6 ms·

Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans hired to clean AI slop

208 points by wahvinci 1y ago

ares623 1y ago
I for one am super excited for what my kids, and the other children they grow up with, will do in their future careers! I am so proud and cheer this future on, it can’t come soon enough! This is software’s true purpose.
- notachatbot123 1y ago
  The article has a strong focus on deceptive media, used on social media to penetrate viewers' attention. It makes me sad and glad that my kids and family did grow up before all this insanity of psychological abuse.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > This is software’s true purpose. I assume you missed the whole part where 75% of people use LLMs for porn, AI bf/gf roleplaying, spam, ads, scams, &c. It's like youtube, in theory: unlimited free educational content to raise the bar world wide, in practice: 3/4th of videos are braindead garbage, and probably 99% of views are on concentrated this.
onion2k 1y ago
Someone tried to generate a retro hip-hop album cover image with AI, but the text is all nonsense, and humans would have to be hired to clean that AI slop In about two years we've gone from "AI just generates rubbish where the text should be" to "AI spells things pretty wrong." This is largely down to generating a whole image with a textual element. Using a model like SDXL with a LORA like FOOOCUS to do inpainting and input image with a very rough approximation of the right text (added via MS Paint) you can get a pretty much perfect result. Give it another couple of years and the text generation will be spot on. So yes, right now we need a human to either use the AI well, or to fix it afterwards. That's how technology always goes - something is invented, it's not perfect, humans need to fix the outputs, but eventually the human input diminishes to nothing.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  > That's how technology always goes This is not how AI has ever gone. Every approach so far has either been a total dead end, or the underlying concept got pivoted into a simplified, not-AI tech. This new approach of machine learning content generation will either keep developing, or it will join everything else in the history of AI by hitting a point of diminishing to zero returns.
  - selalipop 1y ago
    But their comment is about 2 years out of date, and AI image gen has got exponentially better at text than when the models and LoRAs they mentioned were SOTA. I agree we probably won't magically scale current techniques to AGI, but I also think the local maxima for creative output is going to be high enough that it changes how we approach it the way computers changed how we approach knowledge work. That's why I focus on it at least.
  - onion2k 1y ago
    This is not how AI has ever gone. Every approach so far has either been a total dead end, or the underlying concept got pivoted into a simplified, not-AI tech. You're talking about the progress of technology. I'm talking about how humans use technology in it's early states. They're not mutually exclusive.
- vunderba 1y ago
  Minor correction. FOOCUS [1] isn't a LoRA - it's a Gradio-based frontend (in the same vein as Automatic1111, Forge, etc.) for image generation. And most SOTA models (Imagen, Qwen 20b, etc) at this point can actually already handle a fair amount of text in a single T2I generation. Flux Dev provided your willing to roll a couple gens can do it as well. [1] https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus
wtcactus 1y ago
First thing that came to mind when I started seeing news about companies needing developers to clean up AI code, was the part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because they bought this new machine to produce the toothpaste, but then they re-wire him for an higher salary because the machine keeps breaking and they need someone to fix it. AI (at least this form of AI) is not going to take our jobs away and let us all idle and poor, just like the milling machine or the plough didn't take people's jobs away and make everyone poor. it will enable us to do even greater things.
- riffraff 1y ago
  Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones. The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago. (I don't think LLMs are like that, tho). Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships. But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
  - visarga 1y ago
    By the same logic, people working in transportation around the time Ford Model T was introduced did NOT diminish 100 years later. We went from about 3.2 million in 1910 (~8% of the workforce) to 6–16 million in 2023 (~4–10%, depending on definition). That is the effect of a century of transportation development. Sometimes demand scales, maybe food is less elastic. Programming has been automating itself with each new language and library for 70 years and here we are, so many software devs. Demand scaled up as a result of automation.
- Towaway69 1y ago
