9 ms·

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.

soared 2y ago
Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options. Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on. Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you would trust the outcome?
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a car mechanic?
    - redwall_hp 2y ago
      My mechanic takes a video of a tire tread depth gauge being inserted into each wheel and reports the values, when doing the initial inspection and tests before every oil change. It's something that can be empirically measured instead of visually guessed at by a human or magic eight-ball. Using a tool that costs only a few dollars, no less, like the pressure gauge you should already keep in your glovebox.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I am hoping that there will always be premium paid options for LLMs, and thus the onus would be on the user whether or not they want biased answers. These will likely be cell-phone-plan level expensive, but the value prop would still be excellent.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    God forbid people attempt to facilitate legitimate commerce!
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  > Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all it costs is $0.01
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It’s understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that only looks real.
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      It's also something so trivial to determine yourself. It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading any critical thinking to AI
      - tbrownaw 2y ago
        There's a reason that people have to be told to not just believe everything they read on the Internet. And there's a reason some people still do that anyway.
    - quickthrowman 2y ago
      I agree with you, my post was about not using AI to check tread depth and relying on a penny and your own eyesight instead, illustrated here: https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-check-your-tire-tread-penny-test/# https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-che...
  - giobox 2y ago
    You don't even need the penny most of the time, given most car tires have tread wear bars in the tread gaps you can just look at now.
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  Once they have you hooked they’ll start jacking up the prices.
  - msp26 2y ago
    It's a race to the bottom for pricing. They can't do shit. Even if the American companies colluded to stop competing and raise prices, Chinese providers will undermine that. There is no moat. Most of these AI APIs and products are interchangeable.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      OK, so they won't raise prices, they'll simply EOL their too expensive to maintain services and users won't feel the impact on their wallets, they'll just lose their tool and historical data and what ever else of theirs was actually the property of the company.
- mmmBacon 2y ago
  For the tire you can also use a penny. If you stick the penny in the tread with Liconln’s head down and his hair isn’t covered, then you need new tires. No AI. ;)
  - olyjohn 2y ago
    You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.
- kbelder 2y ago
  Now I think this conversation will happen in my lifetime: Me: "Looks like your tire is a little low." Youth: "How can you tell, where's your phone?"
gilbetron 2y ago
How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was wrong.
- colinmorelli 2y ago
  As for correctness, they mentioned the LLM citing links that the person can verify. So there is some protection at that level. But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus when we look to others is constantly moving as technology advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have a specific circumstance that warrants they do so. The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    If it’s also returning links, wouldn’t it be faster and more authoritative to just go read the official links and skip the LLM slop entirely?
    - krisoft 2y ago
      Sure. But often you don’t know how to find the information or what are the right technical terms for your problem. In a more general sense sometimes, but not always, it is easier to verify something than to come up with it at the first place.
    - blendergeek 2y ago
      No. The LLM in the story found the necessary links. In this case the LLM was a better search engine.
  - victorbjorklund 2y ago
    But if you dont know anything about programming a link to a library/etc is not so useful. Same if you dont know about tax law and it cities the tax code and how it should be understood (the code is correct but the interpretation is not)
colinmorelli 2y ago
This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time). It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc). Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you. These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. > Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an eating disorder! There is already so much bullshit in the diet space that adding AI bullshit (again, using the technical definition of bullshit here) only stands to increase the value of an interaction with a person with knowledge. And that's without getting into what happens when brand recommendations are baked into the training data. 0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
  - colinmorelli 2y ago
    > "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. I understand your perspective, but the intention was to use a term we've all heard to reflect the thing we're all thinking about. Whether or not this is the right term to use for scenarios where the LLM emits incorrect information is not relevant to this post in particular. > No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. No, this is not why real dietitians are expensive. Real dietitians are expensive because they go through extensive training on a topic and are a licensed (and thus supply constrained) group. That doesn't mean they're operating without a grounding fact base. Dietitians are not making up nutritional evidence and guidance as they go. They're operating on studies that have been done over decades of time and millions of people to understand in general what foods are linked to what outcomes. Yes, the field evolves. Yes, it requires changes over time. But to suggest we "don't know" is inconsistent with the fact that we're able to teach dietitians how to construct diets in the first place. There are absolutely cases in which the confounding factors for a patient are unique enough such that novel human thought will be required to construct a reasonable diet plan or treatment pathway for someone. That will continue to be true in law, health, finances, etc. But there are also many, many cases where that is absolutely not the case, the presentation of the case is quite simple, and the next step actions are highly procedural. This is not the same as saying dietitians are useless, or physicians are useless, or attorneys are useless. It is to say that, due to the supply constraints of these professions, there are always going to be fundamental limits to the amount they can produce. But there is a credible argument to be made that if we can bolster their ability to deliver the common scenarios much more effectively, we might be able to unlock some of the capacity to reach more people.
