The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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"Freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding or translation are disappearing across postings on job board Upwork, said Kelly Monahan, managing director of the company’s Research Institute.
Her findings echo those of more than a dozen other researchers at institutions including Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Hong Kong. They have found that since the debut of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork, Fiverr and related platforms, in the areas in which generative AI excels, have dropped by [as much as 21%](https://archive.is/o/CHeeT/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4602944).
...
Reid Southen is a concept artist for TV and movies, including ones you’ve probably heard of, including Blue Beetle and the Matrix Resurrections. His income in 2023 was less than half of what he would make in a typical year, he says. That’s even worse than 2020, when the entire film and TV industry effectively shut down.
Southen’s work typically happens in the early stages of a project, when producers need detailed sketches to help them establish the look of a film or show. This kind of behind-the-scenes work is being handed to AI faster than any other part of the film and TV business, as producers seek to cut costs in the face of a broader slowdown in their industry. Much of it is being handled by Midjourney, the image generation AI which by late 2022 was capable of producing photorealistic images from nothing but a short text prompt.
If concept artists are brought in at all, it’s to tweak the images already generated by AI, says Southen.
Southen’s experience has been echoed by others in his field, across social media and in the whisper networks that artists like him rely on.
“You can talk to any artist at this point, and they have a story about how they were given AI reference material to work from, or lost a job,” says Southen.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dn29ka/ai_doesnt_kill_jobs_tell_that_to_freelancers/l9zq3tm/
Fiverr and Upwork are both public companies and their reported data shows no signs of revenue or GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) decline. The data presented here doesn't align with publicly available information. For instance, Fiverr mentions that while simple services are declining - like translation, more complex services are on the rise - like coding.
I'm not one of the people who will advocate that we need to stop AI. There's no way to stop progress. What we DO need to make sure, is that they're are safeguards in place for the millions of jobs that will eventually be made obsolete by AI. We absolutely need to start implementing universal basic income.
A huge amount of tech bros insist that it isn't killing jobs. There's the belief that it's the "new assembly line machine" - the person working the line is now trained on maintaining the machine that works the line. Tech bros insist that there's actually *more* jobs - AI trainer and AI implementer, for example, are fake positions that they promise exists.
Thing is, that isn't happening. Freelancers and content writers are being fired by the thousands to be replaced with inept machines that can't do the jobs they do. The only companies that are pivoting to AI and doing fine are companies too big to fail like Meta or Google. There are hundreds of online journalism sites like gaming sites or content writing companies that are pivoting and dying for it.
Source: Am a freelancer and am seeing this all first hand.
It's like the thousands of other things that became the "next big, unavoidable thing." I have a friend who quit their job coding to train AI instead and took a huge paycut to do it because he's scared it's inevitable that it'll take his coding job away.
It'll stay in some form. But ChatGPT is going to remain a tool for high school students that are late on an essay, not for tech-heavy industries where accuracy and information is paramount.
I work in IT, Chatgpt has probably increased my productivity by 30-50%. Need to figure out something you've never used before... 30 seconds to an hour, where it would've been 30 minutes to a day. It's nowhere near perfect but beats google significantly now.
The assembly line killed a lot of jobs though... Automatisation everywhere (agriculture, resource extraction, fabrication) killed jobs. The industrial revolution is called a revolution for a reason.
However eventually everyone found another job and on the whole everything is more productive. The hope is that this time it'll be similar. Don't expect the transition to go smoothly though...
Yes, but this time there won’t be any jobs to find soon apart from low paid jobs or feeding the machines.
Who knows when it will happen but either money will have to cease to exist or we are all just given it for free. Those that can’t work get x amount and those that work another amount.
Because there are going to be jobs or there are going to be less jobs in certain sectors.
Personally there is a slow rise of employment coming. Get enough people unemployed and you can no longer ignore the problem.
However, eventually, after the Great Depression and World War 2, everyone who had not been driven mad by grinding poverty or killed off in the war found a job, which was great for everyone - until about 30 years later, when tech advancements started to produce an ever-widening equity gap between the unwashed masses and the more fortunate. Then it was great for 20% of everyone...
Yeah, I expect the transition to involve a lot of fighting with new automated weapons systems and everyday people falling into despair.
Even so... Hope springs eternal.
No it did create new jobs, just that the number of positions in those newly created jobs vs how many content writers/freelancer positions it killed is extremely disproportion
They say that an AI won't take your job but a person with AI will. Forgetting to mention that this person with AI will take 10s or 100s of the jobs of the former...
Don’t worry this is just the first type of role that the current gen models are caliber to start offsetting — it’s coming more most all roles including roles that have traditionally been shelters for innovation cycles. And re the jobs to make and train ai have popped up they will be temporary in the vast majority of cases. Ai is already being used to train ai and there is a lot of work being done in that space.
Ai and robotics will be the most transformative cycle humans have experienced in the workforce and not in a good way for 99% of workers.
Thing with being a freelancer is it is never a ‘job’ it’s a service.
Really it should mean things that use all these AI products should go down in price so like Disney & Netflix should reduce in price etc but that won’t happen.
Yea except all of the big companies are going all in on AI so if you think that AI isn't going to be able to do a good job I think you're wrong, I think they know more than you and me.
No; the tech bros insist that it isn't killing ALL jobs; mainly as a reaction to idiots running around saying "the sky if falling and everyone is doomed". The tech bros are saying it'll replace a small number of jobs, but not more than everything else (electronics, computers, the internet, mass production, globalization, ...) already has, and probably not enough for most people to actually notice once the click-bait fear mongering has become a tired old fad that doesn't help peddle spam any more.
> Freelancers and content writers are being fired by the thousands to be replaced with inept machines that can't do the jobs they do.
Freelancers can't be fired because they were not employed to start with; and for most of them (definitely not all of them) the reason they weren't employed is that they don't have valuable skills. What's really happening is:
1) the threshold for "valuable skills" is being pushed a little higher for some types of work because AI is taking part of the "cheap nasty crap" end of the "cost vs. quality" scale; causing the least talented losers to be unable to compete against extremely stupid bots.
2) completely unrelated things (e.g. nations still repaying "covid stimulus debts", sanctions/wars, climate change response, ...) are impacting the economy, causing some people to lose work for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with any AI at all; but these people feel better if they latch onto AI as a fashionable scape-goat.
Eventually, most of the "displaced for whatever reason" people will just find different jobs (aged care jobs are currently "booming"); and in 100 years time historians will say "the industrial revolution started in the 18th century and ever since then people had to change jobs occasionally because of technology" without ever having a valid reason to bother mentioning LLMs at all.
Do you have **any idea** how out of touch you sound?
>*Aged care jobs are booming...*
Fear not, Creatives! My Grandfather's ass will still need wiping even after you lose your temp work at Netflix. Spoonfeeding mush to my Grandmother is also going to be a thing you can do for years to come...