  > it will enable us to do even greater things. Just as gun powder enabled greater things. I agree with you just humans have shown, time after time, an ability to first use innovation to make lives miserable for their fellow humans.
Dwedit 1y ago
> creating this garbage consumes staggering amounts of water and electricity, contributing to emissions that harm the planet This is highly dependent on which model is being used and what hardware it's running on. In particular, some older article claimed that the energy used to generate an image was equivalent to charging a mobile phone, but the actual energy required for a single image generation (SDXL, 25 steps) is about 35 seconds of running a 80W GPU.
- samplatt 1y ago
  35 seconds @ 80W is ~210 mAh, so definitely a lot less than the ~4000+ mAh in today's phone batteries.
  - serial_dev 1y ago
    Don’t you ignore the energy used to train the models? I don’t know how much is that “per image”, but it should be included (and if it shouldn’t, we should know why it is negligible). I’m not sure it will be as high as a full charge of a phone, but it’s incomplete without the resources needed for collecting data and training the model.
  - red369 1y ago
    I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but I thought mAh/Ah was not a good measure for comparing storage of quite different devices, because it doesn't take into account voltage. This is fine for comparing Li-ion devices, because they use the same voltage, but I understood that using watt-hours was therefore more appropriate for apples-to-apples comparisons for devices with different wattages. Am I missing something? Does the CPU/GPU/APU doing this calculation on servers/PCs run the same wattage as mobile devices?
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      No you are completely right. mAh is a unit of current over time. Not power. The proper unit is watt hours.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
intellectronica 1y ago
How is this ironic? Carelessly AI-generated output (what we call "slop") is precisely that mediocre average you get before investing more in refining it through iteration. The problem isn't that additional work is needed, but that in many cases it is assumed that no additional work is needed and the first generation from a vague prompt is good enough.
- kataklasm 1y ago
  The irony stems from the fact workers are fired due to being 'replaced' by AI only to then be re-hired afterwards to clean up the slop, thus maximizing costs to the business!
  - ggm 1y ago
    Relative cost of labour will differ. One was subject matter expert price, the other will aim for mechanical turk. When the big lawsuits hit, they'll roll back.
  - adventured 1y ago
    It'll be a large cost reduction over time. The median software developer in the US was at around $112,000 in salary plus benefits on top of that (healthcare, stock compensation), prior to the job plunge. Call it a minimum of $130,000 just at the median. They'll hire those people back at half their total compensation, with no stock, far fewer benefits, to clean up AI slop. And or just contract it overseas at ~1/3 the former total cost. Another ten years from now the AI systems will have improved drastically, reducing the slop factor. There's no scenario where it goes back to how it was, that era is over. And the cost will decline substantially versus the peak for US developers.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      Based on... what? The more you try to "reduce costs" by letting LLMs take the reigns, the more slop will eventually have to be cleaned up by senior developers. The mess will get exponentially bigger and harder to resolve. Because I think it won't just be a linear relationship. If you let 1 vibe coder replace a team of 10, you'll need a lot more than 10 people to clean it up and maintain it going forward when they hit the wall. Personally I'm looking forward to the news stories about major companies collapsing under the weight of their LLM-induced tech debt.
fifilura 1y ago
Like being a middle manager for employees that don't learn :)
- svantana 1y ago
  I've never heard of a middle manager that fixes errors in other employees' output. Sounds more like a senior developer or creative (which, in fairness, is often a type of low-level manager).
  - fifilura 1y ago
    Yeah, maybe the wrong word, it was meant to describe "someone with no power but all the responsibilities" (BTDT).
sltr 1y ago
> AI was supposed to replace humans There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. 2. AI is diluting/degrading media culture. For the first, I'm waiting for more data, e.g. from the BLS. For the second, I think a new category of media has emerged. It lands somewhere near chiptune and deep-fried memes.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics. What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda. Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.
  - b112 1y ago