ozgrakkurt 2y ago
It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process. For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is. I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
- atrus 2y ago
  > As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad enough the AI marketers push AI as some all knowing, correct oracle, but when the anti-ai people use that as the basis for their arguments, it's somehow more annoying. Trust but verify is still a good rule here, no matter the source, human or otherwise.
  - DharmaPolice 2y ago
    If a junior developer lies about something important, they can be fired and you can try to find someone else who wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they don't know they've lied.
    - atrus 2y ago
      You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied" though. Being wrong isn't lying.
eqmvii 2y ago
Your tax example isn't far off from what's already possible with Google. The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers, digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire lawyers.
chgs 2y ago
I tend to use ai for the same things I’d have used Google for in 2005. Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.
- flmontpetit 2y ago
  It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.
  - erkt 2y ago
    I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API. It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.
    - xyzal 2y ago
      It's happening, though not with ads yet https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poisoning-grooming-chatbots-russia/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poi...
    - JoshTko 2y ago
      My bet is that free versions of models will become sponsor aligned.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      I'm an AI pessimist, yet I don't see this happening (at least not without some major advancements in how LLMs work). One major problem is the payment mechanism. The nature of LLMs means you just can't really know or force it to spit out ad garbage in a predictable manor. That'll make it really tricky for an advertiser to want to invest in your LLM advertising (beyond being able to sell the fact that they are an AI ad service). Another is going to be regulations. How can you be sure to properly highlight "sponsored" content in the middle of an AI hallucination? These LLM companies run a very real risk of running a fowl of FTC rules.
mr_toad 2y ago
> I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. That’s like buying a wrench and changing your own spark plugs. Wrenches are not putting mechanics out of business.
- Avicebron 2y ago
  Depends on how good the wrench is, if I can walk over to the wrench, kick it, say change my spark plugs now you fuck, and it does so instantly and for free and doesn't complain....
conductr 2y ago
I’m a bit of a skeptic too and kind of agree on this. Also, the human employee displacement will be slow. It will start by not eliminating existing jobs but just eliminating the need for additional headcount, so it caps the growth of these labor markets. As it does that, the folks in the roles leveraging AI the most will start slowly stealing share of demand as they find more efficient and cheaper ways to perform the work. Meanwhile, core demand is shrinking as self service by customers is increasingly enabled. Then at some step pattern, perhaps the next global business cycle down turn, the headcount starts trending downward. This will repeat a handful of times, probably taking decades to be measured in aggregate by this type of study.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Not consulting a real tax advisor is probably going to cost you much more. I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Most people’s (USA) taxes are not complex, and just require basic arithmetic to complete. Even topics like stock sales, IRA rollovers, HSAs, and rental income (which the vast majority of taxpayers don’t have) are straightforward if you just read the instructions on the forms and follow them. In 30 years of paying taxes, I’ve only had a tax professional do it once: as an experiment after I already did them myself to see if there was any difference in the output. I paid a tax professional $400 and the forms he handed me back were identical to the ones I filled out myself.
  - aaronbaugher 2y ago
    I'm one of those weird kids who liked doing those puzzles where you had to walk through a list of tricky instructions and end up with the right answers, so I'm pretty good at that sort of thing. I also have fairly simple finances: a regular W-2 job and a little side income that doesn't have taxes withdrawn. But last year the IRS sent me a $450 check and a note that said I'd made a mistake on my taxes and paid too much. Sadly, they didn't tell me what the mistake was, so I couldn't be sure to correct it this year. Technically, all you have to do is follow the written instructions. But there are a surprising number of maybes in those instructions. You hit a checkbox that asks whether you qualify for such-and-such deduction, and find yourself downloading yet another document full of conditions for qualification, which aren't always as clear-cut as you'd like. You can end up reading page after page to figure out whether you should check a single box, and that single box may require another series of forms. My small side income takes me from a one-page return to several pages, and next year I'm probably going to have to pay estimated taxes in advance because that non-taxed income leaves me owing at the end of the year more than some acceptable threshold that could result in fines. All because I make an extra 10% doing some evening freelancing. Most people's taxes shouldn't be complex, but in practice they're more complex than they should be.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
Ironically, your example is what you used to get from a Google search back when Google wasn't aggressively monetized and enshittified.
- timmytokyo 2y ago
