.
hardware2win 4y ago
ChatGPT is no threat to SE.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  Famous last words. Just the other day I asked it to do something somewhat non-trivial: write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom. It cranked out not only working, but _sophisticated_, code that just needed some minor fixes to account for version updates in about 20 seconds. It was pretty eye opening.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    How is that not the same as a machinist spending 15 minutes in solidworks to design a peice, hitting export on the g-code, firing up the 7 axis cnc, walking out the door and coming back the next day to the finished goods. 3d printing is a great example of how this will only create more stuff. It's a threat to the low end. If you do basic stuff, your need to climb the skill ladder.
  - float4 4y ago
    > write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom And now ask yourself how many non-SE's can even ask that question to ChatGPT.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    Sure it can give you cool results from time to time just like Google and SO, yet you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit Software is not like art One error here = doesnt work Meanwhile errors at image may be hard to spot or even cool
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit And the person who does that will earn more. But they will be expected to produce at a rate that a human, working unassisted, cannot today. And those who would have assisted today will not have a niche anymore.
oxfordmale 4y ago
Google is not primarily a web search company. Instead, it is an ad company that uses web search to maximise its advertising revenue. ChatGPT is good at the moment, as it has not yet included advertising or has been gamed by SEO. This will change.
- nobody0 4y ago
  ads are coming into this space [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-ads-early-pitch-advertisers-2023-02-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-...
  - oxfordmale 4y ago
    Soon ChatGPT will recommend Colgate if you ask it how to brush your teeth, or use a similar product placement strategy.
    - rustyf 4y ago
      I wonder what happens, though, if you ask ChatGPT, "Is there a better toothpaste than Colgate"? The instance this question is not answered truthfully, ChatGPT becomes garbage.
      - oxfordmale 4y ago
        This will be a game of cat and mouse between the search companies and the regulators. It has to be clear it is an advertisement of sorts, at least in most countries, however, there are different ways to do this. It will put a significant number of lawyers' kids through university.
      - zo1 4y ago
        They'll spend a lot of effort scrubbing any facts that they don't like or don't suit their agenda and narrative. Whether that's the agenda of advertisers, the powers that be, or the "privileged" classes won't matter. You think Googles search results are opaque now?? Wait till it's hidden behind a 2 trillion parameter neural network. And by extension of that, "fake news" will be targeted and the all knowing AI knowledge base will be used to determine what is false or true. This will be the end of disent. When they say we won't own anything, and we'll be happy, they also mean knowledge.
visarga 4y ago
AI is not just for creators, it's also for readers: summarisation, fact checking, "talking to" articles, books and papers.
- candiodari 4y ago
  Currently it seems mostly useful for exercising human fact checking ability ...
  - homarp 4y ago
    the new turing test
- Lio 4y ago
  "Fact checking" is the one I worry about there. If AI confidently tells you something is true will you know that it's not? It's obvious when it's telling you it's still 2022 but what about more everything else?
  - visarga 4y ago
    Better than no checking, which is what we will do 99% of the time. There is a NLP task called "entailment", where two affirmations are judged to see if they support each other or not. A combination of search + entailment would work for fact-checking articles. But if you want to do this properly you need to first mine all facts from all sources, then do reconciliation, then update your "truth" table for reference. Probably everyone will want to select the sources of truth they want loaded into the system, we're not going to agree on truth. Even the bare minimum of knowing when an affirmation is controversial or doesn't exist in references would be of great help. AI could indicate <controversial> tags for the first and <citation needed> for the latter. Fortunately search can tell us when no results are found, unlike LLMs.
coffeeblack 4y ago
In software development, it probably increases earning potential, because you can outsource all the tedious coding to the AI and have more time to manage the big picture of how your software interacts with other components, is optimized for certain tasks, etc. So you can deliver more value in the same time frame.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  Are you aware of what happens when the amount of value that can be produced from workers exceeds the demand? Salaries get demolished, jobs get cut.
  - w0m 4y ago
    existing* jobs; but it also opens up entire new markets that weren't feasible prior. In the US as an example; ~150 years ago 80% of the population had to farm to feed the country. Today it's 1%. Yea; '97% of jobs lost!' - but it gave the workforce the power/freedom to build other new/amazing things also. I know that's a trite example; but I like it as it makes it clear that the status quo is not an immutable (or entirely positive) thing.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  What tedious for you is essential for me. I take great care writing every line of my code. I'm actually paying for Copilot and use for repeating blocks of code. But that's a miniscule amount of time saved, like IDE autocomplete, just increases quality of life. So far no AI written any substantial amount of not-completely-trivial code that I'd accept. And amount of time tweaking its output exceeds amount of time I'd spend writing that code.
  - danielbln 4y ago
    The question is, will this still be the case in 2, 5, 10 years. Is there a hard limit to how well these models will perform, or will we look back at "carefully, manually crafted lines of code" as we do now at punchcards.
ilaksh 4y ago