    This is my fear for everything. I lay no blame here, but at the same time, I can imagine an entire younger generation not actually learning... anything. Part of learning is doing. You can read about fixing a car, but until you do it, you won't know how it's actually done. For most things, doing is what turns "reading a bunch of stuff" into "skill". Yet how far will this go? I see a neuralink, or I see smartglasses, where people just ask "how do I do this" and follow along as some kind of monkey. Not even understanding anything, at all, about whatever they do. Who will advance our capabilities? Or debug issues not yet seen? Certainly AI is nowhere near either of those. Taking existing data and correlating it and discovering new relationships in that data isn't an advancement of capability.
mmmllm 1y ago
The greatest irony is that the only comment on that article is AI generated
grey-area 1y ago
We have not yet entered the AI age, though I believe we will. LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful. Perhaps they will evolve or perhaps they will prove a dead end.
- bheadmaster 1y ago
  > LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful. LLMs are a particular application of machine learning, and as such LLMs both benefit by and contribute to general machine learning techniques. I agree that LLMs are not the AI we all imagine, but the fact that it broke a huge milestone is a big deal - natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI! I believe it is only a matter of time until we get to a multi-sensory self-modifying large models which can both understand and learn from all five of human senses, and maybe even some of the senses we have no access to.
  - pyzhianov 1y ago
    > natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI what if we have chosen a wrong metric there?
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      I don't think we have. Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that.
      - bheadmaster 1y ago
        > Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that. But they do close a big gap - they're capable of "understanding" fuzzy ill-defined sentences and "infer" the context, insofar as they can help formalize it into a format parsable by another system.
        1y ago
lordnacho 1y ago
It's not so strange that e-commerce is the first thing that AI has visibly altered. Most "buy this thing" sites really just have one proposition at their core. The presentation is incidental. You can't have a website looking like it's still 2003, but you also don't really care what your 2025 shop front looks like. Your ads are there to draw attention, not to be works of art. What does AI do, at its heart? It is literally trained to make things that can pass for what's ordinary. What's the best way to do that, normally? Make a bland thing that is straight down the middle of the road. Boring music, boring pictures, boring writing. Now there are still some issues with common sense, due to the models lacking certain qualities that I'm sure experts are working on. Things like people with 8 fingers, lack of a model of physics, and so on. But we're already at a place where you could easily not spot a fake, especially while not paying attention. So where does that leave us? AI is great at producing scaffolding. Lorem Ipsum, but for everything. Humans come in to add a bit of agency. You have to take some risk when you're producing something, decisions have to be made. Taste, one might call it. And someone needs to be responsible for the decisions. Part of that is cleaning up obvious errors, but also part of it is customizing the skeleton so that it does what you want.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Brad Pitt as Rusty: "Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances..." (from Ocean's Eleven)
  - latexr 1y ago
    > And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances... I’ve only seen the movie when it came out, so I didn’t remember this scene and thought you might’ve been doing the ellipsis yourself. So I checked it out. For anyone else curious, the character was interrupted. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/characters/nm0000093?item=qt0329520 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/characters/nm0000093?it...
alexander2002 1y ago
Someone can drop a sick blog post called LoremIpsum.ai
SuperHeavy256 1y ago
Man complains about AI giving him a starting point to do his work from.
rich_sasha 1y ago
Is that so ironic? Think of humans in factories fishing out faulty items, where formerly they would perhaps be the artisans that made the product in the first place.
- LightBug1 1y ago
  Yes, when AI's whole schtick was that it was supposed to be the greatest and smartest revolution in the last few centuries. Conclusion: we are not in the age of AI.
  - rich_sasha 1y ago
    Dunno. Mass production was clearly a many-orders-of-magnitude improvement on the artisan model, yet still humans are needed. We still call it the "industrial revolution".
    - LightBug1 1y ago
      Fair. My jury is still out as to whether the current models are proto-AI. Obviously an incredible innovation. I'm just not certain they have the potential to go the whole way. /layman disclaimer