  I think this is an important point. It's easy to lose track of just how bad search has gotten over the years because the enshittification has been so gradual. The replacement of search by AI is capturing so many people's imaginations because it feels like the way google felt when it first came around. If AI replaces search, I do wonder how long before AI becomes just as enshittified as search did. You know google/OpenAI/etc will eventually need to make this stuff profitable. And subscriptions aren't currently doing that.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    I am honestly glad that we have normalized paying for AI in a way that was never normalized for search. This way, there's a fighting chance that it won't become a dumb ads platform (although OpenAI seems to be speedrunning this).
dcchuck 2y ago
I actually paid for tax advice from one of those big companies (it was recommended - last time I will take that person's recommendations!). I was very disappointed in the service. It felt like the person I was speaking to on the phone would have been better of just echoing the request into AI. So I did just that as I waited on the line. I found the answer and the tax expert "confirmed" it.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  According to the article the Tax expert still has a job though.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn’t going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway. This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.
boredtofears 2y ago
I thought the value of using a licensed tax agent is that if they give you advice that ends up being bad, they have an ethical/professional obligation to clean up their mess.
mchusma 2y ago
Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally not, wasn’t good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an effect.
- Jeff_Brown 2y ago
  2024 was already madness for translators and graphic artists, according to my personal anecdata.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  That's now what the AI boosters and shills were saying in 2021. Might be worth a refresher if you've got the time, but nearly every timeline that's been floated by any of the leadership in any of the OG LLM makers has been as hallucinated as the worst answers coming from their bots.
bamboozled 2y ago
Here’s why I don’t think it matters , because the machine is paying for everyone’s productivity boost, even your accountants. So maybe this tide will rise all boats. Time will tell. Your accountant also is probably saving hundreds of dollars in other areas using AI assistance. Personally I still think you should cross check with a professional.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call." What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..." Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation, marketing, hype. In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts not opinions.
- mac-attack 2y ago
  > In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. What happened in 2023 and 2024 actually Nitpicky but it's worth noting that last year's AI capabilities are not the April 2025 AI capabilities and definitely won't be the December 2025 capabilities. It's using deprecated/replaced technology to make a statement, that is not forward projecting. I'm struggling to see the purpose. It's like announcing that the sun is still shining at 7pm, no?
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    I feel like model improvement is severely overstated by the benchmarks and the last release cycle basically made no difference to my use cases. If you gave me Claude 3.5 and 3.7 I couldn't really tell the difference. OpenAI models feel like they are regressing, and LLAMA 4 regressed even on benchmarks. And the hype was insane in 2023 already - it's useful to compare actual outcomes vs historic hype to gauge how credible the hype sellers are.
    - kypro 2y ago
      That's interesting. I think there's been some pretty significant improvements in the rate of hallucinations and accuracy of the models, especially when it comes to rule following. Perhaps the biggest improvement though is in the size of context windows which are huge compared to this time last year. Maybe progress over the last 2-3 months is hard to see, but progress over the last 6 is very clear.
freehorse 2y ago
> And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out. Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.
ravenstine 2y ago
I don't trust what anyone says in this space because there is so much money to be made (by a fraction of people) if AI lives up to its promise, and money to be made to those who claim that AI is "bullshit". The only thing I can remotely trust is my own experience. Recently, I decided to have some business cards made, which I haven't done in probably 15 years. A few years ago, I would have either hired someone on Fiverr to design my business card or pay for a premade template. Instead, I told Sora to design me a business card, and it gave me a good design the first time; it even immediately updated it with my Instagram link when I asked it to. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how AI, as we now know it, doesn't take the wind out of the sails of certain kinds of jobs.
- epicureanideal 2y ago
  But didn't we have business card template programs, and even free suggested business card designs from the companies that sell business cards, almost immediately after they opened for business on the internet?
  - ravenstine 2y ago
    That's missing the point, and is kind of like saying why bother paying someone to build you a house when there are DIY home building kits. (or why even buy a home when you can live in a van rent-free) The point is that I would have paid for another human being's time. Why? Because I am not a young man anymore, and have little desire to do everything myself at this point. But now, I don't have to pay for someone's time, and that surplus time doesn't necessarily transfer to something equivalent like magic.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      You do pay for it though. Compute isn't free.
      - ravenstine 2y ago
        Could I really have been more clear? I am not talking about whether I have to pay more or less for anything. My problem is not paying. I want to pay so that I don't have to make something myself or waste time fiddling with a free template. What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human being is less likely to be at the other end of the transaction when I want to spend money to avoid sacrificing my time. Sure, one can say that whomever is working for one of these AI companies benefits, but they would be outliers and AI is effectively homogenizing labor units in that case. Someone with creative talent isn't going to feasibly spin up a competitive AI business the way they could have started their own business selling their services directly.
vishnugupta 2y ago
I use it everyday to an extent that I’ve come to depend on it. For copywriting, analyzing contracts, exploring my business domain, etc etc. Each of those tasks would have required me to consult with an expert a few years ago. Not anymore.
andrewmutz 2y ago
"AI is all hype and is going to destroy the labor market"
dismalaf 2y ago