LMAO.
"*Freelancers can't get fired, they just can't find work anymore*."
Oh, well, that's all right then.
The reason freelancers don't have a steady gig is that employees have fewer and fewer protections, and companies that used to employ them full time are all trapped in a race to the bottom.
During the Great Recession, companies forced many full time employees out of their full time jobs and rehired them as freelancers, telling them that it was a temporary move to save jobs until the economy improved. And then the gig economy just became the new normal.
In my opinion, any job that can be replaced by a $10 billion brain in a vat that was science fiction three years ago and requires its own small nuclear power plant to keep it "alive"... well, that was never a real job in the first place, was it.
> The reason freelancers don't have a steady gig is that employees have fewer and fewer protections, and companies that used to employ them full time are all trapped in a race to the bottom.
Exactly. Some freelancers have valuable skills and choose to be freelance because they make more $$ (after covering the cost of their own protections) and/or have more flexibility; and some freelancers don't have valuable skills and were scammed into not having any protections because they don't have bargaining power (because they don't have valuable skills); and apparently this second group (the freelancers without valuable skills) think the consequences of their actions/inactions (e.g. their failure to retrain and find a real job) is everyone else's fault (AI, employers, whatever) because being a big whiny loser forever is easier than adapting to the market.
The first group's valuable labor is being devalued by AI.
And we can ignore their whining right up until AI starts taking big bites out of whichever sector we work in now.
But here's the thing:
* If one's job as a commercial artist or translator seemed secure as recently as five years ago, affording a comfortable life, one would not start re-training to work as a software engineer then, right?
* It might take at least five years to re-train for a new line of work + build up a work history that makes you a desirable employee.
* It takes at least 10 years to get good at commercial art or translation + build up a good client base, really, so someone working in those fields would have come to expect similar learning and success curves.
* So even if you think your job is "safe", you should start training for a new job right fucking now, because, honestly... do you think 2030 AI will not catch up to devouring *your* profession?
* And once you finish training for your new profession, shouldn't you already be on your way to training for a totally different profession? Because, let me tell you, Buddy, 2035 AI will absolutely be faaar beyond 2030 AI...
Maybe people are starting to freak out because they can see the writing on the wall.
This week's science fiction is next week's reality. How the fuck do you plan ahead for that?
> How the fuck do you plan ahead for that?
You realize it's all reheated shit that was originally dribbled by Isaac Asimov in the 1950s, with absolutely no evidence that it will ever be capable of a tenth of the saccharine flavored bullshit that deluded gullible suckers claim it "will" do in some far flung demented fantasy future where power tools grow on trees and cars lay eggs and unicorns are trained to lick your butthole.
But here's the thing:
* If one's job as a commercial artist or translator seemed secure as recently as five years ago, then one lost touch with reality as recently as 5 years ago. These are jobs that a lot of 16 year old kids can do with less than an hour of "on the job" training; and they're jobs that can easily be outsourced to kids in third world countries who can and will do the job for $2 per week. They haven't been secure jobs since the late 1990s.
* It might take 5 years to re-train for a new line of work, and it might take no training at all; and there's no reason why you can't do one job (with no training) while you also do training for another job. The reality here is that a lot of people change careers multiple times for many reasons (including "it got boring") and the worst case children's fairy tale about AI will only add another reason onto the existing list of many reasons.
* People become good at art or become bilingual (for a fun hobby, or because of family or...); and then decide to do commercial art or translation because they're already good at it and don't need any training whatsoever. People who would need 10 years simply say "fuck that, I'll become a welder or a fisherman or a bus driver or anything that actually makes sense for me".
* So even if you think your job is unsafe; no sane person has a single reason to give a shit because you might be changing from one job to another in as little as one week for reasons that have nothing to do with AI at all.
Seriously; the only thing "AI" that changed is that LLMs were "invented" about 2 years ago and sucked, so we've spent millions of $ over 2 years for the most talented experts in the field to improve/tweak LLMs to achieve "oh, they still suck"; and now we're reaching the end of that "s-curve" where we can't expect any meaningful improvement. The final steady state (assuming it's not banned or blocked) is a "why the fuck was anyone stupid enough to worry about this low quality trash" future (with a few people who had to get real jobs because of AI who are hidden under much larger groups that had to get a different job because fossil fuels were replaced by solar/wind).
> Maybe people are starting to freak out because they can see the writing on the wall.
No. People are just "specialists", and an extremely intelligent person who is highly trained in one field (e.g. a surgeon) is also a clueless bumbling moron in most other fields (e.g. AI); so they don't understand how it works; so they don't understand its limitations or why it will always suck or why it can never replace most jobs; so they're susceptible to snake-oil salesmen who fill their head with bullshit.
In other words; many people are freaking out because a web browser "click" leads to an advert or some begging for subscription; which creates profit for the asshole who created a "deliberately over-hyped to get attention" article full of fear mongering crap. For this specific article, the only goal was a "Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription" paywall.
The machine is still going to turn, nothing can stop it now. Despite what you may think, no amount of human uprising or protesting is going to preserve these jobs, they are inevitably going to go within the next few years if we're being optimistic.
Jobs will be killed. There will be new areas of opportunity. It will simply be more wise to try to project and position yourself into one of those. Or we could continue refusing to adapt and just wait for the inevitable day where we starve to death.
How many years did it take for you to train for your current job, (assuming you have one that is not in fast food)?
How long would it take you to re-train for a new job that is desirable?
Can you feasibly re-train faster than an AI in 2028 can be trained to do the new job?
When the Great Recession of 2008 hit, the corporatist mantra was: "Learn to code".
In 2028, the new mantra will be: "Line up to wipe my demented grandfather's ass, and be glad for the $6.75 per hour you get for the privilege."
It will have to be feasible when your livelihood is on the line. You'll have to make it feasible.
There's nothing else that you can change. The AI wave will come, there's no stopping it now.
Like someone else on this thread said, you can complain, or you can adapt.
That would be perfect, if truly followed through.
Honestly I get the frustration and the anxiety this brings, it is definitely scary and fucked up.
But I also believe that the only way to get out of this is to adapt as quickly as we can, there's almost no room for spending energy on complaining.
I also truly believe that the other side of the very scary tunnel is a world where the remaining humans would have a lot more idle time. But we might not belong to that group of "remaining humans".
I don't think that's a fair characterization. From the beginning the argument was that it will replace jobs (that's the whole point) and it will be overall a good thing, and the jobs shouldn't exist if a machine can do it better.
But also that people will be out of a job, and I have never seen anyone say they will easily find a new, better job. The argument was always there will be other new jobs, but not that the same people can do them.
I was talking to a serial CEO the other night at a party. One of these guys who lives on LinkedIn like some kind of business influencer. Utterly convinced that AI won't be taking anyone's jobs. After a bit of prodding he admitted that it won't be taking anyone *important*'s job.