Maybe there could be services like Patreon where you subscribe to support them, but the content made by creators is used to either train the AI or the embeddings are put in a vector database. Then when the user does a semantic search, it puts the results from creators or whatever type of curation first. This could provide better search results for the user, at least some degree of attribution or citation for some searches, and a way to support creators at least a little bit. It seems quite possible someone is already building such a system. I mean the alternative seems just to not even try to credit/support creators with these generative systems. I wonder if there is a way to embed a token that is unique and 100% identifiable so it will always be recoverable somehow. Although that might not really make sense. But if it was possible maybe it could be used for attribution.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  If training models becomes the next big business venture, which it seems is likely, then companies doing so might pay for exclusivity rights to content that can be accurately labeled by its author. The specialist authors could also be employed during the reinforcement learning phase to evaluate the response to various prompts within a domain. AI Trainer could easily become a new profession of its own.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
1000 a month is "successful" on patron? Talk about a low bar. ChatGPT might threaten mediocre writers, but not good ones, and never great ones.
manishsharan 4y ago
I think ChatGPT's programming prowess might be a bit overblown. A majority development efforts are spent in adding functionality to existing code , fixing bugs and reducing technical debt. I am not sure ChatGPT can do this.
- wordpad25 4y ago
  yet
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Only for arbitrary reasons. ChatGPT is entirely capable of being provided a block of code and then answering questions about it or making modifications to it. Without the token limit and with some way to guarantee that the code you provided won't make its way into their training data, this would be an entirely reasonable use case.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  Sure, at least not for 2 more weeks.
NhanH 4y ago
I have always thought that most, if not all, people that called themselves “content creators” are not providing much value. And in aggregate they are probably net negative due to their spamminess. Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned. All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  I expect this theme to continue and expand across many "jobs". There are a lot of people who are just plugging numbers into spreadsheets all day and you would think "yes but when something doesn't fit they have to be smart and use human intelligence to fix the problem" However if you see what happens in practice all they do is send an e-mail to someone else saying there is a problem. ChatGTP can do that part. You don't need many of these pencil pushers
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    The irony is these types of jobs are usually in companies that aren't going to spend any money to invest in the back office tools/processes their employees use on a daily basis. Any AI/ML tooling is so far away from that type of company that those jobs might be safer than others.
    - Tarsul 4y ago
      not if (rather when) Microsoft includes its AI into MS Office. And I've read somewhere that that's exactly what they are planning.
      - paleotrope 4y ago
        That will last until Microsoft realizes it cannibalizes Office licenses.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
> Searching for information is about to experience a paradigm shift as big as using browsers instead of phone books A more appropriate comparison would be that information is about to experience a paradigm shift as big as reading blogs instead of books.
rhaway84773 4y ago
I was reading an article comparing chat GPT results with the Google equivalent, and how much better the chat GPT result was. Of course, in reality, once I reduced the search terms to make it more Google friendly (chatGPT’s conversational mode requires a lot of superfluous language, whereas a Google search does better with only keywords), Google returned the same result much faster. The difference was that Google didn’t print the entire result. It asked me to click a link to get the answer. Which I did, and clicking the link and loading the website was still significantly faster than chatGPT. But what made it clear for me is that besides it’s conversational approach (which I don’t find beneficial), chatGPT’s biggest advantage appears to be that it’s ingestion method means that it is able to completely evade copyright, and present somebody else’s results as it’s own. Google could have done exactly the same thing and presented the entire result on its own page, but since it’s not got “AI” which we’ve apparently decided doesn’t need to honor copyright, it doesn’t do that. AI’s biggest advantage right now appears to be the bag of wool it is placing before our eyes that’s preventing us from questioning it’s blatant and outright copyright theft and abuse.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  And to that I say, good riddance. Copyright as it exists in 2023 is an abusive dead weight on knowledge and culture and we would be better without it.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    Don't throw the baby out with the bath water! Copyright as it exists today may have too long a term. But getting rid of it entirely would create massive problems. Film, music and books would become uneconomic to produce overnight. Things like GPL would be unworkable.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      I don't think so. We already live in a world where anything playing on a movie screen has a digital equivalent easy to find for free; ditto music and books. Despite that, sales continue to increase every single year. While removing it from the underground would no doubt decrease sales, calling it "uneconomic to produce" is unnecessarily apocalyptic. As for software licensing, the GPL and most licenses would become irrelevant, since the copying can now happen both ways.
btbuildem 4y ago
Anything that helps put advertising in a deep grave is a good thing.
t344344 4y ago
I think AI democratizes writing and "content production". Now anyone can produce good texts. That includes uneducated migrants and half autistic programmers.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Just like netflix can produce good content, but it's shit by every metrics. If checks the checkboxes for "movies", :"documentaries", &c. but most of the time it's bland as fuck and not worth watching "Content" is good if all you are is a container
  - t344344 4y ago
    Netflix produces garbage, because they want garbage. Imagine there would be some AI that produces movies. Some interesting person (war veteran) would tell it its story, did a few iterations and corrections, and in a month would have a decent movie... That will happen with writing now!
risyachka 4y ago
AI will most likely just increase the speed of development/content production etc. It makes no sense for companies to fire anyone. It makes sense to make everyone use AI so they get even more value from each employee, maximizing their profits and market position.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>Because ChatGPT is so hugely popular and experiencing truly massive demand already, you may not have been able to actually personally use it yet, but suffice to say, it's kind of like magic. And it's still early day Hypefluff. Could have replaced ChatGPT with crypto, penny stocks, or Juicero. Show me the money. I mean actually show me. No more theorycrafting, hypotheticals, or bullshitting. Show me a company using ChatGPT and how its use is reflected on the bottom line of their financial statement.
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  You dont think the commercialization speed of GPT3 via CoPilot is evidence of something? You think that was a one-off?
- danielbln 4y ago
  ChatGPT was released less than 3 months ago, maybe give it a minute? The ecosystem around LLMs has been flourishing and is accelerating, look at langchain, look at all the open models out there. And in comparison to crypto, there is hard, actual usefulness to it, today.
- newsletterthrow 4y ago
  [dead]
deleted 4y ago
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benja123 4y ago
This is part of progress (be it good or bad progress). It used to be that the majority of the US population worked in agriculture and today thanks to automation - it’s around 1% of the population. Same goes for numerous roles (secretaries, switchboard operators etc.) As far as ChatGPT goes - I have a lot of concerns around it, but I am still not convinced it will replace search. I think it might compliment search. Either way I think it’s a good thing if how we search changes. Search is broken, it no longer brings me the best results, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between ads and legit links (this is of course intentional because of revenue and KPIs) and I know longer trust the results. I am not sure if chatGPT is the answer, but maybe it’s part of the answer. Important lesson - teach your kids to have a self development mindset. They need to be prepared to have multiple career changes and that their current skill set might be made obsolete at any moment. It sucks, but it’s reality and when things change, they change fast.
jliptzin 4y ago
I think it does a great job of synthesizing certain things like recipes, book summaries, etc but as soon as there’s anything important involved it’s just wasting time. It spits out a lot of things that seem correct but on closer inspection is not and that ends up costing a lot of time down the road. If it’s not right 100% of the time, or at least tells you when it’s not that confident, it can’t really be trusted. At the very least hopefully it’ll help get rid of all the SEO junk sites littering the internet.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bdcravens 4y ago
Basically: won't anyone think of the horse shoe makers?
tmikaeld 4y ago
I'm more worried about the internet itself, as soon as this technology is accessible to bots, we would no longer be able to distinguish if we're chatting or reading an article by a real human or an AI. Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT..
- dagw 4y ago
  Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to write a rebuttal to your statement. It seems to have pretty strong opinions on the matter: While it's true that advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have made it possible for machines like ChatGPT to produce human-like responses, the idea that we would no longer be able to distinguish between a real human and an AI-generated response is not entirely accurate. Firstly, it's important to note that AI-generated responses are typically generated with a specific purpose or objective in mind. ChatGPT, for example, is designed to generate responses to questions and prompts in a way that mimics human conversation. However, it's unlikely that an AI-generated response would be able to replicate the nuances and complexities of human conversation in a completely convincing way. Secondly, there are various methods that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by an AI or a human. For instance, machine-generated responses tend to be more formulaic and less spontaneous than human responses. Additionally, there are techniques such as the Turing Test that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. It's also worth noting that the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits. For instance, it can help to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and enhance our understanding of complex problems. In summary, while it's true that advances in AI and natural language processing have the potential to generate responses that are difficult to distinguish from those generated by humans, there are still ways to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. Moreover, the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits, and we should not be overly worried about the potential negative effects of this technology.
  - tmikaeld 4y ago
    That's because it's specifically designed not to value itself higher than any human, even if you try and force it.
teekert 4y ago
I always thought about writing this insightful blog about whay Ayn Rand would think of surveillance capitalism. She's a very strong proponent of the right to privacy, but at the same time she is a proponent of an unregulated market, that market produced surveillance capitalism. Or did it? Maybe it was produced by companies manipulating the rules behind the scenes, Ayn would hate that! Perhaps she would feel the need to take matters into her own hands: self-host all the things! I bet she'd have her own server, even though it runs that socialist, shared OS called Linux ;) ... So I ask ChatGPT what would Ayn think? And it writes a very nice, balanced text. Exactly in line with my thoughts, just written more concisely and in much better English. I really enjoyed that conversation with ChatGPT. I did loose the interest to write the assay. Or perhaps I can copy paste it to my blog... Makes me feel like a CheatGPT though.
atemerev 4y ago
"Content creators" are doomed, of course. It is no longer a sustainable income source; now, you have to be a niche artist, like people who try their luck in modern art: only a few of them will invent something original enough and be lucky enough to be successful, the rest will get nothing. Or, you can switch to be an AI operator and run mass production content pipelines. There will be less of those compared to individual content creators, but still sustainable enough. Like, only 3% of people are now professionally involved in food farming, and that's a good thing. There is no other way.

74 points by hunglee2 4y ago

>What AI is already capable of should be celebrated. It's amazing. It can save so much time and enable so much more productivity. But we should all share in that collective productivity increase as it continues to improve. It shouldn't be the case that some people win big while many, if not most, lose. That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen one.

eggy 4y ago
Whenever there are large paradigm shifts in culture, business, or technology, there is a shift in winners and losers, so I agree this is wishful thinking.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Calavar 4y ago
This is exactly what Karl Marx predicted 200 years ago, except he saw things in the context of industrialization and mechanical automation as opposed to AI and digital automation.
koheripbal 4y ago
It would also be inconsistent with every previous technological advancement.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I'm kinda happy that I live in this age as an office worker and not in a factory during the industrial revolution. Those jobs all disappeared but do we really miss them? It's the menial work that gets offloaded to machines. I don't see current AI coming up with new ideas for example.
  - aikinai 4y ago
    Certainly not, that update isn’t due for another week!
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    > I don't see current AI coming up with new ideas for example I'd check that carefully before relying on it. I've personally used AI to come up with new ideas for a few projects I'm working on. I've read several articles detailing how people are using it to innovate in their business and I'm 100% certain the reason why ChatGPT is at capacity during working hours every day is because there are droves of people using it daily for work now. I'd even go as far as to say that brainstorming with ChatGPT is one of the most productive use cases.
    - geraneum 4y ago
      > I've personally used AI to come up with new ideas. It seems that you basically agree with the point being made. You are coming up with those ideas with help of ChatGPT as a tool, or is the bot coming up with ideas? If it's the latter, can we remove you from the process and achieve the same result? I don't think so, but I am not saying this will never happen in the future, though.
      - throwaway4aday 4y ago
        In a hypothetical scenario where there is a group of people that need to come up with ideas then I think having ChatGPT in the mix would mean that group could be smaller but remain as productive as a larger group. It's certainly been able to fill the position of a sounding board or knowledgeable collaborator when I've used it.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      I really don't think the current generation of chatbots is capable of creative thoughts. They're just really good at combining stuff that they already know. I'm sure at some point they'll get past that point but it seems a tough nut to crack with current tech.
  - 4y ago
lm28469 4y ago
Especially since it's going against everything we did since the invention of the steam engine lol Like yes in a perfect world time saved would go back to workers, it doesn't though. A machine could do in a minute what a knitter would do in a day, it doesn't mean knitters got a 7 minute work week
- melvinmelih 4y ago
  > A machine could do in a minute what a knitter would do in a day, it doesn't mean knitters got a 7 minute work week That’s why the capitalist class owns the means of production (the owner makes their profit in 7 minutes now).
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  But it does mean that the people who were formerly knitters now have more material wealth than a lot of the upperclass people of their day. In order to buy a pair of shoes, that knitter would have had to work months if not a full year to save enough money. Now even some of the poorest people among us only need to spend a fraction of their weekly income to buy a new pair of very serviceable shoes that are probably much better made and more comfortable than the cheapest pair a local cobbler could have made by hand. I believe that means in a very real sense that the time saved has gone back to workers. We all already share in that collective productivity increase.
  - api 4y ago
    … which for many is all eaten up by runaway inflation in certain key constrained areas like housing. This is why in the US there are hordes of homeless people with smart phones and why the poor generally have no problem having houses full of appliances and giant TVs. Gadgets have indeed gotten radically cheaper. The things that are hard to make cheaper for structural or physical reasons like housing, health care, tuition, and child care tend to inflate so as to eat the surplus. Housing is the worst culprit in many markets.
    - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
pydry 4y ago
Wishful thinking would be if they thought it would.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
this is very shallow criticism. I benefit from invention of a car because I can buy a car and be it's owner and only benefactor You cannot buy and own ChatGPT as invididual, you will never even be able to inslect its source code. A car is patent protected. Patents allow me personally to build a car for my personal use. Copyright doesn't allow that. Patents last 20 years, copyright lasts close to 100, depending on jurisdiction. The only reason corporations can make insane profits from this tech is because we granted this category of IP insane priviliges and government is spending tax dollars to protect their IP. Make code like patents - it must be published in a register accessibke by anyone, and loses protections after 20 years. If you don't register it, then the government will not be prosecuting anyone for using it. Suddenly the benefits will be shared
- 9dev 4y ago
  I like the suggestion; contrary to physical commodities, however, the usage of derivation of code cannot be proven easily, unless the entire supply chain is rebuilt on, I don’t know, hashes of code fragments and remote attestation?
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  Now we start suing OpenAI into oblivion for copyright infringement (uhhh) when it has trained on text that is under copyright... like artists are doing to Stable Diffusion.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    thats abother option. However I believe Art belongs under copyright. It us not functional - our society does not fall apart is a famous piece of art is lost. However our society does fall apart when key piece of technology is lost, thats why Patents have all these safeguards. Code is functional technology, it is not merely artistic.