Google (non-Gemini) has always been a great source for tax advice, at least here in Canada because, if nothing else, the government's website appears to leave all its pages available for indexing (even if it's impossible to navigate on its own).
ericmcer 2y ago
This is a great point, I was just using it understand various DMV procedures. It is invaluable for navigating bureaucracy so if your job is to ingest and regurgitate a bunch of documents and procedures you may be highly at risk here. That is a great use for it too, rather than replacing artists we have personal advisors who can navigate almost any level of complex bureaucracy instantaneously. My girlfriend hates AI, like rails against it at any opportunity, but after spending a few hours on the DMV website I sat down and fed her questions into Claude and had answers in a few seconds. Instant convert.
nzeid 2y ago
> Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. These examples aren't wrong but you might be overstating their impact on the economy as a whole. E.g. the overwhelming majority of people do not pay solely for tax advice, or have a dietician, etc. Corporations already crippled their customer support so there's no remaining damage to be dealt. Your tax example won't move the needle on people who pay to have their taxes done in their entirety.
m3047 2y ago
The biggest harm today is people in training for "people interaction" specialties with a high degree of empathy / ability to read others: psychology, counseling, forensic interviewing. They pay a lot of money (or it's invested in them) to get trained and then have to do practical residency / internship: they need to do those interships NOW, and a significant proportion of the population that they'd otherwise interact with to do so is off faffing about with AI. The fact that anecdotally they can't seem to create "convincing" enough AIs to take the place of subjects is damning.
empath75 2y ago
This thought process sort of implies that there's a limited amount of work that's available to do, and once AI is doing all of it, that everyone else will just sit on their hands and stop using their brains to do stuff. Even if every job that exists today were currently automated _people would find other stuff to do_. There is always going to be more work to do that isn't economical for AIs to do for a variety of reasons.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research. One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Also, frequently you're buying some protection by using the licensed agent. If they give you bad advice, there's a person to go to and in the most extreme cases, maybe file a lawsuit or insurance claim against.
datpuz 2y ago
Nearly every job, even a lot of creative ones, require a degree of accuracy and consistency that gen AI just can't deliver. Until some major breakthrough is achieved, not many people doing real work are in danger.
notahacker 2y ago
A friend of mine is working on a "RAG for tax advisers" startup. He's selling it to the tax accountants, as a way for them to spot things they wouldn't otherwise have the time to review and generate more specialist tax advisory work. There's a lot more work they could do if only it's affordable to the businesses they advise (none of whom could do their own taxes even if they wanted to!) Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower cost of doing work generates more demand overall...
jmull 2y ago
> ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk I doubt it. Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search. It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
> set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient If that’s true, probably for the best that those jobs get replaced. Then again, the value may have been in the personal touch (pay to feel good about your decisions) rather than quality of directions.
jaredcwhite 2y ago
> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.
- worik 2y ago
  > So…all you needed was a decent search engine, Yes. "...all you need" A good search engine is a big ask. Google at its height was quite good. LLMs are shaping up to be very good search engines That would be enough, for me to be very pleased with them
jakubmazanec 2y ago
Awfully early? We have "useful" LLMs for almost three years. Where is the productivity increase? Also, your example is not very relevant. 1) Would you pay the professional if you couldn't find the answer yourself? 2) If search engines were still useful (I'm assuming you googled first), wouldn't they be able to find the official calculator too?
- decimalenough 2y ago
  LLMs have come a long way in those 3 years. The early ones were absolute garbage compared to what we have today. 1) Yes. I had in fact already booked the appointment, but decided to try asking Gemini for shits and giggles. 2) I did google, but I didn't know an official calculator existed, and the search results presented me with a morass of random links that I couldn't make heads or tails of. Remember, I'm not a domain expert in this area.
  - jakubmazanec 2y ago
    So search is broken, and our answer is creating energy-guzzling bullshitting AIs. No wonder there is no change in productivity.
mmcnl 2y ago
But all those jobs have been at risk for a long time already, yet they still exist. There is so much "pre-AI" low-hanging fruit that is still there. So why is that? I don't have the answer, but clearly there is more to it than just technology.
gamblor956 2y ago
Every month I run some trial law and tax questions past all the big AI chat bots. They scored about 60% this month. That sounds good until you consider that 60% is a failing grade for the bar exam, and a licensed lawyer getting 40% of their legal advice wrong would be disbarred.
InfoHuman 2y ago
Those "pay me for advice on X" jobs have survived many other technological innovations. In the pre-internet time, there was an ever-expanding volume of books and articles you could read to get the advice. Then along came the world wide web, search engines, and apps - advice available from anywhere, anytime. And yet dieticians, financial advisors, lawyers, etc. have continued to be in demand. Are LLMs finally going to be the breakthrough that changes this? Maybe. The anthropomorphized chat experience where you feel like you're talking to a person definitely helps. So does the confident style of LLM answers, which sound expert and definitive. But I'm not sure it will work for everyone, or even for the majority. Many people lack the background knowledge, vocabulary, patience, and persistence to get good results from their own research. I've seen plenty of people who struggle to use Google effectively, and I suspect these same people will have trouble getting helpful answers on complex topics from an LLM.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing "[W]ell-hidden" -- what a choice of words! I had a good laugh when I read this. (No trolling!) Can you share a link? HN is so much fun for these great posts.

