6 ms·

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that altho

by abtinf 4y ago

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the reduction in quality and switches vendors; new entrants underbid the market further; firms start to differentiate on quality at a price premium, further eroding low end margins; the money saved on this is invested in new roles for to ensure marketing quality control. The error is to believe that a given state of the world is static. It never is. Every day, millions of very smart and capable humans apply their minds to figure out how to make money by selling a product or service that satisfies. And everyday, what it takes to satisfy customers changes a little bit. Posts like this drop all the context that led to such a job even being possible in the first place.

QuiDortDine 4y ago
As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.
- blibble 4y ago
  wait until it starts training on its own output and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam
- codersfocus 4y ago
  With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary
  - SCAQTony 4y ago
    To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I both strongly agree (“content is a plague”) and strongly disagree (artisans, even digital ones, make society better). I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today. That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.
  - QuiDortDine 4y ago
    > It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.
    - omnimus 4y ago
      More likely outcome is that people will consume even more content. Because it will be more addictive and tailor made for them. Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.
      - vintermann 4y ago
        But is the idea of "content" really all that? When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI. But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say. Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".
- jacknews 4y ago
  'Content' is going to be so much better when it's written by gpt ... lol.
- emrah 4y ago
  ChatGPT has the answers it has because of all that content people have been posting online. What happens when people stop posting and there is nothing to further train the ai? Ai doesn't have intrinsic value, it has to be trained on something
- alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
  It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.
  - jgust 4y ago
    Something something 100 monkeys with a typewriter? I'm expecting some margin of error introduced into these models that produces a surreal fever dream era of AI generated content on the internet.
  - bko 4y ago
    There doesn't need to be new material. Just mechanism to segregate between good and bad and that will always exist if humans are interesting. LLMs use reinforcement learning once they have a base understanding of words. It's like how modern chess engines don't analyze games, just play against themselves. LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer
    - alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
      That works because chess is a closed world. Without input from outside, two LLMs training against each other would most likely become raving lunatics -- just as two humans locked in a dark cell together would do.
    - lagrange77 4y ago
      > LLMs use reinforcement learning > LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer You're describing RLHF (Reinforcement learning with Human Feedback) used by ChatGPT, right. I wouldn't say that LLMs use it, but RLHF is used to create a higher level model on top of a LLM.
famouswaffles 4y ago
Creative writing output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5(and it gets even better with targeted refinement). People say 60% as good or whatever but don't be too surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.
- troyvit 4y ago
  I don't think it matters if AI is a better writer. From the post: "[...] although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin." So yeah if we consumers of content are lucky we won't see much of a difference, but the web has been in a break-neck race to the bottom for over a decade now. Companies that pay for the creation of content have and will continue to pay as little as they can as long as the content generates clicks. Given that 27.7% of those clicks come from bot farms[1] (and that number is rising) we already see a huge market that's just bots writing content and monetizing it for other bots. We humans will get to sift through that to try to find real content. [1] https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/bad-bot-report/ https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/b...
Cpoll 4y ago
Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  It’s the same sentiment as being angry the printing press is robbing scribes of their job. It just might be that technology advances and society no longer has the same need for your skill and you need to adapt.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    The printing press was an upgrade, the FTA is a cost cutting downgrade.
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      If I drive a luxury sports car and I lose my job, I might get rid of the luxury car and switch to a compact. Both are good enough, one is cheaper. That’s the way the world works. It’s not nice to hear the results of a bot are good enough when you know your results are better. Tough luck.
klyrs 4y ago
> A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only if you focus on long-term macroeconomics, and ignore the impact of microeconomics on real people. Today, this writer is out of a major chunk of their income.
smakmur 4y ago
As someone who manages our own brand's social media, and just started using ChatGPT, I was surprised ChatGPT could provide with captions that are pretty good and moderately inspiring. Try it out yourself. Definitely a timesaver and cost-reduction

by abtinf 4y ago

QuiDortDine 4y ago

As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.

blibble 4y ago
wait until it starts training on its own output and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam
codersfocus 4y ago
With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary
- SCAQTony 4y ago
  To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?
vineyardmike 4y ago
I both strongly agree (“content is a plague”) and strongly disagree (artisans, even digital ones, make society better). I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today. That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.
- QuiDortDine 4y ago
  > It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.
  - omnimus 4y ago
    More likely outcome is that people will consume even more content. Because it will be more addictive and tailor made for them. Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      But is the idea of "content" really all that? When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI. But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say. Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".
jacknews 4y ago
'Content' is going to be so much better when it's written by gpt ... lol.
emrah 4y ago
ChatGPT has the answers it has because of all that content people have been posting online. What happens when people stop posting and there is nothing to further train the ai? Ai doesn't have intrinsic value, it has to be trained on something
alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.
- jgust 4y ago
  Something something 100 monkeys with a typewriter? I'm expecting some margin of error introduced into these models that produces a surreal fever dream era of AI generated content on the internet.
- bko 4y ago
  There doesn't need to be new material. Just mechanism to segregate between good and bad and that will always exist if humans are interesting. LLMs use reinforcement learning once they have a base understanding of words. It's like how modern chess engines don't analyze games, just play against themselves. LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer
  - alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
    That works because chess is a closed world. Without input from outside, two LLMs training against each other would most likely become raving lunatics -- just as two humans locked in a dark cell together would do.
  - lagrange77 4y ago
    > LLMs use reinforcement learning > LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer You're describing RLHF (Reinforcement learning with Human Feedback) used by ChatGPT, right. I wouldn't say that LLMs use it, but RLHF is used to create a higher level model on top of a LLM.

famouswaffles 4y ago

Creative writing output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5(and it gets even better with targeted refinement). People say 60% as good or whatever but don't be too surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

troyvit 4y ago
I don't think it matters if AI is a better writer. From the post: "[...] although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin." So yeah if we consumers of content are lucky we won't see much of a difference, but the web has been in a break-neck race to the bottom for over a decade now. Companies that pay for the creation of content have and will continue to pay as little as they can as long as the content generates clicks. Given that 27.7% of those clicks come from bot farms[1] (and that number is rising) we already see a huge market that's just bots writing content and monetizing it for other bots. We humans will get to sift through that to try to find real content. [1] https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/bad-bot-report/ https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/b...

Cpoll 4y ago

Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.

tinus_hn 4y ago
It’s the same sentiment as being angry the printing press is robbing scribes of their job. It just might be that technology advances and society no longer has the same need for your skill and you need to adapt.
- pnt12 4y ago
  The printing press was an upgrade, the FTA is a cost cutting downgrade.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    If I drive a luxury sports car and I lose my job, I might get rid of the luxury car and switch to a compact. Both are good enough, one is cheaper. That’s the way the world works. It’s not nice to hear the results of a bot are good enough when you know your results are better. Tough luck.

klyrs 4y ago

> A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only if you focus on long-term macroeconomics, and ignore the impact of microeconomics on real people. Today, this writer is out of a major chunk of their income.

smakmur 4y ago

As someone who manages our own brand's social media, and just started using ChatGPT, I was surprised ChatGPT could provide with captions that are pretty good and moderately inspiring. Try it out yourself. Definitely a timesaver and cost-reduction