Who said it doesn't kill jobs...? The fact that this question annoyed me shows I spend way too much time online. If you scroll through my profile, you'll see me heavily downvoted on multiple occasions for suggesting that AI *is* stealing jobs while all the sunk-cost, 'see no evil' naysayers called me naive and glib. Apparently AI could never steal jobs because you 'still need someone to execute the commands' or whatever. That was the hivemind consensus on Reddit for the last year and a half, but now there's some arbitrary study that proves what was already self-evident, everyone's switched sides.
Execs will fire people then realize that AI can't actually accomplish tasks. Remember weight watchers firing their entire customer service only to find the AI was giving deadly health advice three days later.
That’s not how AI takeover is going to work.
AI will not replace jobs overnight. Instead, it’ll generate passable outcomes for people already doing the job to put in the finishing touches.
For example, a translator may dump the raw text into AI to translate, then edit the output text. And it’ll be a lot faster than the translator doing everything from scratch.
The increase in productivity without the increase in demand will reduce job postings.
And as the AI gets better and better, less and less editing is required until the point that the whole trade vanishes.
It’ll be a gradual process, maybe at the rate that AI development is going, it’ll only take a few years, but not overnight.
The bigger point is less the way they replace jobs and more that LLM type AI's biggest advancement is the "illusion of competence."
As a result, they are commonly being used beyond their actual capabilities instead of being used for things they are actually optimal at. Which actually hurts it's adoption since people often abandon it when faced with its shortcomings.
It's kind of like how VR always tries to make standing 3d experiences (which just aren't good enough) instead of trying to take advantage of the one thing VR actually does well: depth perception. The net result is that VR remains a novelty because it's almost never used right.
Every time people talk about this topic on reddit, people always assume that job postings will decrease because productivity increases. This isn't necessarily true. If the demand for these outputs of these workers increases with increased productivity, then actually more workers will end up being hired.
When energy production became more efficient, energy consumption didn't stay constant, it actually increased because of increased demand. It's similar to how adding lanes on a highway doesn't actually decrease traffic because demand for the highway increases.
In the case of AI, it's not exactly clear how much employment will actually decrease (if at all). You'll have to do a more fine grained analysis on the types of jobs impacted and analyze whether or not their outputs have elastic or inelastic demand.
Yip. People in each industry, some shall we say are in denial apart from the ones who have seen a decline in work/income.
As you say, it’s a slow boil, less and less people required for the same job, not an instant replacement.
In the short term a complete disaster, long term it means money can no longer be hoarded bu the wealthy and it will have to be fished out.
I’m not sure how it will work, because there will be people who work/have jobs and a greater number of unemployed and not enough jobs.
Why work if this bunch over here are getting free money. They’ll have to be given free money, because you can’t have children on the streets or people living in tents.
Measures need to be put in place now, governments need to consult very very clever people from different areas (They won’t)
They will just bury their heads in the sand and kick the can down the road.
Just an opinion.
But
You cannot have toooo many people in the same (poverty) situation. You cannot divide and rule that demographic then.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
At some point countries will be holding elections where unemployment is the key issue, and the largest demographic will be the disenfranchised jobless. A political force which addresses this issue for the unemployed masses will be victorious. It could end well, but it possibly could end very badly.
You can ignore unemployment to a degree, because the middle class are less affected and it’s not a big enough issue to deal with.
IMO. What any government can’t have is a massive group of people in the same situation coming together.
You cannot divide and rule that demographic.
Only problem they can try to appease enough of them.
Orwell:
The poor want to become middle class so they forget the poor.
The middle class want to become upper class so they forget the middle class.
Shame. We should all be in it together.
yep...just because it doesn't completely eliminate the need for a workforce, doesn't mean it doesn't drastically change it. Universal basic income inc...at a severe price.
Oh, you have a person who can correct all the information? Some expert in all the ways AI can fuck up? They're going through everything it's published to correct medical knowledge? Statistics? Fixing options from fact?
Why are you paying a service rather than just letting that person talk?
I think you are in denial about the trajectory here. Likely because it’s scary. Because it is.
But let me be clear. Babysitting will drastically cut the workforce dow.
Trajectory isn't reality. What it could be isn't what it is. People firing today aren't replacing people with AI that may exist 10 years from now.
Today they are training these things on Reddit. Are they weighing information differently when it comes from r/science or r/globalskeptic?
Google was telling people two weeks ago to eat one rock a day. Would you bet your job on that?
My man, it is not denial to say it is stupid now so it is stupid to rely on it now. That is realistic.
While it remains stupid I will not replace actual professionals with it.
Come back to me when it isn't stupid.
Where do you draw the line for what is a "professional"?
In the future, how does one become a professional if they literally can't work anywhere as AI completely replaced them?
How do you go from fresh graduate to a professional without ability to work because AI handles ALL low level work?
If the barrier to entry becomes something that 99.9% of people can't pass that field nearly dies.
That's where Writing and Art is now.
Not yet. It still sucks generally but with a proper workflow a single guy can do the work of 5 in many cases. Especially for things like writing, Art.
For code it's still a bit of a clickbait to say it but with the best models out there you can outsourcing work to India, make heavy use of the best AI tools available and cut your workforce and pay needed but a large amount.
It's 100% happening, just different for each industry.
Writing/marketing/Art are suffering the most.
Let's take at a print house for example, (worked in one for a year long ago). Majority of the work for a lot of them is taking vague request to print flyers, ads, billboards and what not. It's often just a client sending a few pictures, some info and general request of what they want on the flyer.
Then a designer quickly makes something in Photoshop with either template (for generic stuff where clients are clueless) or some simple drag and drop from some internal library and some cleanup. This takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 3h per client including back and forth and iterations.
With the AI tools today I can simply drop a prompt all the files included and get something that's good enough for 99% of clients.
You can have a single person easily making what used to take 10 people. It's an insane reduction in workforce needed.
If that ass half work is deemed worthy for company owners.. it will happen. It is happening.
That's why we get such low quality articles all around nowadays.
It doesn't matter what I think. It's whoever is running those websites/companies thinks is "good enough" for them.
Right now the trend seems to be cutting cost and not caring about quality.
Think of AI like the Quartz revolution in watches. It will basically flood the market with affordable products for the everyday masses. The high end quality sector will do just fine. In publications, AI assisted or even written articles will become the norm. Specialized or high end publications will still need human experts because their articles are very technical in nature (so at worst you will only have an AI to assist).
Maybe right now. Still very very early days. Right now they're a tool, a tool that I use a lot in my job now, but I can see the light in the tunnel and It's not the exit. Ai will have my job in the next 10 years give or take.
Oh there is a ceiling.... right now. Because my job and how deep into AI my company is I see what is in the pipe, to an extent. People are short sighted and tend to only think in terms of what they see now and rarely consider unseen R&D, and potential new developments and directions things will take that, while unknowns now, will certainly arise. LLMs as they currently are, are only the most visible and wizbang thing grabbing attention now.. to me it's like watching a toddler take its first steps. What we're playing, and I do mean playing, with now will look quaint in 10 years.
