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AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care
- szastamasta 2y agoI hope that these media companies realize sooner than later, that if their content is AI generated, there’s no reason to go there. We’ll just skip the middlemen and go straight to OpenAI or whatever. No need to go to their site.
- jncfhnb 2y agoIt’s the opposite really. We will skip OpenAI and go to media companies that are proficient in using available ai tools.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoIt may not make a difference if all published material converges :\
- toomuchtodo 2y agoWhy would media companies be better than technologists training against all publicly available content (torrents, streaming, offline media)? Media companies are good at capturing value via copyright and creating a moat through resources needed to produce content, not technology.
- jncfhnb 2y agoWe are nowhere close to removing the need for creative vision and good execution for useful or popular works. Even with AI creating art is still labor intensive. We are close to having open source tech that is on par with closed source tech (flux vs OpenAI Sora). I’m not referring the patent holding media giants. I’m referring creative studios.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoI agree with that.
- szastamasta 2y agoI’m not sure about that. I think the OpenAI deals the cards here. They have the model and the data. If these media outlets fire creative people there’s nothing they have that OpenAI hasn’t got.
- robwwilliams 2y agoI have being using Claude 3.5 as a reading companion with which/whom I can have a surprisingly intelligent conversation on topics that are new to me or well known. It adds an interactive conversation to reading. Who is going to indulge me in a conversation at 11 PM on some abstruse text I happen to be reading? Claude! Yes, frequent errors but if I give a quote or screen shot then smart rebuttals or extensions. This makes my thinking sharper and learning much more fun.
- deisteve 2y agoIt's already the case, at a few companies I've involved with we've already laid off much of the content creation roles. The first to go were written content, then drawn content and now corporate stock photographers/videographers are next. The second wave will involve 3d modelers, animators, post-processing jobs in cinema. I'm already seeing lot of developer jobs especially front-end, testing roles being replaced entirely. Ironically, only back-end, devops, cybersecurity appears to be safe as it is mission critical even when good chunk of the jobs are automated. what leads to my conclusion is that your comment will hold true for the most part, much as people stopped buying newspapers once Google News took off, there will still be those that pay digital subscriptions for media outlets they support, in fact their market shares might increase as a result of creative destruction. There are riches to be made during these chaotic times. There are none for those seeking to be a miner-for-hire anymore in a large chunk of the white collar space.
- ryandrake 2y agoI'm hoping people start asking themselves, "Why should I take the time to read something that nobody took the time to write?" and start rejecting AI slop content.
- SoftTalker 2y agoThis is exactly my feeling. I'm not interested in listening to AI music, or reading AI prose or poetry. I'm not even a fan of todays CGI in movies, it's just too unbelievable. I'd rather be impressed by real stunt actors, model builders, lighting and sound engineers, and a good director behind the cameras.
- deisteve 2y agobut what if you can't tell? what if it was AI generated pornography?
- SoftTalker 2y agoI actually could make an exception for porn I think. So much abuse in that industry, and taking advantage of people who have had terrible lives since childhood. If people could satisfy their voyeuristic urges without contributing to the perpetuation of abuse that would be a good thing.
- impure 2y agoI think you underestimate how lazy people are. Writing an article also requires finding a topic to write about meaning research. People don’t want research, they just want information fed to them.
- Ekaros 2y agoAnd I am not even sure they always want information. Often enough they just want some stimulation. Some quick fix for boredom...
- bell-cot 2y agoIANAL, but the specifics of this case sound ripe for running it past a good Aussie IP lawyer. Maybe all that he could do would be to send a few unpleasant letters. Or maybe those specifics could make this an "interesting" test case, giving the publication a painful or fatally expensive lesson in cutting-edge IP law.
- righthand 2y agoI think the LLM bot infatuation leads to a closed internet. Block all untrusted traffic and you request access to websites for information once you’re validated as a human. There are two divisions of people in the AI war. People who want this because they think it’s the future so they are trying to apply it to everything. And people who don’t want or don’t care about LLM being added to their daily life. LLM bots everywhere might not go away but neither will the push back against them. Hurt enough people with your attempts to displace people’s jobs and they will develop defenses as a reaction to the out right abuse of the internet’s good will.
- deisteve 2y agoI don't think is realistic because there is no way to verify the intent of someone who is validated as a human without reading their minds. So this proposal of closed internet and heavily walled gardens doesn't really work and it just leads to more sophisticated and harder to detect means of scraping that data. Think about it, if you have data that is so valuable that people are willing to put a paywall and throttle their usage at the expense of user experience, its most certainly going to be dumped in the public. Also this fear of LLM stealing your content is unwarranted. It's no different than somebody running compression algorithms on content they scraped so that its more accessible for the masses. From my readings and speaking with lawyers it appears the current copyright laws won't stand with LLMs because of the difficulty of reproducing the entire "compression" process which requires extreme amount of money to replicate. This is OpenAI and many other's legal defence. That there won't be attempts to replicate the underlying mechanism to prove copyright contents were used in the process. A carefully written prompt to replicate copyright work like with Suno can claim compensation pro delicto but to prove every piece of content will be difficult to claim LLM or token based attention networks are able to "steal" without building it from scratch, training it on millions of hours, especially if its closed and patented. So we might see people claiming victory over cases like Suno but they've already lost the bigger battle over LLM's legal status.
- righthand 2y agoThe point of tying it to identity verification isn’t to stop bad actors immediately. It’s to identify bad actors. With the current way platforms are developed it is impossible to identify bad actors. In this case, a human content producer sees OpenAI as a bad actor for taking their content and not attributing or paying them for it. Normally their revenue might be attained from advertising dollars which an indexing bot will bypass. See I think that is only true for so long. People don't want easy ways to scrape data, they want to promote their efforts. Things could easily change which allow for easier identity verification. For example, Social Security numbers are seeing lots of criticism right now and there is call for a national digital ID that can be used instead. If a national ID were to be implemented it would offer a lane for something like verified access to happen. People already have a preference for platforms like Facebook where the farce is sold that it’s easier to identify real people by using it. Then you tack that on with copyright infringement and blatant stealing that is happening with LLMs and there will be enough of a momentum for people to close off. Especially on an internet where open platforms are constantly being attacked and devalued for being open. Content producers will only start sending minimal data to indexing bots, enough to get listed. SEO dependent sites will probably perish in this era. Legal battles wont even matter if society shifts that way.
- BeetleB 2y ago> Cosmos Magazine – Australia's rough analog of New Scientist It's been a few decades since I read New Scientist, for good reason. It was a fairly low quality publication - not unlike what Popular Science became. If Cosmos is similarly poor, then this is not surprising.
- rgbrenner 2y agoChecking internet archive from 2022/23 (prior to the 2024 ownership change that introduced AI articles) supports this: https://web.archive.org/web/20220601000000*/cosmosmagazine.com https://web.archive.org/web/20220601000000*/cosmosmagazine.c...
- anigbrowl 2y agoPublications like this serve as entry-level information for people who are interested in science or want to stay abreast of the news but don't have a science education or the aspiration to develop professional knowledge. I prefer reading papers to explainer articles, but I still remember being shocked by the steepness of the learning curve I encountered the first time I bought a copy of Nature.
- BeetleB 2y agoThere's a large gap between Nature and, say, Popular Science. Take a look at a typical 80's Scientific American and compare with now. Heck, I suspect even today's Scientific American is still better than Popular Science (although I haven't compared them in over 20 years).
- anigbrowl 2y agoYes....that's why I described magazines like this as 'entry level.'
- mannykannot 2y agoI see that articles on the Cosmos website, nominally from the past week, are being attributed to human authors.
- anigbrowl 2y agoAs Adam Smith observed, professional synergies tend to conclude in frauds upon the public.
- jms703 2y agoMaybe an unpopular opinion, but some jobs shouldn't exist. We should fire some terrible jobs that can be done by machines. Most of the content being manufactured today is quite lazy and I'm fine with AI writing it because I won't see it anyway. But replacing a person without helping them grow into a new and more impactful job isn't the way to do this. I wish more companies would 'fire' certain types of work and help their employees grow into other roles.
- doe_eyes 2y agoThe problem is that many of what you describe as "terrible" jobs are just a low-overhead way for creative folks to pay their bills. You don't make a living writing timeless poems or painting masterpieces, at least not usually. You make a living doing copyediting or painting commissioned artwork - and then work on achieving greatness in your free time. AI doesn't have to be good to destroy this income. This is making it harder for creativity to thrive. Relatively few budding artists can count on private patronage or government sponsorship, and both of these come with plenty of strings attached. And pie-in-the-sky ideas like universal income are not going to wish the problem away.
- sroussey 2y agoThere is some history here, like the musicians that went on strikes and picketed radio stations after one dared to play a record on the radio instead of a live orchestra!
- xanderlewis 2y agoThe difference is that arguably this is the endgame — the entire process can now be automated. Every doomsday prediction is wrong… until the final one isn’t.
- jncfhnb 2y agoThe entire process is very much not automated
- SoftTalker 2y ago> Techniques exist to watermark such AI generated content – readers easily could be alerted. But that idea has already been nixed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently declared that AI watermarking threatened at least 30 percent of the ChatGPT-maker's business. I realize it would be an arms race, but are there any browser plugins that can alert readers to content that is likely AI-generated? I do think that some required disclosure that "this content was generated" might be a good thing. Sort of how magazine and newspaper advertisements that are formatted to look like news articles, or advertising programs on TV that look like news programs or talk shows, have to be disclosed as advertisements.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThat’s not possible with words. My 12 yo daughter’s essay was marked as 80% AI written when I watched her write it.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoWe could have regulated OpenAI into providing it- just dump everything it generates into a bloom filter and let people query it. With open models this is of course no longer possible
- gruez 2y ago>just dump everything it generates into a bloom filter AFAIK bloom filter doesn't work for fuzzy matches, so any sort of light editing would defeat this.
- anigbrowl 2y agoI hope people like yourself start filing lawsuits over this kind of thing. Non-technologists are using tools they don't understand to 'score' the quality of work put out by individuals, with life-altering results. T his despite those tools being both unreliable and treating semantic correctness as equivalent to artificiality. In fact, the more skill and effort someone invest in writing clearly, organizing one's thoughts etc., the more likely their output is to be labeled as AI-generated; people are literally being penalized for getting too good. Increasingly this is being used in the commercial world as an excuse not to pay people for commissioned work.