      - falcor84 1y ago
        As you say, whether we call it "AI", or "doohickey", it is an incredible innovation. And I don't think that anyone is claiming at the moment that the systems as-is will themselves "go the whole way" - it is a technological advancement, that like all others should inspire practitioners to develop better future systems, that adapt some aspects of it. Perhaps at some point we will see a self-propelling technological singularity with the AI developing its own successor autonomously, but that's clearly not the current situation.
        LightBug1 1y ago
        Doohickey is so much more relatable ... I may call LLM's that from now on. Thank you.
cladopa 1y ago
We have been doing this for decades. I was hired to correct and train speech recognition and OCR programs like 20 years ago. A friend of mine corrected geolocated tags. In the history of AI systems you basically had people inputing Prolog rules in "smart" systems or programmers hardcoding rules is programs like ELIZA or Generalised Problem Solvers.
nathias 1y ago
ironic, like rain on your wedding day
- patrickmay 1y ago
  Only if you're a meteorologist.
nottorp 1y ago
Just pour 500 more billion per year into OpenAI and they'll fix it. ... about when Tesla delivers full self driving.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  Full self-driving is 1000x more likely than AGI. There are all these maps, lines on the ground and signs; the roads don't wiggle like snakes, appear and disappear; and the other cars and obstacles don't suddenly change number, shape and physics. I like the idea that mediocre sci-fi show Upload came up with: maybe they can get self-driving to the point where it doesn't require a human in the loop and a squirrel will work.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > the roads don't wiggle like snakes, appear and disappear You mean, full self driving only on pre mapped roads then? I doubt even that will happen, but it's just a subset anyway.
  - thunky 1y ago
    > Full self-driving is 1000x more likely than AGI. GP specifically said Tesla delivering FSD.
deleted 1y ago
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alkyon 1y ago
Before AI even attains the promised AGI level, we all will be driven mad by 'slopocalypse' like in one of the PKD stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_Pitch_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_Pitch_(short_story)
- zippothrowaway 1y ago
  I've not read that story in decades - thanks. I got shudders just re-reading it when I came across: '“It’s too late to vid your wife,” the fasrad said. “There are three emergency-rockets in the stern; if you want, I’ll fire them off in the hope of attracting a passing military transport.”' ...which sounds exactly like ChatGPT5.
cyanydeez 1y ago
Irony or a never ending capitalist deescalator on human value
seydor 1y ago
The irony was created by AI companies purposely overpromising and inflating the bubble. They deserve such ridicule.
Our_Benefactors 1y ago
> employment for hundreds of thousands of humans: cleaning up the mess AI makes Stopped reading there. The author is very biased and out of touch.
goranmoomin 1y ago
From the case that the article is presenting, I think LLMs are acting as a validation step – the average person who doesn't know how to code creates a minimal, LLM-spaghetti system (e.g. a restaurant menu website) with ChatGPT, validate if this is something that they need, iterate on it, create a specification, and then bring in an actual (costly) engineer that can fix and improve the system. There's a lot of LLM byproducts that leave us in bad taste (hate all of the LLM slop on the internet), but I don't think this is one of them.
derfabianpeter 1y ago
Greatest irony of the industrial age: humans hired to operate machines.
ath3nd 1y ago
[dead]
quantumcotton 1y ago
Literally just a consultant labeled different. Clean code. Create a job site efficiency. Same thing. Nothing ground breaking. It's expected.
Olivia8 1y ago
I believe AI’s impact on the labour market will be a mixed bag over the next decade. Many roles will shift, tasks that are routine and repetitive will be taken over, while people will be in charge of communication, strategy, ethics and human judgement. The demand will definitely increase for experts in AI governance, prompt engineering, data science, etc. And this knowledge is in high demand today. More and more companies in the mentioned above industries use AI voice agents which are efficient and cost saving solutions, boosting productivity and relieving human employees of time consuming and repetitive tasks, while AI calling agents interact with customer, reply their inquiries, provide information, make appointments, etc. They are able to qualify leads and forward to the sales teams only interested clients if we are speaking about anything related to sales. Speaking about voice AI, I have been checking several and find Coldi AI one of the best solutions for leads generation.

208 points by wahvinci 1y ago

I for one am super excited for what my kids, and the other children they grow up with, will do in their future careers! I am so proud and cheer this future on, it can’t come soon enough! This is software’s true purpose.

notachatbot123 1y ago
The article has a strong focus on deceptive media, used on social media to penetrate viewers' attention. It makes me sad and glad that my kids and family did grow up before all this insanity of psychological abuse.
lm28469 1y ago
> This is software’s true purpose. I assume you missed the whole part where 75% of people use LLMs for porn, AI bf/gf roleplaying, spam, ads, scams, &c. It's like youtube, in theory: unlimited free educational content to raise the bar world wide, in practice: 3/4th of videos are braindead garbage, and probably 99% of views are on concentrated this.

onion2k 1y ago

Someone tried to generate a retro hip-hop album cover image with AI, but the text is all nonsense, and humans would have to be hired to clean that AI slop In about two years we've gone from "AI just generates rubbish where the text should be" to "AI spells things pretty wrong." This is largely down to generating a whole image with a textual element. Using a model like SDXL with a LORA like FOOOCUS to do inpainting and input image with a very rough approximation of the right text (added via MS Paint) you can get a pretty much perfect result. Give it another couple of years and the text generation will be spot on. So yes, right now we need a human to either use the AI well, or to fix it afterwards. That's how technology always goes - something is invented, it's not perfect, humans need to fix the outputs, but eventually the human input diminishes to nothing.

zdragnar 1y ago
> That's how technology always goes This is not how AI has ever gone. Every approach so far has either been a total dead end, or the underlying concept got pivoted into a simplified, not-AI tech. This new approach of machine learning content generation will either keep developing, or it will join everything else in the history of AI by hitting a point of diminishing to zero returns.
- selalipop 1y ago
  But their comment is about 2 years out of date, and AI image gen has got exponentially better at text than when the models and LoRAs they mentioned were SOTA. I agree we probably won't magically scale current techniques to AGI, but I also think the local maxima for creative output is going to be high enough that it changes how we approach it the way computers changed how we approach knowledge work. That's why I focus on it at least.
- onion2k 1y ago
  This is not how AI has ever gone. Every approach so far has either been a total dead end, or the underlying concept got pivoted into a simplified, not-AI tech. You're talking about the progress of technology. I'm talking about how humans use technology in it's early states. They're not mutually exclusive.
vunderba 1y ago
Minor correction. FOOCUS [1] isn't a LoRA - it's a Gradio-based frontend (in the same vein as Automatic1111, Forge, etc.) for image generation. And most SOTA models (Imagen, Qwen 20b, etc) at this point can actually already handle a fair amount of text in a single T2I generation. Flux Dev provided your willing to roll a couple gens can do it as well. [1] https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus

wtcactus 1y ago

First thing that came to mind when I started seeing news about companies needing developers to clean up AI code, was the part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because they bought this new machine to produce the toothpaste, but then they re-wire him for an higher salary because the machine keeps breaking and they need someone to fix it. AI (at least this form of AI) is not going to take our jobs away and let us all idle and poor, just like the milling machine or the plough didn't take people's jobs away and make everyone poor. it will enable us to do even greater things.

riffraff 1y ago
Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones. The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago. (I don't think LLMs are like that, tho). Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships. But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
- visarga 1y ago
  By the same logic, people working in transportation around the time Ford Model T was introduced did NOT diminish 100 years later. We went from about 3.2 million in 1910 (~8% of the workforce) to 6–16 million in 2023 (~4–10%, depending on definition). That is the effect of a century of transportation development. Sometimes demand scales, maybe food is less elastic. Programming has been automating itself with each new language and library for 70 years and here we are, so many software devs. Demand scaled up as a result of automation.
Towaway69 1y ago
> it will enable us to do even greater things. Just as gun powder enabled greater things. I agree with you just humans have shown, time after time, an ability to first use innovation to make lives miserable for their fellow humans.