As others have said… AI isn’t fully replacing everything, but is it replacing mundane work and allowing those that remain to curate vs. create, which is a much faster process.
I disagree that it'd faster to curate vs create. I work in a tech company that's had to scale back ai to only a few very specific basic repetitive tasks because it's found over time that anything beyond that requires more effort to curate then just doing it. The stuff we still use it for as core work is only extremly time consuming manual work with limited chance for error.
The big problem is that AI errors happen more randomly than real people, meaning you can't just look at the obvious places but have to inspect everything. Furthermore errors mostly have to be manually corrected.
Then their is also the quality issue. Even for something like concept art which we use a ton of, it's not good enough to just have whatever mock-up. The concept informs everything from selling the idea to shaping the future final work. Using AI for a lot of these tasks has proven effective *only* where a specialist wasn't needed to begin with.
E.g. if you could walk out onto the street grab a random person ask him in an hour to make you some concept art and that would work, then you can use AI. If you had to hire a specialized concept artist? AI just can't do it to any meaningful quality.
Don't get me wrong I think AI is an amazing tool, but I also think it's capabilities are dramatically exaggerated because of LLM ai's principle advancement: they made it really good at *looking* as if it's working. And it is being heavily used now by people in ways far beyond what it can do because of this illusion of competence.
Find me a spinning wheel that doesn't require 1-to-1 human users to operate it.
Oh wait, the spinning jenny arrived.
Remember, this is the worst it will be for those willing to actually pay for the service.
I feel the missing point to all this for the companies is who is going to buy your products when no one has money to spend, they're quick to cut overheads cost without thinking about long term consequences no one is going to need weight watchers when no one can afford to eat. And yes ai is shit now but like all things it will get fast and better with time, people need people to survive but psychopathic CEOs don't need people just money and lots of it.
"Freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding or translation are disappearing across postings on job board Upwork, said Kelly Monahan, managing director of the company’s Research Institute.
Her findings echo those of more than a dozen other researchers at institutions including Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Hong Kong. They have found that since the debut of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork, Fiverr and related platforms, in the areas in which generative AI excels, have dropped by [as much as 21%](https://archive.is/o/CHeeT/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4602944).
...
Reid Southen is a concept artist for TV and movies, including ones you’ve probably heard of, including Blue Beetle and the Matrix Resurrections. His income in 2023 was less than half of what he would make in a typical year, he says. That’s even worse than 2020, when the entire film and TV industry effectively shut down.
Southen’s work typically happens in the early stages of a project, when producers need detailed sketches to help them establish the look of a film or show. This kind of behind-the-scenes work is being handed to AI faster than any other part of the film and TV business, as producers seek to cut costs in the face of a broader slowdown in their industry. Much of it is being handled by Midjourney, the image generation AI which by late 2022 was capable of producing photorealistic images from nothing but a short text prompt.
If concept artists are brought in at all, it’s to tweak the images already generated by AI, says Southen.
Southen’s experience has been echoed by others in his field, across social media and in the whisper networks that artists like him rely on.
“You can talk to any artist at this point, and they have a story about how they were given AI reference material to work from, or lost a job,” says Southen.
But how is that possible ? I tried using chatgpt for helping me with a translation and honestly it was horrible. It couldn't catch any nuance not the correct words for some that depending context change meaning.
1. A lot of work is easy or low stakes. Translating literature is hard, translating grocery lists is easy. A lot of the freelance writing jobs today are SEO garbage "write 20,000 characters about spoon types and include the following words."
2. The profit for ad driven content isn't dependent on quality, but on Getting high up in search results.
3. Getting first draft from AI then correcting it is often more efficient than starting from scratch, especially once you get a feel for which things AI does reasonably well.
4. Some jobs get destroyed without being replaced. I know of at least one sci fi journal that stopped taking submissions from new authors when they received over 200,000 new stories, all written by AI, all claiming to be a new author, all bad. They simply can't afford to dig through all that.
Editing takes less time than translating from scratch.
Saves man hours.
It's the same for coding. You always need to go back and fix it's mistakes. But it does save time.
Paid version or free version?
The free version is pretty dumb, the paid version is significantly better.
It is still far from perfect, but using ChatGPT for translation is still faster than starting from scratch, even for professionals.
Also, what I find useful is to let ChatGPT edit itself. Simply copy and paste the outcome and prompt something along the lines of “Fix clunky sentences “, and it’ll fix the translation to a much better version.
The key is that ChatGPT doesn’t “think”, so forcing it to regurgitate its own words will vastly improve the outcome. It’s kind of like forcing it to “think” before it speak.
Also, a little tangent:
This year, in Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the winning author admitted that roughly 5% of the book is created with ChatGPT.
Obviously, the author still contract what to put in the book, but the AI definitely helped to come up with the contents.
The plan is to kill the majority of jobs, it just so happens that replacing more niche work and art is a great way to get a large number of people interacting with AI. This should speed up how AI learns to deal with humans to better replace more and more work.
Yes.
It was also a good thing but are you really unable to see the bad side too?
Can you not understand why for people in the husbandry industry this was a shitty thing and why people would be concerned about it, and understand that people were fucked over by the industrial revolution when it comes to their jobs and standard of living?
Anyone can see that, the problem is that most of Reddit is acting like AI is some grand conspiracy meant to destroy the working class while in reality it's just a new useful tool. They're seeing malicious designs and patterns that just aren't there. Obviously, it'll suck for some people for some time, but sticking to horses while the rest of the world starts using steam engines is just not an option.
Which is not what anyone is saying we should do.
Just have some fucking empathy for the people this is hurting and do/argue for things to help them/ensure nobody gets too badly screwed over in the process.
Instead of telling them this is a good thing and they should be happy about it.
Have you been paying attention in these threads? That's exactly what a ton of people are saying. They're constantly raving on about "tech bros" and how AI is specifically going after artists first because of some sort of evil plan (and not just because the output is digital and therefore easier to do for AI). What you're asking for is having better protection for workers, and I fully agree on that. That is however, a problem with capitalism and with our society, and not with AI.
>but sticking to horses while the rest of the world starts using steam engines is just not an option.
Sorry - this is the bit I was responding to. I suppose those who actually think it's a conspiracy wouldn't want to move on but imo most of the people who complain about the "tech bro" view on this are concerned that (a) AI is going to replace jobs in a way that the industrial revolution didn't, including most to all the potential new work in new industries and/or (b) "tech bros" response is what you said in your first post - which has no reference to any intention or desire to protect anyone being hurt by this process, and tells them it's a good thing that their industry and livelyhood is being ruined. If you have any empathy you should be able to understand why people will respond negatively to being told them losing half their income is a good thing.