soared 2y ago

Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options. Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on. Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.

notTooFarGone 2y ago
So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you would trust the outcome?
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a car mechanic?
  - redwall_hp 2y ago
    My mechanic takes a video of a tire tread depth gauge being inserted into each wheel and reports the values, when doing the initial inspection and tests before every oil change. It's something that can be empirically measured instead of visually guessed at by a human or magic eight-ball. Using a tool that costs only a few dollars, no less, like the pressure gauge you should already keep in your glovebox.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I am hoping that there will always be premium paid options for LLMs, and thus the onus would be on the user whether or not they want biased answers. These will likely be cell-phone-plan level expensive, but the value prop would still be excellent.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  God forbid people attempt to facilitate legitimate commerce!
quickthrowman 2y ago
> Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all it costs is $0.01
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It’s understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that only looks real.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    It's also something so trivial to determine yourself. It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading any critical thinking to AI
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      There's a reason that people have to be told to not just believe everything they read on the Internet. And there's a reason some people still do that anyway.
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    I agree with you, my post was about not using AI to check tread depth and relying on a penny and your own eyesight instead, illustrated here: https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-check-your-tire-tread-penny-test/# https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-che...
- giobox 2y ago
  You don't even need the penny most of the time, given most car tires have tread wear bars in the tread gaps you can just look at now.
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
Once they have you hooked they’ll start jacking up the prices.
- msp26 2y ago
  It's a race to the bottom for pricing. They can't do shit. Even if the American companies colluded to stop competing and raise prices, Chinese providers will undermine that. There is no moat. Most of these AI APIs and products are interchangeable.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    OK, so they won't raise prices, they'll simply EOL their too expensive to maintain services and users won't feel the impact on their wallets, they'll just lose their tool and historical data and what ever else of theirs was actually the property of the company.
mmmBacon 2y ago
For the tire you can also use a penny. If you stick the penny in the tread with Liconln’s head down and his hair isn’t covered, then you need new tires. No AI. ;)
- olyjohn 2y ago
  You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.
kbelder 2y ago
Now I think this conversation will happen in my lifetime: Me: "Looks like your tire is a little low." Youth: "How can you tell, where's your phone?"

gilbetron 2y ago

How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was wrong.

colinmorelli 2y ago
As for correctness, they mentioned the LLM citing links that the person can verify. So there is some protection at that level. But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus when we look to others is constantly moving as technology advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have a specific circumstance that warrants they do so. The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  If it’s also returning links, wouldn’t it be faster and more authoritative to just go read the official links and skip the LLM slop entirely?
  - krisoft 2y ago
    Sure. But often you don’t know how to find the information or what are the right technical terms for your problem. In a more general sense sometimes, but not always, it is easier to verify something than to come up with it at the first place.
  - blendergeek 2y ago
    No. The LLM in the story found the necessary links. In this case the LLM was a better search engine.
- victorbjorklund 2y ago
  But if you dont know anything about programming a link to a library/etc is not so useful. Same if you dont know about tax law and it cities the tax code and how it should be understood (the code is correct but the interpretation is not)

colinmorelli 2y ago

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time). It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc). Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you. These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.

dingnuts 2y ago
"Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. > Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an eating disorder! There is already so much bullshit in the diet space that adding AI bullshit (again, using the technical definition of bullshit here) only stands to increase the value of an interaction with a person with knowledge. And that's without getting into what happens when brand recommendations are baked into the training data. 0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
- colinmorelli 2y ago
  > "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. I understand your perspective, but the intention was to use a term we've all heard to reflect the thing we're all thinking about. Whether or not this is the right term to use for scenarios where the LLM emits incorrect information is not relevant to this post in particular. > No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. No, this is not why real dietitians are expensive. Real dietitians are expensive because they go through extensive training on a topic and are a licensed (and thus supply constrained) group. That doesn't mean they're operating without a grounding fact base. Dietitians are not making up nutritional evidence and guidance as they go. They're operating on studies that have been done over decades of time and millions of people to understand in general what foods are linked to what outcomes. Yes, the field evolves. Yes, it requires changes over time. But to suggest we "don't know" is inconsistent with the fact that we're able to teach dietitians how to construct diets in the first place. There are absolutely cases in which the confounding factors for a patient are unique enough such that novel human thought will be required to construct a reasonable diet plan or treatment pathway for someone. That will continue to be true in law, health, finances, etc. But there are also many, many cases where that is absolutely not the case, the presentation of the case is quite simple, and the next step actions are highly procedural. This is not the same as saying dietitians are useless, or physicians are useless, or attorneys are useless. It is to say that, due to the supply constraints of these professions, there are always going to be fundamental limits to the amount they can produce. But there is a credible argument to be made that if we can bolster their ability to deliver the common scenarios much more effectively, we might be able to unlock some of the capacity to reach more people.