Dwedit 1y ago

> creating this garbage consumes staggering amounts of water and electricity, contributing to emissions that harm the planet This is highly dependent on which model is being used and what hardware it's running on. In particular, some older article claimed that the energy used to generate an image was equivalent to charging a mobile phone, but the actual energy required for a single image generation (SDXL, 25 steps) is about 35 seconds of running a 80W GPU.

samplatt 1y ago
35 seconds @ 80W is ~210 mAh, so definitely a lot less than the ~4000+ mAh in today's phone batteries.
- serial_dev 1y ago
  Don’t you ignore the energy used to train the models? I don’t know how much is that “per image”, but it should be included (and if it shouldn’t, we should know why it is negligible). I’m not sure it will be as high as a full charge of a phone, but it’s incomplete without the resources needed for collecting data and training the model.
- red369 1y ago
  I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but I thought mAh/Ah was not a good measure for comparing storage of quite different devices, because it doesn't take into account voltage. This is fine for comparing Li-ion devices, because they use the same voltage, but I understood that using watt-hours was therefore more appropriate for apples-to-apples comparisons for devices with different wattages. Am I missing something? Does the CPU/GPU/APU doing this calculation on servers/PCs run the same wattage as mobile devices?
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    No you are completely right. mAh is a unit of current over time. Not power. The proper unit is watt hours.
- quickthrowman 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

intellectronica 1y ago

How is this ironic? Carelessly AI-generated output (what we call "slop") is precisely that mediocre average you get before investing more in refining it through iteration. The problem isn't that additional work is needed, but that in many cases it is assumed that no additional work is needed and the first generation from a vague prompt is good enough.

kataklasm 1y ago
The irony stems from the fact workers are fired due to being 'replaced' by AI only to then be re-hired afterwards to clean up the slop, thus maximizing costs to the business!
- ggm 1y ago
  Relative cost of labour will differ. One was subject matter expert price, the other will aim for mechanical turk. When the big lawsuits hit, they'll roll back.
- adventured 1y ago
  It'll be a large cost reduction over time. The median software developer in the US was at around $112,000 in salary plus benefits on top of that (healthcare, stock compensation), prior to the job plunge. Call it a minimum of $130,000 just at the median. They'll hire those people back at half their total compensation, with no stock, far fewer benefits, to clean up AI slop. And or just contract it overseas at ~1/3 the former total cost. Another ten years from now the AI systems will have improved drastically, reducing the slop factor. There's no scenario where it goes back to how it was, that era is over. And the cost will decline substantially versus the peak for US developers.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Based on... what? The more you try to "reduce costs" by letting LLMs take the reigns, the more slop will eventually have to be cleaned up by senior developers. The mess will get exponentially bigger and harder to resolve. Because I think it won't just be a linear relationship. If you let 1 vibe coder replace a team of 10, you'll need a lot more than 10 people to clean it up and maintain it going forward when they hit the wall. Personally I'm looking forward to the news stories about major companies collapsing under the weight of their LLM-induced tech debt.

fifilura 1y ago

Like being a middle manager for employees that don't learn :)

svantana 1y ago
I've never heard of a middle manager that fixes errors in other employees' output. Sounds more like a senior developer or creative (which, in fairness, is often a type of low-level manager).
- fifilura 1y ago
  Yeah, maybe the wrong word, it was meant to describe "someone with no power but all the responsibilities" (BTDT).

sltr 1y ago

> AI was supposed to replace humans There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. 2. AI is diluting/degrading media culture. For the first, I'm waiting for more data, e.g. from the BLS. For the second, I think a new category of media has emerged. It lands somewhere near chiptune and deep-fried memes.

mschuster91 1y ago
> There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics. What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda. Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.
- b112 1y ago
  This is my fear for everything. I lay no blame here, but at the same time, I can imagine an entire younger generation not actually learning... anything. Part of learning is doing. You can read about fixing a car, but until you do it, you won't know how it's actually done. For most things, doing is what turns "reading a bunch of stuff" into "skill". Yet how far will this go? I see a neuralink, or I see smartglasses, where people just ask "how do I do this" and follow along as some kind of monkey. Not even understanding anything, at all, about whatever they do. Who will advance our capabilities? Or debug issues not yet seen? Certainly AI is nowhere near either of those. Taking existing data and correlating it and discovering new relationships in that data isn't an advancement of capability.

mmmllm 1y ago

The greatest irony is that the only comment on that article is AI generated

grey-area 1y ago

We have not yet entered the AI age, though I believe we will. LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful. Perhaps they will evolve or perhaps they will prove a dead end.

bheadmaster 1y ago
> LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful. LLMs are a particular application of machine learning, and as such LLMs both benefit by and contribute to general machine learning techniques. I agree that LLMs are not the AI we all imagine, but the fact that it broke a huge milestone is a big deal - natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI! I believe it is only a matter of time until we get to a multi-sensory self-modifying large models which can both understand and learn from all five of human senses, and maybe even some of the senses we have no access to.
- pyzhianov 1y ago
  > natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI what if we have chosen a wrong metric there?
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    I don't think we have. Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that.
    - bheadmaster 1y ago
      > Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that. But they do close a big gap - they're capable of "understanding" fuzzy ill-defined sentences and "infer" the context, insofar as they can help formalize it into a format parsable by another system.
      - 1y ago

lordnacho 1y ago

It's not so strange that e-commerce is the first thing that AI has visibly altered. Most "buy this thing" sites really just have one proposition at their core. The presentation is incidental. You can't have a website looking like it's still 2003, but you also don't really care what your 2025 shop front looks like. Your ads are there to draw attention, not to be works of art. What does AI do, at its heart? It is literally trained to make things that can pass for what's ordinary. What's the best way to do that, normally? Make a bland thing that is straight down the middle of the road. Boring music, boring pictures, boring writing. Now there are still some issues with common sense, due to the models lacking certain qualities that I'm sure experts are working on. Things like people with 8 fingers, lack of a model of physics, and so on. But we're already at a place where you could easily not spot a fake, especially while not paying attention. So where does that leave us? AI is great at producing scaffolding. Lorem Ipsum, but for everything. Humans come in to add a bit of agency. You have to take some risk when you're producing something, decisions have to be made. Taste, one might call it. And someone needs to be responsible for the decisions. Part of that is cleaning up obvious errors, but also part of it is customizing the skeleton so that it does what you want.

mikepurvis 1y ago
Brad Pitt as Rusty: "Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances..." (from Ocean's Eleven)
- latexr 1y ago
  > And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances... I’ve only seen the movie when it came out, so I didn’t remember this scene and thought you might’ve been doing the ellipsis yourself. So I checked it out. For anyone else curious, the character was interrupted. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/characters/nm0000093?item=qt0329520 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/characters/nm0000093?it...

alexander2002 1y ago

Someone can drop a sick blog post called LoremIpsum.ai

SuperHeavy256 1y ago

Man complains about AI giving him a starting point to do his work from.

rich_sasha 1y ago

Is that so ironic? Think of humans in factories fishing out faulty items, where formerly they would perhaps be the artisans that made the product in the first place.

LightBug1 1y ago
Yes, when AI's whole schtick was that it was supposed to be the greatest and smartest revolution in the last few centuries. Conclusion: we are not in the age of AI.
- rich_sasha 1y ago
  Dunno. Mass production was clearly a many-orders-of-magnitude improvement on the artisan model, yet still humans are needed. We still call it the "industrial revolution".
  - LightBug1 1y ago
    Fair. My jury is still out as to whether the current models are proto-AI. Obviously an incredible innovation. I'm just not certain they have the potential to go the whole way. /layman disclaimer
    - falcor84 1y ago
      As you say, whether we call it "AI", or "doohickey", it is an incredible innovation. And I don't think that anyone is claiming at the moment that the systems as-is will themselves "go the whole way" - it is a technological advancement, that like all others should inspire practitioners to develop better future systems, that adapt some aspects of it. Perhaps at some point we will see a self-propelling technological singularity with the AI developing its own successor autonomously, but that's clearly not the current situation.
      - LightBug1 1y ago
        Doohickey is so much more relatable ... I may call LLM's that from now on. Thank you.

cladopa 1y ago

We have been doing this for decades. I was hired to correct and train speech recognition and OCR programs like 20 years ago. A friend of mine corrected geolocated tags. In the history of AI systems you basically had people inputing Prolog rules in "smart" systems or programmers hardcoding rules is programs like ELIZA or Generalised Problem Solvers.

nathias 1y ago

ironic, like rain on your wedding day

patrickmay 1y ago
Only if you're a meteorologist.

nottorp 1y ago

Just pour 500 more billion per year into OpenAI and they'll fix it. ... about when Tesla delivers full self driving.

pessimizer 1y ago
Full self-driving is 1000x more likely than AGI. There are all these maps, lines on the ground and signs; the roads don't wiggle like snakes, appear and disappear; and the other cars and obstacles don't suddenly change number, shape and physics. I like the idea that mediocre sci-fi show Upload came up with: maybe they can get self-driving to the point where it doesn't require a human in the loop and a squirrel will work.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > the roads don't wiggle like snakes, appear and disappear You mean, full self driving only on pre mapped roads then? I doubt even that will happen, but it's just a subset anyway.
- thunky 1y ago
  > Full self-driving is 1000x more likely than AGI. GP specifically said Tesla delivering FSD.

deleted 1y ago

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alkyon 1y ago

Before AI even attains the promised AGI level, we all will be driven mad by 'slopocalypse' like in one of the PKD stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_Pitch_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_Pitch_(short_story)

zippothrowaway 1y ago
I've not read that story in decades - thanks. I got shudders just re-reading it when I came across: '“It’s too late to vid your wife,” the fasrad said. “There are three emergency-rockets in the stern; if you want, I’ll fire them off in the hope of attracting a passing military transport.”' ...which sounds exactly like ChatGPT5.

cyanydeez 1y ago

Irony or a never ending capitalist deescalator on human value

seydor 1y ago

The irony was created by AI companies purposely overpromising and inflating the bubble. They deserve such ridicule.

Our_Benefactors 1y ago

> employment for hundreds of thousands of humans: cleaning up the mess AI makes Stopped reading there. The author is very biased and out of touch.

goranmoomin 1y ago

From the case that the article is presenting, I think LLMs are acting as a validation step – the average person who doesn't know how to code creates a minimal, LLM-spaghetti system (e.g. a restaurant menu website) with ChatGPT, validate if this is something that they need, iterate on it, create a specification, and then bring in an actual (costly) engineer that can fix and improve the system. There's a lot of LLM byproducts that leave us in bad taste (hate all of the LLM slop on the internet), but I don't think this is one of them.

derfabianpeter 1y ago

Greatest irony of the industrial age: humans hired to operate machines.

ath3nd 1y ago

[dead]

quantumcotton 1y ago

Literally just a consultant labeled different. Clean code. Create a job site efficiency. Same thing. Nothing ground breaking. It's expected.

Olivia8 1y ago

I believe AI’s impact on the labour market will be a mixed bag over the next decade. Many roles will shift, tasks that are routine and repetitive will be taken over, while people will be in charge of communication, strategy, ethics and human judgement. The demand will definitely increase for experts in AI governance, prompt engineering, data science, etc. And this knowledge is in high demand today. More and more companies in the mentioned above industries use AI voice agents which are efficient and cost saving solutions, boosting productivity and relieving human employees of time consuming and repetitive tasks, while AI calling agents interact with customer, reply their inquiries, provide information, make appointments, etc. They are able to qualify leads and forward to the sales teams only interested clients if we are speaking about anything related to sales. Speaking about voice AI, I have been checking several and find Coldi AI one of the best solutions for leads generation.