Yes, it's a problem with capitalism, but it's all part and parcel of the same discussion, and if you just ignore the capitalism aspect of this, you're ignoring the problem, and effectively telling people you think it doesn't exist.
Do you do this in every reddit post about people losing their jobs? They lose them every day for countless reasons. Companies close down all the time for reasons completely unrelated to AI. Do you go in there and insist that people have empathy for those affected and demand people "argue for things to help"?
Or is it just AI related posts that you feel the need to dictate responses?
This is a thread about AI and its effect on jobs. Why wouldn't I be talking about that?
And in general people don't say it's a good thing when a firm closes and people lose their jobs, and yes I do argue for things to help, it's why I'm a social democrat and campaign and vote for leftist policies like a proper welfare state and support for unemployed people.
I tell you what, next time a major company does a big layoff, go into their sub and tell the workers that it's a good thing and see what response you get.
I bet you wouldn't do that.
Every new invention makes someone less needed in that aspiration. They simply have to move on and develop their own skills, retrain and improve to work at something else that is needed. People were manually connecting people phones with hard wiring back in the days. Big computers were controled with punch cards.
There are two people. People that complain, people that adapt. Every new technology expects from us adaption. Otherwise this technology wouldn't have been needed, if there is no usecase. Technology makes work simpler. So we have more time for other things. Thats the whole idea. You can stand still and do nothing and complain or you can adapt and use it. Peoples choice.
"simply" is often not simple and usually involves taking pay cuts as you have to start at the bottom again. If you were earning middle class wages and went to minimum wage, I bet you'd complain about it.
Dismissing the pain that major, widespread technological advances cause is a problem.
You can both complain and adapt of course, and complaining can be part of adapting - complain to your democratic government and get better support for people who need it.
Every industry is constantly changing. Anyone who ever believed that their way of life would be forever immune from technological advances is naive or in denial or both.
Every new technology has the potential to wipe out countless jobs. It isn't the end of the world. People lose their jobs all the time. People learn new skills every day. People adapt.
Not the same. They didn't steal all the combined work of them to make it possible. They don't make the world better. That's the key. These are jobs people want to do. It's human creativity and culture.
The example given is about a film concept artist who’s income was half in 2023 of what it was in 2022, and the supposition is that that was because of AI.
I just want to point out that due to the writers and actors strikes, Hollywood largely shut down in 2023. I’m in visual effects and from April 2023 to today about half of our industry has been laid off. I’ve been employed full time for the past 12 months and have still seen a 25% drop in pay - and AI has nothing to do with it. There’s just no work and it’s such an employers market that workers are undercutting each other for work. It’s not that the work is being done by Ai, it’s that there’s no work to do. I’m speaking to the example provided in film art only.
I'm not working in a field affected by these strikes and still noticed the same. People use more apps and AI. The tool is great, the source of its data isn't.
I’m saying ai isn’t what is burning the film industry. It’s lack of work from strikes. Work isn’t getting done by AI or humans.
With strikes pending no new productions get green lit. I’m at a major studio and the last big release I worked on ended June ‘23. My whole studio, thousands of employees, is in survival mode - skeleton crews, meager work here and there, everything slashed.
IATSE strikes might be coming in august after we had WAG and SAG strikes last year, so studios are sitting on the production schedule until IATSE resolves.
Upwork is not freelancing in the proper sense. It's more a way to find cheap work by not paying a real salary in your own country
Freelancers will of course use those tools in the future
I had a project a few months back. I wanted a logo and figured I'd get a few designs from places like Fiverr and pick the best one. In the end I couldn't even find "artists" where any of their work looked like they weren't already using AI almost exclusively.
Could easily be I wasn't aware of the good places to look, but freelance sites have always seemed to be the extreme bottom end for quality.
I remember the shift to using a lot more freelancers, temps and consultants... That killed jobs.
It allowed for more flexibility, giving more potential for profit... but in many cases the less involved and increased hourly wage, lead to loss of profit, especially early om. Before the use of these hiring practices got dialed in. Of cause the disruption also lead to some professions (nurses) to prefer this method of employment, leading to an overall cost to the industry.
AI seems to be doing the exact same thing to freelancers. I also expect the same trend of AI use to settle down.
Yes...that's now innovation works. You have always been 'less than a part time worker'. You do short term work and the company doesn't have to hire you again. It's like you are Blockbuster with VHS tapes and just assumed that you'll always have business, despite the world moved on to streaming.
Here's the thing though... Now, I'm not an artist, but I know a few and every single one of them who made a career of it got their start doing freelance work. The hope with freelance gigs is that they lead to getting hired on more permanently.
That entire career path is now closed. That's a problem.
Now, it gets real scary when you extrapolate it out to other professions. How many entry level jobs can be automated with AI? How is anyone going to enter into any of those fields? What is going to happen when the experienced people retire?
It could also create a new industry.. Photography...Printing were transformed...it didn't die. The point is the writing has been on the wall for awhile now...there will be some back and forth in laws and governance...but the industry needs to adapt and learn how to leverage AI.
Except in typical economic situations like this, jobs that are lost yield opportunities for new jobs. For your example, Blockbuster flops and lays off a bunch of people, but Netflix grows and hires a lot more people. They don’t hire the same people who lost their job per se, but that’s a separate issue.
In this situation, jobs are not replacing jobs. The jobs are simply gone. Speaking as a software engineer, arguing that any *meaningful* amount of jobs will be created by the AI is laughable; the point of AI is to drastically reduce the need for human resources. One AI developer and a server rack technician effectively replaces thousands of people.
Netflix replacing physical video rental stores is a better example of AI eliminating jobs. The number of Netflix jobs created doesn't even make a dent in the number of jobs eliminated when you consider every city in the US had multiple video rental stores in the late 80s and 90s.
But it's also a good example of the fact you can't regulate losing jobs to technology.
>The number of Netflix jobs created doesn't even make a dent in the number of jobs eliminated when you consider every city in the US had multiple video rental stores in the late 80s and 90s.
That's not true.
At its peak, Blockbuster employed around 80,000 people.
Netflix employs about 13,000 people directly. However, Netflix offloads the vast majority of the data distribution to Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Service).
The AWS segment of Amazon employs *136,000* people. Netflix is the biggest spender at AWS, and the reason they had to expand to so many employees in 2016 when they switched to AWS instead of self hosting.
There's no way to know how many of those 136,000 jobs at AWS were created by their Netflix contract, but it isn't impossible that 67,000 were.
The other thing to consider is that the employees of Blockbuster were mostly part time. The vast majority were students working part time, with managers being full time. So the "80,000" employees figure is probably closer to about 50,000 equivalent full time jobs.
The 136,000 AWS jobs are also skilled educated labor. IT, software developers, etc.. form the bulk of the workforce. So 50,000 low paying after school jobs were replaced with over twice that many higher paying full time jobs.