ozgrakkurt 2y ago

It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process. For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is. I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs

atrus 2y ago
> As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad enough the AI marketers push AI as some all knowing, correct oracle, but when the anti-ai people use that as the basis for their arguments, it's somehow more annoying. Trust but verify is still a good rule here, no matter the source, human or otherwise.
- DharmaPolice 2y ago
  If a junior developer lies about something important, they can be fired and you can try to find someone else who wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they don't know they've lied.
  - atrus 2y ago
    You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied" though. Being wrong isn't lying.

eqmvii 2y ago

Your tax example isn't far off from what's already possible with Google. The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers, digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire lawyers.

chgs 2y ago

I tend to use ai for the same things I’d have used Google for in 2005. Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.

flmontpetit 2y ago
It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.
- erkt 2y ago
  I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API. It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.
  - xyzal 2y ago
    It's happening, though not with ads yet https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poisoning-grooming-chatbots-russia/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poi...
  - JoshTko 2y ago
    My bet is that free versions of models will become sponsor aligned.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I'm an AI pessimist, yet I don't see this happening (at least not without some major advancements in how LLMs work). One major problem is the payment mechanism. The nature of LLMs means you just can't really know or force it to spit out ad garbage in a predictable manor. That'll make it really tricky for an advertiser to want to invest in your LLM advertising (beyond being able to sell the fact that they are an AI ad service). Another is going to be regulations. How can you be sure to properly highlight "sponsored" content in the middle of an AI hallucination? These LLM companies run a very real risk of running a fowl of FTC rules.

mr_toad 2y ago

> I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. That’s like buying a wrench and changing your own spark plugs. Wrenches are not putting mechanics out of business.

Avicebron 2y ago
Depends on how good the wrench is, if I can walk over to the wrench, kick it, say change my spark plugs now you fuck, and it does so instantly and for free and doesn't complain....

conductr 2y ago

I’m a bit of a skeptic too and kind of agree on this. Also, the human employee displacement will be slow. It will start by not eliminating existing jobs but just eliminating the need for additional headcount, so it caps the growth of these labor markets. As it does that, the folks in the roles leveraging AI the most will start slowly stealing share of demand as they find more efficient and cheaper ways to perform the work. Meanwhile, core demand is shrinking as self service by customers is increasingly enabled. Then at some step pattern, perhaps the next global business cycle down turn, the headcount starts trending downward. This will repeat a handful of times, probably taking decades to be measured in aggregate by this type of study.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Not consulting a real tax advisor is probably going to cost you much more. I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.

ryandrake 2y ago
Most people’s (USA) taxes are not complex, and just require basic arithmetic to complete. Even topics like stock sales, IRA rollovers, HSAs, and rental income (which the vast majority of taxpayers don’t have) are straightforward if you just read the instructions on the forms and follow them. In 30 years of paying taxes, I’ve only had a tax professional do it once: as an experiment after I already did them myself to see if there was any difference in the output. I paid a tax professional $400 and the forms he handed me back were identical to the ones I filled out myself.
- aaronbaugher 2y ago
  I'm one of those weird kids who liked doing those puzzles where you had to walk through a list of tricky instructions and end up with the right answers, so I'm pretty good at that sort of thing. I also have fairly simple finances: a regular W-2 job and a little side income that doesn't have taxes withdrawn. But last year the IRS sent me a $450 check and a note that said I'd made a mistake on my taxes and paid too much. Sadly, they didn't tell me what the mistake was, so I couldn't be sure to correct it this year. Technically, all you have to do is follow the written instructions. But there are a surprising number of maybes in those instructions. You hit a checkbox that asks whether you qualify for such-and-such deduction, and find yourself downloading yet another document full of conditions for qualification, which aren't always as clear-cut as you'd like. You can end up reading page after page to figure out whether you should check a single box, and that single box may require another series of forms. My small side income takes me from a one-page return to several pages, and next year I'm probably going to have to pay estimated taxes in advance because that non-taxed income leaves me owing at the end of the year more than some acceptable threshold that could result in fines. All because I make an extra 10% doing some evening freelancing. Most people's taxes shouldn't be complex, but in practice they're more complex than they should be.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

Ironically, your example is what you used to get from a Google search back when Google wasn't aggressively monetized and enshittified.

timmytokyo 2y ago
I think this is an important point. It's easy to lose track of just how bad search has gotten over the years because the enshittification has been so gradual. The replacement of search by AI is capturing so many people's imaginations because it feels like the way google felt when it first came around. If AI replaces search, I do wonder how long before AI becomes just as enshittified as search did. You know google/OpenAI/etc will eventually need to make this stuff profitable. And subscriptions aren't currently doing that.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I am honestly glad that we have normalized paying for AI in a way that was never normalized for search. This way, there's a fighting chance that it won't become a dumb ads platform (although OpenAI seems to be speedrunning this).

dcchuck 2y ago

I actually paid for tax advice from one of those big companies (it was recommended - last time I will take that person's recommendations!). I was very disappointed in the service. It felt like the person I was speaking to on the phone would have been better of just echoing the request into AI. So I did just that as I waited on the line. I found the answer and the tax expert "confirmed" it.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
According to the article the Tax expert still has a job though.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn’t going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway. This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.

boredtofears 2y ago

I thought the value of using a licensed tax agent is that if they give you advice that ends up being bad, they have an ethical/professional obligation to clean up their mess.

mchusma 2y ago

Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally not, wasn’t good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an effect.