jddj 4y ago

Been a while since I saw a call for UBI. I think I subconsciously credited an inflationary environment and the wake-up-call that was the things we depend on becoming slightly harder to get because fewer people were working their usual jobs. And the difficulty in getting things done in a malfunctioning labor market. And in general just a lot less magical thinking in commodity squeezes / rising rate environments. But that's not to say that the problem doesn't exist. Just that it's interesting that this particular solution seemed to skulk away for a little while.

bamboozled 4y ago
I find this comment interesting but hard to understand, what is the gist of your comment ?
- jddj 4y ago
  That's fair, it was probably a bit snarky. I read the featured article as a call for universal basic income. My point was mainly that calls for things like that had disappeared slightly over the past couple of years, and in parts of the world we had the brief experiment and the almost immediate result was an overheated economy where none of the boring staples were available anymore. I'll grant that it's not fair because we didn't have robots stocking shelves and the stalled shipping industry played a big part, but I think there was still a lesson learned that these nice-sounding solutions like "just stop burning fossil fuels overnight", and "just give everyone money" started to feel a bit less like quick fixes and we were reminded that the transition will be a long, slow one. It was interesting to see a UBI article with inflation running hot. I had sort of assumed they were from another time.

hardware2win 4y ago

ChatGPT is no threat to SE.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Famous last words. Just the other day I asked it to do something somewhat non-trivial: write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom. It cranked out not only working, but _sophisticated_, code that just needed some minor fixes to account for version updates in about 20 seconds. It was pretty eye opening.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  How is that not the same as a machinist spending 15 minutes in solidworks to design a peice, hitting export on the g-code, firing up the 7 axis cnc, walking out the door and coming back the next day to the finished goods. 3d printing is a great example of how this will only create more stuff. It's a threat to the low end. If you do basic stuff, your need to climb the skill ladder.
- float4 4y ago
  > write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom And now ask yourself how many non-SE's can even ask that question to ChatGPT.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Sure it can give you cool results from time to time just like Google and SO, yet you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit Software is not like art One error here = doesnt work Meanwhile errors at image may be hard to spot or even cool
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit And the person who does that will earn more. But they will be expected to produce at a rate that a human, working unassisted, cannot today. And those who would have assisted today will not have a niche anymore.

oxfordmale 4y ago

Google is not primarily a web search company. Instead, it is an ad company that uses web search to maximise its advertising revenue. ChatGPT is good at the moment, as it has not yet included advertising or has been gamed by SEO. This will change.

nobody0 4y ago
ads are coming into this space [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-ads-early-pitch-advertisers-2023-02-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-...
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  Soon ChatGPT will recommend Colgate if you ask it how to brush your teeth, or use a similar product placement strategy.
  - rustyf 4y ago
    I wonder what happens, though, if you ask ChatGPT, "Is there a better toothpaste than Colgate"? The instance this question is not answered truthfully, ChatGPT becomes garbage.
    - oxfordmale 4y ago
      This will be a game of cat and mouse between the search companies and the regulators. It has to be clear it is an advertisement of sorts, at least in most countries, however, there are different ways to do this. It will put a significant number of lawyers' kids through university.
    - zo1 4y ago
      They'll spend a lot of effort scrubbing any facts that they don't like or don't suit their agenda and narrative. Whether that's the agenda of advertisers, the powers that be, or the "privileged" classes won't matter. You think Googles search results are opaque now?? Wait till it's hidden behind a 2 trillion parameter neural network. And by extension of that, "fake news" will be targeted and the all knowing AI knowledge base will be used to determine what is false or true. This will be the end of disent. When they say we won't own anything, and we'll be happy, they also mean knowledge.

visarga 4y ago

AI is not just for creators, it's also for readers: summarisation, fact checking, "talking to" articles, books and papers.

candiodari 4y ago
Currently it seems mostly useful for exercising human fact checking ability ...
- homarp 4y ago
  the new turing test
Lio 4y ago
"Fact checking" is the one I worry about there. If AI confidently tells you something is true will you know that it's not? It's obvious when it's telling you it's still 2022 but what about more everything else?
- visarga 4y ago
  Better than no checking, which is what we will do 99% of the time. There is a NLP task called "entailment", where two affirmations are judged to see if they support each other or not. A combination of search + entailment would work for fact-checking articles. But if you want to do this properly you need to first mine all facts from all sources, then do reconciliation, then update your "truth" table for reference. Probably everyone will want to select the sources of truth they want loaded into the system, we're not going to agree on truth. Even the bare minimum of knowing when an affirmation is controversial or doesn't exist in references would be of great help. AI could indicate <controversial> tags for the first and <citation needed> for the latter. Fortunately search can tell us when no results are found, unlike LLMs.

coffeeblack 4y ago

In software development, it probably increases earning potential, because you can outsource all the tedious coding to the AI and have more time to manage the big picture of how your software interacts with other components, is optimized for certain tasks, etc. So you can deliver more value in the same time frame.

alexb_ 4y ago
Are you aware of what happens when the amount of value that can be produced from workers exceeds the demand? Salaries get demolished, jobs get cut.
- w0m 4y ago
  existing* jobs; but it also opens up entire new markets that weren't feasible prior. In the US as an example; ~150 years ago 80% of the population had to farm to feed the country. Today it's 1%. Yea; '97% of jobs lost!' - but it gave the workforce the power/freedom to build other new/amazing things also. I know that's a trite example; but I like it as it makes it clear that the status quo is not an immutable (or entirely positive) thing.
vbezhenar 4y ago
What tedious for you is essential for me. I take great care writing every line of my code. I'm actually paying for Copilot and use for repeating blocks of code. But that's a miniscule amount of time saved, like IDE autocomplete, just increases quality of life. So far no AI written any substantial amount of not-completely-trivial code that I'd accept. And amount of time tweaking its output exceeds amount of time I'd spend writing that code.
- danielbln 4y ago
  The question is, will this still be the case in 2, 5, 10 years. Is there a hard limit to how well these models will perform, or will we look back at "carefully, manually crafted lines of code" as we do now at punchcards.

ilaksh 4y ago

Maybe there could be services like Patreon where you subscribe to support them, but the content made by creators is used to either train the AI or the embeddings are put in a vector database. Then when the user does a semantic search, it puts the results from creators or whatever type of curation first. This could provide better search results for the user, at least some degree of attribution or citation for some searches, and a way to support creators at least a little bit. It seems quite possible someone is already building such a system. I mean the alternative seems just to not even try to credit/support creators with these generative systems. I wonder if there is a way to embed a token that is unique and 100% identifiable so it will always be recoverable somehow. Although that might not really make sense. But if it was possible maybe it could be used for attribution.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
If training models becomes the next big business venture, which it seems is likely, then companies doing so might pay for exclusivity rights to content that can be accurately labeled by its author. The specialist authors could also be employed during the reinforcement learning phase to evaluate the response to various prompts within a domain. AI Trainer could easily become a new profession of its own.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

1000 a month is "successful" on patron? Talk about a low bar. ChatGPT might threaten mediocre writers, but not good ones, and never great ones.

manishsharan 4y ago

I think ChatGPT's programming prowess might be a bit overblown. A majority development efforts are spent in adding functionality to existing code , fixing bugs and reducing technical debt. I am not sure ChatGPT can do this.

wordpad25 4y ago
yet
Karunamon 4y ago
Only for arbitrary reasons. ChatGPT is entirely capable of being provided a block of code and then answering questions about it or making modifications to it. Without the token limit and with some way to guarantee that the code you provided won't make its way into their training data, this would be an entirely reasonable use case.
WithinReason 4y ago
Sure, at least not for 2 more weeks.

NhanH 4y ago

I have always thought that most, if not all, people that called themselves “content creators” are not providing much value. And in aggregate they are probably net negative due to their spamminess. Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned. All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.

gitfan86 4y ago
I expect this theme to continue and expand across many "jobs". There are a lot of people who are just plugging numbers into spreadsheets all day and you would think "yes but when something doesn't fit they have to be smart and use human intelligence to fix the problem" However if you see what happens in practice all they do is send an e-mail to someone else saying there is a problem. ChatGTP can do that part. You don't need many of these pencil pushers
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  The irony is these types of jobs are usually in companies that aren't going to spend any money to invest in the back office tools/processes their employees use on a daily basis. Any AI/ML tooling is so far away from that type of company that those jobs might be safer than others.
  - Tarsul 4y ago
    not if (rather when) Microsoft includes its AI into MS Office. And I've read somewhere that that's exactly what they are planning.
    - paleotrope 4y ago
      That will last until Microsoft realizes it cannibalizes Office licenses.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

> Searching for information is about to experience a paradigm shift as big as using browsers instead of phone books A more appropriate comparison would be that information is about to experience a paradigm shift as big as reading blogs instead of books.

rhaway84773 4y ago

I was reading an article comparing chat GPT results with the Google equivalent, and how much better the chat GPT result was. Of course, in reality, once I reduced the search terms to make it more Google friendly (chatGPT’s conversational mode requires a lot of superfluous language, whereas a Google search does better with only keywords), Google returned the same result much faster. The difference was that Google didn’t print the entire result. It asked me to click a link to get the answer. Which I did, and clicking the link and loading the website was still significantly faster than chatGPT. But what made it clear for me is that besides it’s conversational approach (which I don’t find beneficial), chatGPT’s biggest advantage appears to be that it’s ingestion method means that it is able to completely evade copyright, and present somebody else’s results as it’s own. Google could have done exactly the same thing and presented the entire result on its own page, but since it’s not got “AI” which we’ve apparently decided doesn’t need to honor copyright, it doesn’t do that. AI’s biggest advantage right now appears to be the bag of wool it is placing before our eyes that’s preventing us from questioning it’s blatant and outright copyright theft and abuse.

Karunamon 4y ago
And to that I say, good riddance. Copyright as it exists in 2023 is an abusive dead weight on knowledge and culture and we would be better without it.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  Don't throw the baby out with the bath water! Copyright as it exists today may have too long a term. But getting rid of it entirely would create massive problems. Film, music and books would become uneconomic to produce overnight. Things like GPL would be unworkable.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    I don't think so. We already live in a world where anything playing on a movie screen has a digital equivalent easy to find for free; ditto music and books. Despite that, sales continue to increase every single year. While removing it from the underground would no doubt decrease sales, calling it "uneconomic to produce" is unnecessarily apocalyptic. As for software licensing, the GPL and most licenses would become irrelevant, since the copying can now happen both ways.

btbuildem 4y ago

Anything that helps put advertising in a deep grave is a good thing.

t344344 4y ago

I think AI democratizes writing and "content production". Now anyone can produce good texts. That includes uneducated migrants and half autistic programmers.

lm28469 4y ago
Just like netflix can produce good content, but it's shit by every metrics. If checks the checkboxes for "movies", :"documentaries", &c. but most of the time it's bland as fuck and not worth watching "Content" is good if all you are is a container
- t344344 4y ago
  Netflix produces garbage, because they want garbage. Imagine there would be some AI that produces movies. Some interesting person (war veteran) would tell it its story, did a few iterations and corrections, and in a month would have a decent movie... That will happen with writing now!

risyachka 4y ago

AI will most likely just increase the speed of development/content production etc. It makes no sense for companies to fire anyone. It makes sense to make everyone use AI so they get even more value from each employee, maximizing their profits and market position.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>Because ChatGPT is so hugely popular and experiencing truly massive demand already, you may not have been able to actually personally use it yet, but suffice to say, it's kind of like magic. And it's still early day Hypefluff. Could have replaced ChatGPT with crypto, penny stocks, or Juicero. Show me the money. I mean actually show me. No more theorycrafting, hypotheticals, or bullshitting. Show me a company using ChatGPT and how its use is reflected on the bottom line of their financial statement.

RupertEisenhart 4y ago
You dont think the commercialization speed of GPT3 via CoPilot is evidence of something? You think that was a one-off?
danielbln 4y ago
ChatGPT was released less than 3 months ago, maybe give it a minute? The ecosystem around LLMs has been flourishing and is accelerating, look at langchain, look at all the open models out there. And in comparison to crypto, there is hard, actual usefulness to it, today.
newsletterthrow 4y ago
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benja123 4y ago

This is part of progress (be it good or bad progress). It used to be that the majority of the US population worked in agriculture and today thanks to automation - it’s around 1% of the population. Same goes for numerous roles (secretaries, switchboard operators etc.) As far as ChatGPT goes - I have a lot of concerns around it, but I am still not convinced it will replace search. I think it might compliment search. Either way I think it’s a good thing if how we search changes. Search is broken, it no longer brings me the best results, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between ads and legit links (this is of course intentional because of revenue and KPIs) and I know longer trust the results. I am not sure if chatGPT is the answer, but maybe it’s part of the answer. Important lesson - teach your kids to have a self development mindset. They need to be prepared to have multiple career changes and that their current skill set might be made obsolete at any moment. It sucks, but it’s reality and when things change, they change fast.

jliptzin 4y ago

I think it does a great job of synthesizing certain things like recipes, book summaries, etc but as soon as there’s anything important involved it’s just wasting time. It spits out a lot of things that seem correct but on closer inspection is not and that ends up costing a lot of time down the road. If it’s not right 100% of the time, or at least tells you when it’s not that confident, it can’t really be trusted. At the very least hopefully it’ll help get rid of all the SEO junk sites littering the internet.

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bdcravens 4y ago

Basically: won't anyone think of the horse shoe makers?

tmikaeld 4y ago

I'm more worried about the internet itself, as soon as this technology is accessible to bots, we would no longer be able to distinguish if we're chatting or reading an article by a real human or an AI. Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT..

dagw 4y ago
Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to write a rebuttal to your statement. It seems to have pretty strong opinions on the matter: While it's true that advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have made it possible for machines like ChatGPT to produce human-like responses, the idea that we would no longer be able to distinguish between a real human and an AI-generated response is not entirely accurate. Firstly, it's important to note that AI-generated responses are typically generated with a specific purpose or objective in mind. ChatGPT, for example, is designed to generate responses to questions and prompts in a way that mimics human conversation. However, it's unlikely that an AI-generated response would be able to replicate the nuances and complexities of human conversation in a completely convincing way. Secondly, there are various methods that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by an AI or a human. For instance, machine-generated responses tend to be more formulaic and less spontaneous than human responses. Additionally, there are techniques such as the Turing Test that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. It's also worth noting that the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits. For instance, it can help to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and enhance our understanding of complex problems. In summary, while it's true that advances in AI and natural language processing have the potential to generate responses that are difficult to distinguish from those generated by humans, there are still ways to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. Moreover, the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits, and we should not be overly worried about the potential negative effects of this technology.
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  That's because it's specifically designed not to value itself higher than any human, even if you try and force it.

teekert 4y ago

I always thought about writing this insightful blog about whay Ayn Rand would think of surveillance capitalism. She's a very strong proponent of the right to privacy, but at the same time she is a proponent of an unregulated market, that market produced surveillance capitalism. Or did it? Maybe it was produced by companies manipulating the rules behind the scenes, Ayn would hate that! Perhaps she would feel the need to take matters into her own hands: self-host all the things! I bet she'd have her own server, even though it runs that socialist, shared OS called Linux ;) ... So I ask ChatGPT what would Ayn think? And it writes a very nice, balanced text. Exactly in line with my thoughts, just written more concisely and in much better English. I really enjoyed that conversation with ChatGPT. I did loose the interest to write the assay. Or perhaps I can copy paste it to my blog... Makes me feel like a CheatGPT though.

atemerev 4y ago

"Content creators" are doomed, of course. It is no longer a sustainable income source; now, you have to be a niche artist, like people who try their luck in modern art: only a few of them will invent something original enough and be lucky enough to be successful, the rest will get nothing. Or, you can switch to be an AI operator and run mass production content pipelines. There will be less of those compared to individual content creators, but still sustainable enough. Like, only 3% of people are now professionally involved in food farming, and that's a good thing. There is no other way.