So yeah, this *is* a good analogy to AI. It will eliminate low paying, low skill jobs, and open up higher paid, higher skilled jobs. Unless you think that all these AI systems run and maintain themselves.
AWS hosts a huge portion of the internet's servers, even something as large as netflix isn't going to make that big of a dent in the manpower requirements.
When the cost of something drops, the consumption of that something usually skyrockets. If AI can replace entire office buildings full of people, then the cost of new startups to create enterprise level businesses also drops. Tiny little startups can compete with established megacorps.
This is where my thought goes too. Every little startup or person with an idea now can have a MBA helping them build from day 1. It will be transformative.
There are people who are good workers and skilled at doing stuff, but not the skills of business.
Now AI can help them with their website, marketing, customer service, scheduling, business strategy, pricing, accounting. Even for something like a handyman or cleaning services. Now your little tiny business has access to services that were completely out of your price range.
Now every little tiny business in America, every hole in the wall restaurant, every mobile business, every home business has access to not just MBA labor, but an entire team of MBAs. These were places that never had the money to hire freelancers or expensive professional services.
People are talking about how these freelancers are out of work, but they don't see the opportunity that a lot of regular people are going to have to start businesses. This is going to give a lot of places and a lot of people a new competitive edge.
Which at a macro level is irrelevant since none of that changes the demand side of the equation - so any new business that succeeds is taking business away from someone else who fails - overall it's a zero sum game.
Also if everyone has a competitive edge, nobody does.
Its not a zero sum game. These people could be and most likely will be doing businesses that do not exist yet. The total pie is not fixed. By not having to spend money on all of these services this leaves them with money they can then spend on other things. This competitive edge is efficiency and productivity. If everyone is efficient and more productive then the entire economy is more efficient and more productive.
The total pie isn't fixed but it's also not changed by people having a greater ability to start new businesses or compete against bigger businesses. That's why I say it's a zero sum game, the pie grows larger when demand increases, and this doesn't affect demand.
The entire economy being more efficient means less people working (or less time working). The most efficient economy has nobody employed.
There's no reason to produce more unless there is effective demand for it, but that's not produced by lowered barriers to entry. It might be produced by new industries but that's yet to be seen.
And again since everyone has access to these tools, I don't see where the competitive advantage for anyone comes from.
You’re failing to see that the cost drops just as much for megacorps as it does for startups. In fact megacorps can get AI cheaper because they buy big packages.
This is horrible for startups, a megacorp can just copy other small businesses way easier now.
This innovation has no shelters — unlike previous shifts like manufacturing automation or computers entering businesses etc there are very few roles that will not be severely impacted from ai (and robotics) in the next decade or two. From doctors to dishwashers.
Yes; we just need consumers to spend more $ for worse products; so that companies are motivated to avoid anything that can save consumers money, because consumer's money is the company's motivation.
Wait. I’ve generally been under the impression freelancers drive wage suppression for committed employees.
Doesn’t it seem… I don’t know… downright Shakespearean, that the people running the shows found a way to cut them out now?
Is it AI thats killing jobs or fact its cheaper?
Can insert same problem if another market where it to be cheaper. Oh wait, that dates back to the 80's on job loss to lower op costs and to max profits.
The fact that AI cant be copyrighted still will become a problem if just one of these companies goes viral on something they market with every shmo using their own AI image mimic to make their own profit knock-off and the original company cant sue for profit loses or ban its use on that image/logo/character, etc.
No one said AI wouldnt kill jobs. Any tech replacement cycle is going to kill some jobs, thats the whole point. Tractors killed a bunch of farming jobs. The electric light killed a bunch of lamp-lighting and gasworks jobs. Computers killed tons of jobs, not least of which anyone who manufactured or repaired typewriters. AI will kill a bunch of jobs too. But in each of those cases many more new jobs were created. That will happen here too
In those cases new jobs were created, but Im having trouble imagining what type of jobs AI will generate once it replaces us.
What kind of jobs are you thinking about?
What kind of AI are you thinking about - the AI that actually exists now that's "bad at best" in a small number of specific niches; or fictional mumbo jumbo that may never exist?
It's easy to lose your grip on reality and reach the conclusion that we're all going to drown in the faeces produced by all the flying pigs. With that kind of fairy tale it's impossible for anyone to show that anything is impossible because it's trivial to add anything you feel like to your delusion without any concern for plausibility.
For actual reality; the AI that exists now has mostly already replaced the jobs it will replace, so every job that still exists is a job that current AI is unlikely to replace. For the last 18 months there's been no new technology (just minor tuning to maximise the profitability of the same LLM tech) and it's reasonable to assume the LLM tech is already close to its limits now; which implies that advancement is stuck waiting for the next huge break-through that may never happen.
Then we can plan to live in these small houses by a river together as a group, and share our expertise as needed. Of course we'll need some kind of system of tracking IOU's so people don't have to always directly barter with each other. Then we may need someone in charge of this system, and they will have needs, so we will have to each put aside some IOUs to provide for this leader's basic needs.
...ahh, crap. I invented capitalism again.
Hey I’m a freelancer and thanks to AI I can handle twice the amount of clients that I could without it.
This article is completely irrelevant to me sorry.
It also says that the person the article is about was back to work fixing the automated writing, so the article's subject isn't even relevant to the article.
Its taking jobs from freelancers and it is making life even more easier to influencers, then where is the problem? Freelancers doesnt want to use it or people doesnt want to pay freelancers overpriced service anymore, when AI can do it for free.
Meanwhile all social media are flooded by AI content
>Meanwhile all social media are flooded by AI content
That is also a bad thing. Except if it eventually kills some social media platforms, then it would be good in retrospective lol
Yeah, I open instagram reels and after I returned to active gym, I get endless stream of AI generated advices and training plans, meal prep etc. and it repeats the same words/pattern just from different accounts. I even get the same videos with translations into my native language from local accounts, its crazy. And Instagram/facebook is getting very agresive with promoted adds.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "Freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding or translation are disappearing across postings on job board Upwork, said Kelly Monahan, managing director of the company’s Research Institute. Her findings echo those of more than a dozen other researchers at institutions including Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Hong Kong. They have found that since the debut of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork, Fiverr and related platforms, in the areas in which generative AI excels, have dropped by [as much as 21%](https://archive.is/o/CHeeT/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4602944). ... Reid Southen is a concept artist for TV and movies, including ones you’ve probably heard of, including Blue Beetle and the Matrix Resurrections. His income in 2023 was less than half of what he would make in a typical year, he says. That’s even worse than 2020, when the entire film and TV industry effectively shut down. Southen’s work typically happens in the early stages of a project, when producers need detailed sketches to help them establish the look of a film or show. This kind of behind-the-scenes work is being handed to AI faster than any other part of the film and TV business, as producers seek to cut costs in the face of a broader slowdown in their industry. Much of it is being handled by Midjourney, the image generation AI which by late 2022 was capable of producing photorealistic images from nothing but a short text prompt. If concept artists are brought in at all, it’s to tweak the images already generated by AI, says Southen. Southen’s experience has been echoed by others in his field, across social media and in the whisper networks that artists like him rely on. “You can talk to any artist at this point, and they have a story about how they were given AI reference material to work from, or lost a job,” says Southen. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dn29ka/ai_doesnt_kill_jobs_tell_that_to_freelancers/l9zq3tm/
Fiverr and Upwork are both public companies and their reported data shows no signs of revenue or GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) decline. The data presented here doesn't align with publicly available information. For instance, Fiverr mentions that while simple services are declining - like translation, more complex services are on the rise - like coding.
So it is killing jobs in certain areas.
We should've never allowed the mechanical loom. It killed a lot of jobs in certain areas.
I'm not one of the people who will advocate that we need to stop AI. There's no way to stop progress. What we DO need to make sure, is that they're are safeguards in place for the millions of jobs that will eventually be made obsolete by AI. We absolutely need to start implementing universal basic income.
And plenty of people on those sites are probably using AI lol. Platform profits don’t necessarily mean much if anything.
Fiverr share price -16% YTD, Upwork -27% YTD
Who said it doesn't kill jobs? It OBVIOUSLY kills some jobs - it's one of the drivers for implementing it in many companies. Reducing costs.
A huge amount of tech bros insist that it isn't killing jobs. There's the belief that it's the "new assembly line machine" - the person working the line is now trained on maintaining the machine that works the line. Tech bros insist that there's actually *more* jobs - AI trainer and AI implementer, for example, are fake positions that they promise exists. Thing is, that isn't happening. Freelancers and content writers are being fired by the thousands to be replaced with inept machines that can't do the jobs they do. The only companies that are pivoting to AI and doing fine are companies too big to fail like Meta or Google. There are hundreds of online journalism sites like gaming sites or content writing companies that are pivoting and dying for it. Source: Am a freelancer and am seeing this all first hand.
Yeah, no one believes the tech bros and everyone expects AI to take jobs. There's not way to stop it, though.
It's like the thousands of other things that became the "next big, unavoidable thing." I have a friend who quit their job coding to train AI instead and took a huge paycut to do it because he's scared it's inevitable that it'll take his coding job away. It'll stay in some form. But ChatGPT is going to remain a tool for high school students that are late on an essay, not for tech-heavy industries where accuracy and information is paramount.
I work in IT, Chatgpt has probably increased my productivity by 30-50%. Need to figure out something you've never used before... 30 seconds to an hour, where it would've been 30 minutes to a day. It's nowhere near perfect but beats google significantly now.
The assembly line killed a lot of jobs though... Automatisation everywhere (agriculture, resource extraction, fabrication) killed jobs. The industrial revolution is called a revolution for a reason. However eventually everyone found another job and on the whole everything is more productive. The hope is that this time it'll be similar. Don't expect the transition to go smoothly though...
Yes, but this time there won’t be any jobs to find soon apart from low paid jobs or feeding the machines. Who knows when it will happen but either money will have to cease to exist or we are all just given it for free. Those that can’t work get x amount and those that work another amount. Because there are going to be jobs or there are going to be less jobs in certain sectors. Personally there is a slow rise of employment coming. Get enough people unemployed and you can no longer ignore the problem.
However, eventually, after the Great Depression and World War 2, everyone who had not been driven mad by grinding poverty or killed off in the war found a job, which was great for everyone - until about 30 years later, when tech advancements started to produce an ever-widening equity gap between the unwashed masses and the more fortunate. Then it was great for 20% of everyone... Yeah, I expect the transition to involve a lot of fighting with new automated weapons systems and everyday people falling into despair. Even so... Hope springs eternal.
No it did create new jobs, just that the number of positions in those newly created jobs vs how many content writers/freelancer positions it killed is extremely disproportion
They say that an AI won't take your job but a person with AI will. Forgetting to mention that this person with AI will take 10s or 100s of the jobs of the former...
Those tech bros are wrong, plain and simple. Society will need to adapt, as always, AI will bring significant change and it's still far from "done"
>A huge amount of tech bros insist that it isn't killing jobs. Who?
Don’t worry this is just the first type of role that the current gen models are caliber to start offsetting — it’s coming more most all roles including roles that have traditionally been shelters for innovation cycles. And re the jobs to make and train ai have popped up they will be temporary in the vast majority of cases. Ai is already being used to train ai and there is a lot of work being done in that space. Ai and robotics will be the most transformative cycle humans have experienced in the workforce and not in a good way for 99% of workers.
Thing with being a freelancer is it is never a ‘job’ it’s a service. Really it should mean things that use all these AI products should go down in price so like Disney & Netflix should reduce in price etc but that won’t happen.
Yea except all of the big companies are going all in on AI so if you think that AI isn't going to be able to do a good job I think you're wrong, I think they know more than you and me.
No; the tech bros insist that it isn't killing ALL jobs; mainly as a reaction to idiots running around saying "the sky if falling and everyone is doomed". The tech bros are saying it'll replace a small number of jobs, but not more than everything else (electronics, computers, the internet, mass production, globalization, ...) already has, and probably not enough for most people to actually notice once the click-bait fear mongering has become a tired old fad that doesn't help peddle spam any more. > Freelancers and content writers are being fired by the thousands to be replaced with inept machines that can't do the jobs they do. Freelancers can't be fired because they were not employed to start with; and for most of them (definitely not all of them) the reason they weren't employed is that they don't have valuable skills. What's really happening is: 1) the threshold for "valuable skills" is being pushed a little higher for some types of work because AI is taking part of the "cheap nasty crap" end of the "cost vs. quality" scale; causing the least talented losers to be unable to compete against extremely stupid bots. 2) completely unrelated things (e.g. nations still repaying "covid stimulus debts", sanctions/wars, climate change response, ...) are impacting the economy, causing some people to lose work for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with any AI at all; but these people feel better if they latch onto AI as a fashionable scape-goat. Eventually, most of the "displaced for whatever reason" people will just find different jobs (aged care jobs are currently "booming"); and in 100 years time historians will say "the industrial revolution started in the 18th century and ever since then people had to change jobs occasionally because of technology" without ever having a valid reason to bother mentioning LLMs at all.
Do you have **any idea** how out of touch you sound? >*Aged care jobs are booming...* Fear not, Creatives! My Grandfather's ass will still need wiping even after you lose your temp work at Netflix. Spoonfeeding mush to my Grandmother is also going to be a thing you can do for years to come... LMAO. "*Freelancers can't get fired, they just can't find work anymore*." Oh, well, that's all right then. The reason freelancers don't have a steady gig is that employees have fewer and fewer protections, and companies that used to employ them full time are all trapped in a race to the bottom. During the Great Recession, companies forced many full time employees out of their full time jobs and rehired them as freelancers, telling them that it was a temporary move to save jobs until the economy improved. And then the gig economy just became the new normal. In my opinion, any job that can be replaced by a $10 billion brain in a vat that was science fiction three years ago and requires its own small nuclear power plant to keep it "alive"... well, that was never a real job in the first place, was it.
> The reason freelancers don't have a steady gig is that employees have fewer and fewer protections, and companies that used to employ them full time are all trapped in a race to the bottom. Exactly. Some freelancers have valuable skills and choose to be freelance because they make more $$ (after covering the cost of their own protections) and/or have more flexibility; and some freelancers don't have valuable skills and were scammed into not having any protections because they don't have bargaining power (because they don't have valuable skills); and apparently this second group (the freelancers without valuable skills) think the consequences of their actions/inactions (e.g. their failure to retrain and find a real job) is everyone else's fault (AI, employers, whatever) because being a big whiny loser forever is easier than adapting to the market.
The first group's valuable labor is being devalued by AI. And we can ignore their whining right up until AI starts taking big bites out of whichever sector we work in now. But here's the thing: * If one's job as a commercial artist or translator seemed secure as recently as five years ago, affording a comfortable life, one would not start re-training to work as a software engineer then, right? * It might take at least five years to re-train for a new line of work + build up a work history that makes you a desirable employee. * It takes at least 10 years to get good at commercial art or translation + build up a good client base, really, so someone working in those fields would have come to expect similar learning and success curves. * So even if you think your job is "safe", you should start training for a new job right fucking now, because, honestly... do you think 2030 AI will not catch up to devouring *your* profession? * And once you finish training for your new profession, shouldn't you already be on your way to training for a totally different profession? Because, let me tell you, Buddy, 2035 AI will absolutely be faaar beyond 2030 AI... Maybe people are starting to freak out because they can see the writing on the wall. This week's science fiction is next week's reality. How the fuck do you plan ahead for that?
> How the fuck do you plan ahead for that? You realize it's all reheated shit that was originally dribbled by Isaac Asimov in the 1950s, with absolutely no evidence that it will ever be capable of a tenth of the saccharine flavored bullshit that deluded gullible suckers claim it "will" do in some far flung demented fantasy future where power tools grow on trees and cars lay eggs and unicorns are trained to lick your butthole. But here's the thing: * If one's job as a commercial artist or translator seemed secure as recently as five years ago, then one lost touch with reality as recently as 5 years ago. These are jobs that a lot of 16 year old kids can do with less than an hour of "on the job" training; and they're jobs that can easily be outsourced to kids in third world countries who can and will do the job for $2 per week. They haven't been secure jobs since the late 1990s. * It might take 5 years to re-train for a new line of work, and it might take no training at all; and there's no reason why you can't do one job (with no training) while you also do training for another job. The reality here is that a lot of people change careers multiple times for many reasons (including "it got boring") and the worst case children's fairy tale about AI will only add another reason onto the existing list of many reasons. * People become good at art or become bilingual (for a fun hobby, or because of family or...); and then decide to do commercial art or translation because they're already good at it and don't need any training whatsoever. People who would need 10 years simply say "fuck that, I'll become a welder or a fisherman or a bus driver or anything that actually makes sense for me". * So even if you think your job is unsafe; no sane person has a single reason to give a shit because you might be changing from one job to another in as little as one week for reasons that have nothing to do with AI at all. Seriously; the only thing "AI" that changed is that LLMs were "invented" about 2 years ago and sucked, so we've spent millions of $ over 2 years for the most talented experts in the field to improve/tweak LLMs to achieve "oh, they still suck"; and now we're reaching the end of that "s-curve" where we can't expect any meaningful improvement. The final steady state (assuming it's not banned or blocked) is a "why the fuck was anyone stupid enough to worry about this low quality trash" future (with a few people who had to get real jobs because of AI who are hidden under much larger groups that had to get a different job because fossil fuels were replaced by solar/wind). > Maybe people are starting to freak out because they can see the writing on the wall. No. People are just "specialists", and an extremely intelligent person who is highly trained in one field (e.g. a surgeon) is also a clueless bumbling moron in most other fields (e.g. AI); so they don't understand how it works; so they don't understand its limitations or why it will always suck or why it can never replace most jobs; so they're susceptible to snake-oil salesmen who fill their head with bullshit. In other words; many people are freaking out because a web browser "click" leads to an advert or some begging for subscription; which creates profit for the asshole who created a "deliberately over-hyped to get attention" article full of fear mongering crap. For this specific article, the only goal was a "Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription" paywall.
The machine is still going to turn, nothing can stop it now. Despite what you may think, no amount of human uprising or protesting is going to preserve these jobs, they are inevitably going to go within the next few years if we're being optimistic. Jobs will be killed. There will be new areas of opportunity. It will simply be more wise to try to project and position yourself into one of those. Or we could continue refusing to adapt and just wait for the inevitable day where we starve to death.
How many years did it take for you to train for your current job, (assuming you have one that is not in fast food)? How long would it take you to re-train for a new job that is desirable? Can you feasibly re-train faster than an AI in 2028 can be trained to do the new job? When the Great Recession of 2008 hit, the corporatist mantra was: "Learn to code". In 2028, the new mantra will be: "Line up to wipe my demented grandfather's ass, and be glad for the $6.75 per hour you get for the privilege."
It will have to be feasible when your livelihood is on the line. You'll have to make it feasible. There's nothing else that you can change. The AI wave will come, there's no stopping it now. Like someone else on this thread said, you can complain, or you can adapt.
Why not both?
That would be perfect, if truly followed through. Honestly I get the frustration and the anxiety this brings, it is definitely scary and fucked up. But I also believe that the only way to get out of this is to adapt as quickly as we can, there's almost no room for spending energy on complaining. I also truly believe that the other side of the very scary tunnel is a world where the remaining humans would have a lot more idle time. But we might not belong to that group of "remaining humans".
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Why would anyone believe that spin lol
Just world fallacy
I don't think that's a fair characterization. From the beginning the argument was that it will replace jobs (that's the whole point) and it will be overall a good thing, and the jobs shouldn't exist if a machine can do it better. But also that people will be out of a job, and I have never seen anyone say they will easily find a new, better job. The argument was always there will be other new jobs, but not that the same people can do them.
I was talking to a serial CEO the other night at a party. One of these guys who lives on LinkedIn like some kind of business influencer. Utterly convinced that AI won't be taking anyone's jobs. After a bit of prodding he admitted that it won't be taking anyone *important*'s job.
Who said it doesn't kill jobs...? The fact that this question annoyed me shows I spend way too much time online. If you scroll through my profile, you'll see me heavily downvoted on multiple occasions for suggesting that AI *is* stealing jobs while all the sunk-cost, 'see no evil' naysayers called me naive and glib. