19 ms·

ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners

59 points by erehweb 3y ago

pinewurst 3y ago
https://archive.ph/96CPv https://archive.ph/96CPv
mensetmanusman 3y ago
It does look like knowledge work will go first, it was surprisingly the easiest. Taking control of $100,000 robots to manufacture does have value at the high-end, but still can't compete with humans at the low end. I wonder if this can bring some human-friendly Manufacturing back to certain locations. The environmental impact of outsourcing is incredibly large, making things closer to home with newly freed hands is probably better. It might also help with the obesity crisis having people spend time sitting 10 hours a day less frequently.
- dinvlad 3y ago
  Nah, it’ll be just a new, higher level of abstraction (and provided we even solve the hallucination problem, which is not a given). Engelbart’s and Parkinson’s laws at it once again. In other words, the new work fill the same time, and we’ll just be doing 10x of it (if we can solve the current challenges with LLMs). The human mind is unsurprisingly adaptable to changing conditions and great at abstract thinking, which is what ironically distinguishes it from these machines. We also tend to severely underestimate our own abilities and overestimate the importance of the tools.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > We also tend to severely underestimate our own abilities and overestimate the importance of the tools. Even on HN, this is rampant. I wonder, is it because people are so used to interacting with most other humans solely through a chat interface that they perceive ChatGPT as being close to a real AGI, almost indistinguishable from human intelligence?
    - dinvlad 3y ago
      Pretty much :-) Text generation (and rudimental comprehension) is perceived to be a sign of higher intelligence, simply because it's our natural human UI. Ironically, we tend to limit our imagination on what _we_ could do that computers won't, while simultaneously overuse it to imagine what they _could_ do but won't. One very good example of this is humor - LLM models at present are terrible at generating anything but dad jokes, and are even worse at their attempts to explain "deep" humor. Gary Marcus had a recent episode on it, very interesting insights from top experts in the field: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-ai-make-you-laugh/id1532110146?i=1000613196164 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-ai-make-you-laugh/.... They make a case that LLMs were specifically optimized for text generation and not explanation, while humans are almost the opposite. I believe somewhere in there is also our tendency for confirmation bias and overlooking imperfections where we don't expect some. AI may generate nonsense details, but when we look at the overall text, we don't notice them since we're just awed by the output, and think if it looks flawless it must be flawless. Same thing as with mentalist tricks. And finally, we only think of our intelligence as thoughts carefully animated into sentences, while there's this whole "iceberg" level of feelings and unconscious cognition, which we don't even notice ourselves, but it would be extremely hard to reproduce in AI and we have not even the slightest idea how.
- Closi 3y ago
  > Taking control of $100,000 robots to manufacture does have value at the high-end, but still can't compete with humans at the low end. The problem with robots isn't the physical cost vs a human, it's the task flexibility & cost to program. This is something that could also theoretically be solved with AI in the (fairly close) future.
  - ForestCritter 3y ago
    I worked in a semi automated assembly line. We,as workers were pretty good at keeping the robots running and knowing their quirks and my supervisor was even more knowledgeable. Despite this we still had to call up an engineer daily to trouble shoot why the robots were revolting. AI is not remotely near solving this.
    - Closi 3y ago
      Disagree - AI is getting much closer to solving this fast. Latest generation robotic arms with vision are taking on a greater variety of tasks (e.g. bin/case picking from a mixed tote), more reliably, with a better ability to adaptively recover failed tasks. The progress here are about not needing parts/items to be in a predictable/consistent location and still understanding how to handle/retrieve them and perform actions on them. This stuff is in sites right now.
      - ForestCritter 3y ago
        picking stuff from bins is a far stretch from a full assembly line production. Latest generation arms are surely being developed but the are far from fitting affordability profiles for the average American factory. It sounds great when you are reading it but fabrication is not like picking stuff from bins. The colossal amount of programming for every human task that is performed in a factory that builds compressors would be a dauntingly expensive enterprise even without counting the physical robotic equipement that would be needed. Theory and practice don't always correlate.
        3y ago
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Whenever I hear about AI taking knowledge work, I always think of that show Dirty Jobs. Jobs like 'sewer cleaner' are not going to be automated anytime soon. So eventually all the fun jobs will be AI driven and humans will be left cleaning shit off the walls.
  - HKH2 3y ago
    Then we will soon see what we really are.
  - elforce002 3y ago
    Interesting. Everyone will be the same under this new era. This sounds awfully like communism to me, hehe.
indigodaddy 3y ago
Perhaps the free tier should be jettisoned (at least in the workplace/enterprise?) in an effort to curb this? Obviously if it’s free then some companies may make these sorts of decisions. But if they have to pay then at least they will think more about eliminating their “lone” writer..
- booleandilemma 3y ago
  Why would OpenAI care? Maybe Netflix can be less convenient so Blockbuster won't have such a hard time competing.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  The long-term play is probably to capture a large portion of the salary savings these companies get. But you need to get companies hooked and dependent upon your product first. Once lock-in is achieved, they will ratchet up prices as high as possible.
  - indigodaddy 3y ago
    That makes sense
  - nradov 3y ago
    Marketing and advertising copy as a service. Automated A/B testing and learning based on integration into web analytics and e-commerce systems. Imagine if your advertisements, product descriptions, white papers, and corporate blog posts automatically learned from customer behavior and revised themselves to maximize customer engagement and revenue.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Why would you want to curb this? Personally Id rather have more people dog sitting and fixing AC units, i.e things that provide actual value.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    There aren't enough of those sorts of jobs to accommodate everyone, though. And how large could the market for that sort of thing be when a large percentage of the population can no longer earn enough money to pay for them?
blakesterz 3y ago
“Think of AI as generally acting as a high-end intern,” he said. “Jobs that are mostly designed as entry-level jobs to break you into a field where you do something kind of useful, but it’s also sort of a steppingstone to the next level — those are the kinds of jobs under threat.” Every bit of this article worries me. Not because I think it's coming for my job, but because it's coming for so many other jobs. "Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality." That's the part that makes me think this is going to cause some serious job losses. "the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality." All of the AIs are pretty ok right now, and we're already seeing some (probably not many?) jobs cut because the stuff they make is "good enough". I'm worried what kids just starting college now will face in 4-5 years when they're trying to start a career.
- basisword 3y ago
  I think a lot of the jobs that go will be the ones that popped up recently. The low level white collar ones. Social media content writers for example. That tends to be a very well paid job compared with the skill necessary to do it and the benefits it provides. I imagine most of these jobs will just get replaced with something else that the AI can’t do and that only new grads will accept doing. For your kids, I think you’re imagining more progress with AI than we’ll have in the next five years. I think the changes of the last 3 years will be much more impactful on new grads. I recently switched role and learning remotely is a lot more difficult for various reasons. I’m already well into my career so I imagine for new grads it will be incredibly difficult. I’d worry more about that than AI provided they’re going to college to study something “useful”.
  - housemusicfan 3y ago
    [dead]
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Also, most of the work that is produced is of poor quality anyway. 99% of writing is meh, so ChatGPT is not a downgrade.
booleandilemma 3y ago
Managers began referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack This is horrifying.
- adamredwoods 3y ago
  Reflects the attitude of the company toward its workers. I have one friend who, instead of firing her, her company asked her to use ChatGPT and increased her work load. Smart managers will augment their workers, unless, of course, the worker was poor-performing to begin with.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - curioussavage 3y ago
    Increased work load is just as nightmarish to me. In any case as improvements continue that would probably just be kicking the can down the road and abusing workers, before firing them later. Automation should let people work less. Not just give rich people leverage to work us harder. Making people juggle more tasks at once with the AI will just burn them out.
    - dinvlad 3y ago
      Fortunately or not, history has shown time and time again that Parkinson's law still holds - work will always fill the allotted time. Pretty much the only way to decrease it is to mandate fewer working hours, like is starting to be done in Europe, for example.
    - nradov 3y ago
      If you want to work less you can do that. Many professional writers aren't regular W-2 employees but rather independent contractors paid on a piecework basis. They can use any writing tools, including ChatGPT, and can work as few hours as they like. Of course, prices will continue to fall for low-effort writing that doesn't involve any unique insight or original research. That was already happening with offshore outsourcing before ChatGPT was released.
usaar333 3y ago
> “In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. What an odd statement. Knowledge work has been automated for as long as I can remember. Compilers, automated QA, data entry, etc. In many fields, more labor demand resulted from productivity gains (software); in others, demand didn't rise to compensate (bookkeeping). The question is where is additional demand going from higher savings given productivity boosts. I don't see more demand for HVAC technicians. Maybe dog walkers.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  But all the examples you gave (compilers, automated QA, data entry) fall firmly within the "repetitive" marker. These were all pretty much rote jobs where a person was essentially asked to be like a computer and follow a simple algorithm. But ChatGPT is now killing jobs that are solely about creativity, like copywriting. That is a new, and rather unexpected, turn of events. I saw a good quote, I think it was on Twitter: "What kind of world have we built where the humans slave away at physically demanding jobs for minimum wage, while the computers write poetry and paint all day."
  - shreyshnaccount 3y ago
    Yeah, before llms it was hardly imaginable that these jobs would someday be automated.
  - deepspace 3y ago
    > jobs that are solely about creativity, like copywriting But the point is that the kind of copywriting that CAN be replaced by ChatGPT is just as repetitive and non-creative than those other jobs.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Don't agree with that at all. If it were simply "repetitive and non-creative", why hire copywriters at all, why not just have the engineers or product managers write the copy? I've worked with good copywriters, and was impressed with the quality of writing they did. The point is that ChatGPT excels at the type of creative writing that previously we thought was solely the domain of humans. I think you are getting things backwards if you think that because ChatGPT can do it that it is repetitive and non-creative.
myth_drannon 3y ago
I'm just wondering how the companies will make money if there is noone to buy their products. Wealthy class can't support the economy.
- morkalork 3y ago
  US is kinda fucked in this regard already. The median income is what, 30k? Unless your product is cheap or a necessity of some kind, you've probably already lost half your potential audience.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > The median income is what, 30k? A bit over 40K if you count everyone, and closer to 60K if you just count people working full time.
  - myth_drannon 3y ago
    And with that income it will be hard to support social programs like pensions. So the pyramid scheme might just collapse and retirees are screwed. In that sense the talk about UBI looks completely bonkers if no high earners left to fund it.
    - elforce002 3y ago
      UBI doesn't make sense at all.
- umeshunni 3y ago
  There are plenty of people in the world and the median income globally has risen rapidly over the last few decades. All it means is that wasteful western lifestyles can't be continued while producing little of value.
  - myth_drannon 3y ago
    They will collapse as fast as they have risen. I don't see how 3rd world economies will survive without the westerm middle class. I guess just slaughter each other as humanity always did with excess populace.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I thought this was a good and fair article on the topic, which is kinda rare because often you just get tons of speculation. This article was just filled with real people who actually did lose their job due to ChatGPT, and I think it just shows the tip of the iceberg. I would really be worried right now if I were a marketing copywriter. I've seen (and posted about) examples where ChatGPT still falls behind human ingenuity, but the fact is that it really only falls behind some of the best of human ingenuity. Just guessing, but I'd believe that ChatGPT is as good as or better than 75% of copywriters, and even for that upper tier of copywriters, probably only about 10-15% of the writing they do is in an area where the additional quality makes a difference. Just a worrisome future ahead in my opinion.
- nradov 3y ago
  No one actually reads most of that copy anyway. It's the knowledge work equivalent of digging a hole just to fill it in again. Totally pointless, and done more out of inertia than any real business value.
  - ertian 3y ago
    Saw a comic in the early days of ChatGPT, I wish I'd saved it: What the applicant writes: "I want this job." How the application is sent: "Dear Sir or Madam, I am writing to you today to inquire about the position of blah blah blah..." What the recruiter reads: "This guy wants this job." I'd like a tool I could point at a modern tech company website to read through all the meaningless ad copy and buzzwords and spit out a two-sentence summary of what the thing actually does.
    - ericbarrett 3y ago
      ChatGPT can already do this. In fact, I think it's much better at this kind of summarization task than it is at novel text generation. You'd have to write some glue code to automate it via the API, though I'd be surprised if there aren't open source tools to do it already. As a demo, try this prompt; you might have to trim some to stay under the token limit: Summarize the major arguments and sentiment of the following Hacker News posts. Provide your answer in a brief, bullet-point format: <paste text of HN comment thread here>
nixcraft 3y ago
The "Statement on AI Risk" by Sam Altman and wealthy individuals fails to address the potential impact of AI on job security. Rather, it focuses on concerns regarding war and human extinction. Despite my attempts to raise awareness about the issue, I have received negative feedback. It's important to consider how the everyday struggles of families may affect their ability to purchase products and services such as phones, streaming, gaming, and others when AI takes away their white-collar jobs. Maybe there will be war because there are no jobs while rich folks are getting rich. I hope I remain wrong.
- delfinom 3y ago
  Because wealthy individuals live in a bubble. They also don't fail to realize when you ultimately drive 80% unemployment due to AI replacing everyone's job. That war is going to be internal and it's going to look like the French revolution.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Possibly more like the colour revolution in Egypt. 80% unemployment managed with machine guns and state control of all information sources.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      Egypt has about 4 guns for every 100 people. The US has about 120. I think it would play out differently here.
      - swexbe 3y ago
        Uh huh, your glock won't do much against the AI drones.
      - sgt101 3y ago
        It depends on where they are pointed.
  - caeril 3y ago
msoad 3y ago
I know someone who does copywriting for cybersecurity firms. She writes those seemingly mundane statements these companies release. I've always wondered if anyone actually reads them. She admits that most of her work involves taking a template and slotting in the new information. It's stuff like "Company X's response to security threat Y," which often doesn't contain anything particularly insightful. It usually just states that the company is aware of the threat and is working on it. Nothing technical or useful. I'd be sad to see her lose her job, but at the same time, I can see how unfulfilling this job must be for her. She often feels that the work she does doesn't matter to anyone. To me, solution is not to invent more bullshit jobs. We need a better system for humans to share the fruits of millennials of progress together.
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago
  Let's start a commune.
- elforce002 3y ago
  This is wishful thinking at best. She's fending herself and she's making an honest living out of it. This system is not perfect but what is the alternative? There's no current solution for what lies ahead (potentially job loss on an scale never seen before). I'm seeing government outright banning LLMs from certain industries just to avoid social unrest.
SkipperCat 3y ago
I wonder how this is going to affect the cost of accessing ChatGPT and other AI systems. If ChatGPT can replace a copywriter, who may have an annual cost of $30-$50k per year, then it could easily justify a cost $10k or more per year. The current model seems to be just like Uber. Get into as many markets as you can. Provide the service below cost. Then jack up the price and make money. As someone who uses ChatGPT as a learning tool for various programming tasks, I'll miss it if it becomes too expensive. Its a helpful tool, but not worth more than $20/month.
- nharada 3y ago
  I think unlike Uber, the future floor for costs is probably very low. You can get insane improvements on inference costs/speed when you dedicate time and money towards optimization.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Uber has hard constraints that are difficult to significantly reduce with scale. GPT is already approaching adequate on consumer grade GPUs. Pretty sure the price is going to trend towards zero, no matter what the salary is of the employee it replaces.
jl2718 3y ago
How can you internet in {current year}, and seriously think we need more content writers? We’re not talking about top-tier investigative journalists blowing scandals open and speaking truth to power. We’re talking about the meaningless banter filling space between ads that turn a simple recipe search into a dystopian nightmare. I hope and trust that they will find meaning in a career fixing and building and caring for physical things that people actually want to pay for. This is a step forward.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more, and my work is largely content writing. For content to have any value, it should contain unique information or an especially good and useful presentation of existing information. Otherwise making that content is just worthless busywork. Like the example in this thread of a poster making a press release. How could AI add any information that is of any value? The same goes for AI generated images. If your images are not extremely relevant you are doing it wrong. Use images of your product, not random people smiling. Stock photos, Corporate Memphis art and AI images are a negative value for the information you're presenting. Just as you, I hope companies some day understand that their worthless filler content is just getting in the way of their sales.
  - jl2718 3y ago
    Thank you for that perspective. From the AI side, I think it’s funny how there can be so much simultaneous interest in both “AI writing”, which is exactly as you say, and “AI summarization”, which is like inverting the AI writing function to retrieve the prompt data. An absurd, but seemingly likely, end state of this is an arms race between the two technologies, completely transparent to the user, and resulting in roughly the same user experience, which is always set to the limit of their tolerance.
sircastor 3y ago
This feels largely like Fear-mongering to me, and it can't be helped but noticed that it is coming from a source that is likewise threatened by automation. Fear of change and fear of the future sell newspapers/subscriptions/get people to quit. I don't doubt the threat to copy-writing and similar jobs, but I also suspect that the call/response nature of the advertising industry is going to result in people being inoculated to ad-copy written by ChatGPT, and it will start to sound as hokey as old ads you find in computer magazines.
nickelcitymario 3y ago
As someone who makes a good portion of my living as a writer, I choose to embrace ChatGPT to make me more productive. That's how I stay relevant. For example, today it helped me write a press release. We had dialogue back and forth. I told it to ask me thoughtful questions, and it did. After 5 minutes of back-and-forth, I had the bones of a high-quality press release put together. I then edited it until it met my standards, and submitted it. This process would have previously taken me a few hours. Today it took less than 30 minutes. As a result, my value to my employer has gone up because of ChatGPT. I'm able to get a lot more done with it, and they'd be fools to simply replace me with the bot. In other words, and I'm hardly the only one saying this: ChatGPT is not a replacement for people. It's an augmentation. It's a bicycle for the mind, to steal Steve Jobs's famous metaphor. I think if you're a writer who refuses to embrace this new reality, you should absolutely be worried. But if you embrace the inevitable, the combination of a skilled copywriter + ChatGPT is incredible. It's my writing partner. I'm still in charge, calling all the shots. But my writing partner helps to prevent writer's block. Often, I won't use a single word it produced. Instead, it gives me a starting point. Sometimes that starting point is little more than "I need to do better than what this machine produced, because this is crap." But it's soooo much easier to improve on garbage than it is to create out of the blue. So, I don't think AI is coming for our jobs as writers. If used well, it's the best writing partner you could ask for.
- ZooCow 3y ago
  > In other words, and I'm hardly the only one saying this: ChatGPT is not a replacement for people. It's an augmentation. It's a bicycle for the mind, to steal Steve Jobs's famous metaphor. This is the analogy that jumped out to me as well. LLMs seem to be more of a vehicle than a destination. Like a bicycle, LLMs need to be operated with the direction and effort of an operator to ensure it stays on course and doesn’t veer into traffic. Continuing the analogy, I suspect that LLMs will open up traditional white collar jobs to more people. More people can get to the destination on time with the aid of a bicycle than on foot.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
throwawayaa 3y ago
As an entrepreuner, i struggled to find freelancers, ChatGPT fixed that problem for me.. Addition to RegExps & ML i use to automate most of my work. I think finding right people and managing them is pain in the ass
- elforce002 3y ago
  Interesting. I'm an entrepreneur too and the key thing here is people. Less people working = less purchasing power = less money available = less money in our pockets. See how that works? Everyone is going to be impacted and no amount of automation from our part will solve that.

59 points by erehweb 3y ago

https://archive.ph/96CPv https://archive.ph/96CPv

It does look like knowledge work will go first, it was surprisingly the easiest. Taking control of $100,000 robots to manufacture does have value at the high-end, but still can't compete with humans at the low end. I wonder if this can bring some human-friendly Manufacturing back to certain locations. The environmental impact of outsourcing is incredibly large, making things closer to home with newly freed hands is probably better. It might also help with the obesity crisis having people spend time sitting 10 hours a day less frequently.

dinvlad 3y ago
Nah, it’ll be just a new, higher level of abstraction (and provided we even solve the hallucination problem, which is not a given). Engelbart’s and Parkinson’s laws at it once again. In other words, the new work fill the same time, and we’ll just be doing 10x of it (if we can solve the current challenges with LLMs). The human mind is unsurprisingly adaptable to changing conditions and great at abstract thinking, which is what ironically distinguishes it from these machines. We also tend to severely underestimate our own abilities and overestimate the importance of the tools.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > We also tend to severely underestimate our own abilities and overestimate the importance of the tools. Even on HN, this is rampant. I wonder, is it because people are so used to interacting with most other humans solely through a chat interface that they perceive ChatGPT as being close to a real AGI, almost indistinguishable from human intelligence?
  - dinvlad 3y ago
    Pretty much :-) Text generation (and rudimental comprehension) is perceived to be a sign of higher intelligence, simply because it's our natural human UI. Ironically, we tend to limit our imagination on what _we_ could do that computers won't, while simultaneously overuse it to imagine what they _could_ do but won't. One very good example of this is humor - LLM models at present are terrible at generating anything but dad jokes, and are even worse at their attempts to explain "deep" humor. Gary Marcus had a recent episode on it, very interesting insights from top experts in the field: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-ai-make-you-laugh/id1532110146?i=1000613196164 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-ai-make-you-laugh/.... They make a case that LLMs were specifically optimized for text generation and not explanation, while humans are almost the opposite. I believe somewhere in there is also our tendency for confirmation bias and overlooking imperfections where we don't expect some. AI may generate nonsense details, but when we look at the overall text, we don't notice them since we're just awed by the output, and think if it looks flawless it must be flawless. Same thing as with mentalist tricks. And finally, we only think of our intelligence as thoughts carefully animated into sentences, while there's this whole "iceberg" level of feelings and unconscious cognition, which we don't even notice ourselves, but it would be extremely hard to reproduce in AI and we have not even the slightest idea how.
Closi 3y ago
> Taking control of $100,000 robots to manufacture does have value at the high-end, but still can't compete with humans at the low end. The problem with robots isn't the physical cost vs a human, it's the task flexibility & cost to program. This is something that could also theoretically be solved with AI in the (fairly close) future.
- ForestCritter 3y ago
  I worked in a semi automated assembly line. We,as workers were pretty good at keeping the robots running and knowing their quirks and my supervisor was even more knowledgeable. Despite this we still had to call up an engineer daily to trouble shoot why the robots were revolting. AI is not remotely near solving this.
  - Closi 3y ago
    Disagree - AI is getting much closer to solving this fast. Latest generation robotic arms with vision are taking on a greater variety of tasks (e.g. bin/case picking from a mixed tote), more reliably, with a better ability to adaptively recover failed tasks. The progress here are about not needing parts/items to be in a predictable/consistent location and still understanding how to handle/retrieve them and perform actions on them. This stuff is in sites right now.
    - ForestCritter 3y ago
      picking stuff from bins is a far stretch from a full assembly line production. Latest generation arms are surely being developed but the are far from fitting affordability profiles for the average American factory. It sounds great when you are reading it but fabrication is not like picking stuff from bins. The colossal amount of programming for every human task that is performed in a factory that builds compressors would be a dauntingly expensive enterprise even without counting the physical robotic equipement that would be needed. Theory and practice don't always correlate.
      - 3y ago
yoyohello13 3y ago
Whenever I hear about AI taking knowledge work, I always think of that show Dirty Jobs. Jobs like 'sewer cleaner' are not going to be automated anytime soon. So eventually all the fun jobs will be AI driven and humans will be left cleaning shit off the walls.
- HKH2 3y ago
  Then we will soon see what we really are.
- elforce002 3y ago
  Interesting. Everyone will be the same under this new era. This sounds awfully like communism to me, hehe.

indigodaddy 3y ago

Perhaps the free tier should be jettisoned (at least in the workplace/enterprise?) in an effort to curb this? Obviously if it’s free then some companies may make these sorts of decisions. But if they have to pay then at least they will think more about eliminating their “lone” writer..

booleandilemma 3y ago
Why would OpenAI care? Maybe Netflix can be less convenient so Blockbuster won't have such a hard time competing.
mywittyname 3y ago
The long-term play is probably to capture a large portion of the salary savings these companies get. But you need to get companies hooked and dependent upon your product first. Once lock-in is achieved, they will ratchet up prices as high as possible.
- indigodaddy 3y ago
  That makes sense
- nradov 3y ago
  Marketing and advertising copy as a service. Automated A/B testing and learning based on integration into web analytics and e-commerce systems. Imagine if your advertisements, product descriptions, white papers, and corporate blog posts automatically learned from customer behavior and revised themselves to maximize customer engagement and revenue.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Why would you want to curb this? Personally Id rather have more people dog sitting and fixing AC units, i.e things that provide actual value.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  There aren't enough of those sorts of jobs to accommodate everyone, though. And how large could the market for that sort of thing be when a large percentage of the population can no longer earn enough money to pay for them?

blakesterz 3y ago

“Think of AI as generally acting as a high-end intern,” he said. “Jobs that are mostly designed as entry-level jobs to break you into a field where you do something kind of useful, but it’s also sort of a steppingstone to the next level — those are the kinds of jobs under threat.” Every bit of this article worries me. Not because I think it's coming for my job, but because it's coming for so many other jobs. "Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality." That's the part that makes me think this is going to cause some serious job losses. "the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality." All of the AIs are pretty ok right now, and we're already seeing some (probably not many?) jobs cut because the stuff they make is "good enough". I'm worried what kids just starting college now will face in 4-5 years when they're trying to start a career.

basisword 3y ago
I think a lot of the jobs that go will be the ones that popped up recently. The low level white collar ones. Social media content writers for example. That tends to be a very well paid job compared with the skill necessary to do it and the benefits it provides. I imagine most of these jobs will just get replaced with something else that the AI can’t do and that only new grads will accept doing. For your kids, I think you’re imagining more progress with AI than we’ll have in the next five years. I think the changes of the last 3 years will be much more impactful on new grads. I recently switched role and learning remotely is a lot more difficult for various reasons. I’m already well into my career so I imagine for new grads it will be incredibly difficult. I’d worry more about that than AI provided they’re going to college to study something “useful”.
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  [dead]
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Also, most of the work that is produced is of poor quality anyway. 99% of writing is meh, so ChatGPT is not a downgrade.

booleandilemma 3y ago

Managers began referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack This is horrifying.

adamredwoods 3y ago
Reflects the attitude of the company toward its workers. I have one friend who, instead of firing her, her company asked her to use ChatGPT and increased her work load. Smart managers will augment their workers, unless, of course, the worker was poor-performing to begin with.
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- curioussavage 3y ago
  Increased work load is just as nightmarish to me. In any case as improvements continue that would probably just be kicking the can down the road and abusing workers, before firing them later. Automation should let people work less. Not just give rich people leverage to work us harder. Making people juggle more tasks at once with the AI will just burn them out.
  - dinvlad 3y ago
    Fortunately or not, history has shown time and time again that Parkinson's law still holds - work will always fill the allotted time. Pretty much the only way to decrease it is to mandate fewer working hours, like is starting to be done in Europe, for example.
  - nradov 3y ago
    If you want to work less you can do that. Many professional writers aren't regular W-2 employees but rather independent contractors paid on a piecework basis. They can use any writing tools, including ChatGPT, and can work as few hours as they like. Of course, prices will continue to fall for low-effort writing that doesn't involve any unique insight or original research. That was already happening with offshore outsourcing before ChatGPT was released.

usaar333 3y ago

> “In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. What an odd statement. Knowledge work has been automated for as long as I can remember. Compilers, automated QA, data entry, etc. In many fields, more labor demand resulted from productivity gains (software); in others, demand didn't rise to compensate (bookkeeping). The question is where is additional demand going from higher savings given productivity boosts. I don't see more demand for HVAC technicians. Maybe dog walkers.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
But all the examples you gave (compilers, automated QA, data entry) fall firmly within the "repetitive" marker. These were all pretty much rote jobs where a person was essentially asked to be like a computer and follow a simple algorithm. But ChatGPT is now killing jobs that are solely about creativity, like copywriting. That is a new, and rather unexpected, turn of events. I saw a good quote, I think it was on Twitter: "What kind of world have we built where the humans slave away at physically demanding jobs for minimum wage, while the computers write poetry and paint all day."
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago
  Yeah, before llms it was hardly imaginable that these jobs would someday be automated.
- deepspace 3y ago
  > jobs that are solely about creativity, like copywriting But the point is that the kind of copywriting that CAN be replaced by ChatGPT is just as repetitive and non-creative than those other jobs.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Don't agree with that at all. If it were simply "repetitive and non-creative", why hire copywriters at all, why not just have the engineers or product managers write the copy? I've worked with good copywriters, and was impressed with the quality of writing they did. The point is that ChatGPT excels at the type of creative writing that previously we thought was solely the domain of humans. I think you are getting things backwards if you think that because ChatGPT can do it that it is repetitive and non-creative.

myth_drannon 3y ago

I'm just wondering how the companies will make money if there is noone to buy their products. Wealthy class can't support the economy.

morkalork 3y ago
US is kinda fucked in this regard already. The median income is what, 30k? Unless your product is cheap or a necessity of some kind, you've probably already lost half your potential audience.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > The median income is what, 30k? A bit over 40K if you count everyone, and closer to 60K if you just count people working full time.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  And with that income it will be hard to support social programs like pensions. So the pyramid scheme might just collapse and retirees are screwed. In that sense the talk about UBI looks completely bonkers if no high earners left to fund it.
  - elforce002 3y ago
    UBI doesn't make sense at all.
umeshunni 3y ago
There are plenty of people in the world and the median income globally has risen rapidly over the last few decades. All it means is that wasteful western lifestyles can't be continued while producing little of value.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  They will collapse as fast as they have risen. I don't see how 3rd world economies will survive without the westerm middle class. I guess just slaughter each other as humanity always did with excess populace.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I thought this was a good and fair article on the topic, which is kinda rare because often you just get tons of speculation. This article was just filled with real people who actually did lose their job due to ChatGPT, and I think it just shows the tip of the iceberg. I would really be worried right now if I were a marketing copywriter. I've seen (and posted about) examples where ChatGPT still falls behind human ingenuity, but the fact is that it really only falls behind some of the best of human ingenuity. Just guessing, but I'd believe that ChatGPT is as good as or better than 75% of copywriters, and even for that upper tier of copywriters, probably only about 10-15% of the writing they do is in an area where the additional quality makes a difference. Just a worrisome future ahead in my opinion.

nradov 3y ago
No one actually reads most of that copy anyway. It's the knowledge work equivalent of digging a hole just to fill it in again. Totally pointless, and done more out of inertia than any real business value.
- ertian 3y ago
  Saw a comic in the early days of ChatGPT, I wish I'd saved it: What the applicant writes: "I want this job." How the application is sent: "Dear Sir or Madam, I am writing to you today to inquire about the position of blah blah blah..." What the recruiter reads: "This guy wants this job." I'd like a tool I could point at a modern tech company website to read through all the meaningless ad copy and buzzwords and spit out a two-sentence summary of what the thing actually does.
  - ericbarrett 3y ago
    ChatGPT can already do this. In fact, I think it's much better at this kind of summarization task than it is at novel text generation. You'd have to write some glue code to automate it via the API, though I'd be surprised if there aren't open source tools to do it already. As a demo, try this prompt; you might have to trim some to stay under the token limit: Summarize the major arguments and sentiment of the following Hacker News posts. Provide your answer in a brief, bullet-point format: <paste text of HN comment thread here>

nixcraft 3y ago

The "Statement on AI Risk" by Sam Altman and wealthy individuals fails to address the potential impact of AI on job security. Rather, it focuses on concerns regarding war and human extinction. Despite my attempts to raise awareness about the issue, I have received negative feedback. It's important to consider how the everyday struggles of families may affect their ability to purchase products and services such as phones, streaming, gaming, and others when AI takes away their white-collar jobs. Maybe there will be war because there are no jobs while rich folks are getting rich. I hope I remain wrong.

delfinom 3y ago
Because wealthy individuals live in a bubble. They also don't fail to realize when you ultimately drive 80% unemployment due to AI replacing everyone's job. That war is going to be internal and it's going to look like the French revolution.
- sgt101 3y ago
  Possibly more like the colour revolution in Egypt. 80% unemployment managed with machine guns and state control of all information sources.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Egypt has about 4 guns for every 100 people. The US has about 120. I think it would play out differently here.
    - swexbe 3y ago
      Uh huh, your glock won't do much against the AI drones.
    - sgt101 3y ago
      It depends on where they are pointed.
- caeril 3y ago

msoad 3y ago

I know someone who does copywriting for cybersecurity firms. She writes those seemingly mundane statements these companies release. I've always wondered if anyone actually reads them. She admits that most of her work involves taking a template and slotting in the new information. It's stuff like "Company X's response to security threat Y," which often doesn't contain anything particularly insightful. It usually just states that the company is aware of the threat and is working on it. Nothing technical or useful. I'd be sad to see her lose her job, but at the same time, I can see how unfulfilling this job must be for her. She often feels that the work she does doesn't matter to anyone. To me, solution is not to invent more bullshit jobs. We need a better system for humans to share the fruits of millennials of progress together.

shreyshnaccount 3y ago
Let's start a commune.
elforce002 3y ago
This is wishful thinking at best. She's fending herself and she's making an honest living out of it. This system is not perfect but what is the alternative? There's no current solution for what lies ahead (potentially job loss on an scale never seen before). I'm seeing government outright banning LLMs from certain industries just to avoid social unrest.

SkipperCat 3y ago

I wonder how this is going to affect the cost of accessing ChatGPT and other AI systems. If ChatGPT can replace a copywriter, who may have an annual cost of $30-$50k per year, then it could easily justify a cost $10k or more per year. The current model seems to be just like Uber. Get into as many markets as you can. Provide the service below cost. Then jack up the price and make money. As someone who uses ChatGPT as a learning tool for various programming tasks, I'll miss it if it becomes too expensive. Its a helpful tool, but not worth more than $20/month.

nharada 3y ago
I think unlike Uber, the future floor for costs is probably very low. You can get insane improvements on inference costs/speed when you dedicate time and money towards optimization.
rootusrootus 3y ago
Uber has hard constraints that are difficult to significantly reduce with scale. GPT is already approaching adequate on consumer grade GPUs. Pretty sure the price is going to trend towards zero, no matter what the salary is of the employee it replaces.

jl2718 3y ago

How can you internet in {current year}, and seriously think we need more content writers? We’re not talking about top-tier investigative journalists blowing scandals open and speaking truth to power. We’re talking about the meaningless banter filling space between ads that turn a simple recipe search into a dystopian nightmare. I hope and trust that they will find meaning in a career fixing and building and caring for physical things that people actually want to pay for. This is a step forward.

carlosjobim 3y ago
Couldn't agree more, and my work is largely content writing. For content to have any value, it should contain unique information or an especially good and useful presentation of existing information. Otherwise making that content is just worthless busywork. Like the example in this thread of a poster making a press release. How could AI add any information that is of any value? The same goes for AI generated images. If your images are not extremely relevant you are doing it wrong. Use images of your product, not random people smiling. Stock photos, Corporate Memphis art and AI images are a negative value for the information you're presenting. Just as you, I hope companies some day understand that their worthless filler content is just getting in the way of their sales.
- jl2718 3y ago
  Thank you for that perspective. From the AI side, I think it’s funny how there can be so much simultaneous interest in both “AI writing”, which is exactly as you say, and “AI summarization”, which is like inverting the AI writing function to retrieve the prompt data. An absurd, but seemingly likely, end state of this is an arms race between the two technologies, completely transparent to the user, and resulting in roughly the same user experience, which is always set to the limit of their tolerance.

sircastor 3y ago

This feels largely like Fear-mongering to me, and it can't be helped but noticed that it is coming from a source that is likewise threatened by automation. Fear of change and fear of the future sell newspapers/subscriptions/get people to quit. I don't doubt the threat to copy-writing and similar jobs, but I also suspect that the call/response nature of the advertising industry is going to result in people being inoculated to ad-copy written by ChatGPT, and it will start to sound as hokey as old ads you find in computer magazines.

nickelcitymario 3y ago

As someone who makes a good portion of my living as a writer, I choose to embrace ChatGPT to make me more productive. That's how I stay relevant. For example, today it helped me write a press release. We had dialogue back and forth. I told it to ask me thoughtful questions, and it did. After 5 minutes of back-and-forth, I had the bones of a high-quality press release put together. I then edited it until it met my standards, and submitted it. This process would have previously taken me a few hours. Today it took less than 30 minutes. As a result, my value to my employer has gone up because of ChatGPT. I'm able to get a lot more done with it, and they'd be fools to simply replace me with the bot. In other words, and I'm hardly the only one saying this: ChatGPT is not a replacement for people. It's an augmentation. It's a bicycle for the mind, to steal Steve Jobs's famous metaphor. I think if you're a writer who refuses to embrace this new reality, you should absolutely be worried. But if you embrace the inevitable, the combination of a skilled copywriter + ChatGPT is incredible. It's my writing partner. I'm still in charge, calling all the shots. But my writing partner helps to prevent writer's block. Often, I won't use a single word it produced. Instead, it gives me a starting point. Sometimes that starting point is little more than "I need to do better than what this machine produced, because this is crap." But it's soooo much easier to improve on garbage than it is to create out of the blue. So, I don't think AI is coming for our jobs as writers. If used well, it's the best writing partner you could ask for.

ZooCow 3y ago
> In other words, and I'm hardly the only one saying this: ChatGPT is not a replacement for people. It's an augmentation. It's a bicycle for the mind, to steal Steve Jobs's famous metaphor. This is the analogy that jumped out to me as well. LLMs seem to be more of a vehicle than a destination. Like a bicycle, LLMs need to be operated with the direction and effort of an operator to ensure it stays on course and doesn’t veer into traffic. Continuing the analogy, I suspect that LLMs will open up traditional white collar jobs to more people. More people can get to the destination on time with the aid of a bicycle than on foot.
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throwawayaa 3y ago

As an entrepreuner, i struggled to find freelancers, ChatGPT fixed that problem for me.. Addition to RegExps & ML i use to automate most of my work. I think finding right people and managing them is pain in the ass

elforce002 3y ago
Interesting. I'm an entrepreneur too and the key thing here is people. Less people working = less purchasing power = less money available = less money in our pockets. See how that works? Everyone is going to be impacted and no amount of automation from our part will solve that.