Jeff_Brown 2y ago
2024 was already madness for translators and graphic artists, according to my personal anecdata.
asadotzler 2y ago
That's now what the AI boosters and shills were saying in 2021. Might be worth a refresher if you've got the time, but nearly every timeline that's been floated by any of the leadership in any of the OG LLM makers has been as hallucinated as the worst answers coming from their bots.

bamboozled 2y ago

Here’s why I don’t think it matters , because the machine is paying for everyone’s productivity boost, even your accountants. So maybe this tide will rise all boats. Time will tell. Your accountant also is probably saving hundreds of dollars in other areas using AI assistance. Personally I still think you should cross check with a professional.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call." What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..." Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation, marketing, hype. In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts not opinions.

mac-attack 2y ago
> In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. What happened in 2023 and 2024 actually Nitpicky but it's worth noting that last year's AI capabilities are not the April 2025 AI capabilities and definitely won't be the December 2025 capabilities. It's using deprecated/replaced technology to make a statement, that is not forward projecting. I'm struggling to see the purpose. It's like announcing that the sun is still shining at 7pm, no?
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  I feel like model improvement is severely overstated by the benchmarks and the last release cycle basically made no difference to my use cases. If you gave me Claude 3.5 and 3.7 I couldn't really tell the difference. OpenAI models feel like they are regressing, and LLAMA 4 regressed even on benchmarks. And the hype was insane in 2023 already - it's useful to compare actual outcomes vs historic hype to gauge how credible the hype sellers are.
  - kypro 2y ago
    That's interesting. I think there's been some pretty significant improvements in the rate of hallucinations and accuracy of the models, especially when it comes to rule following. Perhaps the biggest improvement though is in the size of context windows which are huge compared to this time last year. Maybe progress over the last 2-3 months is hard to see, but progress over the last 6 is very clear.

freehorse 2y ago

> And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out. Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.

ravenstine 2y ago

I don't trust what anyone says in this space because there is so much money to be made (by a fraction of people) if AI lives up to its promise, and money to be made to those who claim that AI is "bullshit". The only thing I can remotely trust is my own experience. Recently, I decided to have some business cards made, which I haven't done in probably 15 years. A few years ago, I would have either hired someone on Fiverr to design my business card or pay for a premade template. Instead, I told Sora to design me a business card, and it gave me a good design the first time; it even immediately updated it with my Instagram link when I asked it to. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how AI, as we now know it, doesn't take the wind out of the sails of certain kinds of jobs.

epicureanideal 2y ago
But didn't we have business card template programs, and even free suggested business card designs from the companies that sell business cards, almost immediately after they opened for business on the internet?
- ravenstine 2y ago
  That's missing the point, and is kind of like saying why bother paying someone to build you a house when there are DIY home building kits. (or why even buy a home when you can live in a van rent-free) The point is that I would have paid for another human being's time. Why? Because I am not a young man anymore, and have little desire to do everything myself at this point. But now, I don't have to pay for someone's time, and that surplus time doesn't necessarily transfer to something equivalent like magic.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    You do pay for it though. Compute isn't free.
    - ravenstine 2y ago
      Could I really have been more clear? I am not talking about whether I have to pay more or less for anything. My problem is not paying. I want to pay so that I don't have to make something myself or waste time fiddling with a free template. What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human being is less likely to be at the other end of the transaction when I want to spend money to avoid sacrificing my time. Sure, one can say that whomever is working for one of these AI companies benefits, but they would be outliers and AI is effectively homogenizing labor units in that case. Someone with creative talent isn't going to feasibly spin up a competitive AI business the way they could have started their own business selling their services directly.

vishnugupta 2y ago

I use it everyday to an extent that I’ve come to depend on it. For copywriting, analyzing contracts, exploring my business domain, etc etc. Each of those tasks would have required me to consult with an expert a few years ago. Not anymore.

andrewmutz 2y ago

"AI is all hype and is going to destroy the labor market"

dismalaf 2y ago

Google (non-Gemini) has always been a great source for tax advice, at least here in Canada because, if nothing else, the government's website appears to leave all its pages available for indexing (even if it's impossible to navigate on its own).

ericmcer 2y ago

This is a great point, I was just using it understand various DMV procedures. It is invaluable for navigating bureaucracy so if your job is to ingest and regurgitate a bunch of documents and procedures you may be highly at risk here. That is a great use for it too, rather than replacing artists we have personal advisors who can navigate almost any level of complex bureaucracy instantaneously. My girlfriend hates AI, like rails against it at any opportunity, but after spending a few hours on the DMV website I sat down and fed her questions into Claude and had answers in a few seconds. Instant convert.

nzeid 2y ago

> Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. These examples aren't wrong but you might be overstating their impact on the economy as a whole. E.g. the overwhelming majority of people do not pay solely for tax advice, or have a dietician, etc. Corporations already crippled their customer support so there's no remaining damage to be dealt. Your tax example won't move the needle on people who pay to have their taxes done in their entirety.

m3047 2y ago

The biggest harm today is people in training for "people interaction" specialties with a high degree of empathy / ability to read others: psychology, counseling, forensic interviewing. They pay a lot of money (or it's invested in them) to get trained and then have to do practical residency / internship: they need to do those interships NOW, and a significant proportion of the population that they'd otherwise interact with to do so is off faffing about with AI. The fact that anecdotally they can't seem to create "convincing" enough AIs to take the place of subjects is damning.

empath75 2y ago

This thought process sort of implies that there's a limited amount of work that's available to do, and once AI is doing all of it, that everyone else will just sit on their hands and stop using their brains to do stuff. Even if every job that exists today were currently automated _people would find other stuff to do_. There is always going to be more work to do that isn't economical for AIs to do for a variety of reasons.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research. One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.

freedomben 2y ago
Also, frequently you're buying some protection by using the licensed agent. If they give you bad advice, there's a person to go to and in the most extreme cases, maybe file a lawsuit or insurance claim against.

datpuz 2y ago

Nearly every job, even a lot of creative ones, require a degree of accuracy and consistency that gen AI just can't deliver. Until some major breakthrough is achieved, not many people doing real work are in danger.

notahacker 2y ago

A friend of mine is working on a "RAG for tax advisers" startup. He's selling it to the tax accountants, as a way for them to spot things they wouldn't otherwise have the time to review and generate more specialist tax advisory work. There's a lot more work they could do if only it's affordable to the businesses they advise (none of whom could do their own taxes even if they wanted to!) Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower cost of doing work generates more demand overall...

jmull 2y ago

> ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk I doubt it. Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search. It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

> set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient If that’s true, probably for the best that those jobs get replaced. Then again, the value may have been in the personal touch (pay to feel good about your decisions) rather than quality of directions.

jaredcwhite 2y ago

> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.

worik 2y ago
> So…all you needed was a decent search engine, Yes. "...all you need" A good search engine is a big ask. Google at its height was quite good. LLMs are shaping up to be very good search engines That would be enough, for me to be very pleased with them

jakubmazanec 2y ago

Awfully early? We have "useful" LLMs for almost three years. Where is the productivity increase? Also, your example is not very relevant. 1) Would you pay the professional if you couldn't find the answer yourself? 2) If search engines were still useful (I'm assuming you googled first), wouldn't they be able to find the official calculator too?

decimalenough 2y ago
LLMs have come a long way in those 3 years. The early ones were absolute garbage compared to what we have today. 1) Yes. I had in fact already booked the appointment, but decided to try asking Gemini for shits and giggles. 2) I did google, but I didn't know an official calculator existed, and the search results presented me with a morass of random links that I couldn't make heads or tails of. Remember, I'm not a domain expert in this area.
- jakubmazanec 2y ago
  So search is broken, and our answer is creating energy-guzzling bullshitting AIs. No wonder there is no change in productivity.

mmcnl 2y ago

But all those jobs have been at risk for a long time already, yet they still exist. There is so much "pre-AI" low-hanging fruit that is still there. So why is that? I don't have the answer, but clearly there is more to it than just technology.

gamblor956 2y ago

Every month I run some trial law and tax questions past all the big AI chat bots. They scored about 60% this month. That sounds good until you consider that 60% is a failing grade for the bar exam, and a licensed lawyer getting 40% of their legal advice wrong would be disbarred.

InfoHuman 2y ago

Those "pay me for advice on X" jobs have survived many other technological innovations. In the pre-internet time, there was an ever-expanding volume of books and articles you could read to get the advice. Then along came the world wide web, search engines, and apps - advice available from anywhere, anytime. And yet dieticians, financial advisors, lawyers, etc. have continued to be in demand. Are LLMs finally going to be the breakthrough that changes this? Maybe. The anthropomorphized chat experience where you feel like you're talking to a person definitely helps. So does the confident style of LLM answers, which sound expert and definitive. But I'm not sure it will work for everyone, or even for the majority. Many people lack the background knowledge, vocabulary, patience, and persistence to get good results from their own research. I've seen plenty of people who struggle to use Google effectively, and I suspect these same people will have trouble getting helpful answers on complex topics from an LLM.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing "[W]ell-hidden" -- what a choice of words! I had a good laugh when I read this. (No trolling!) Can you share a link? HN is so much fun for these great posts.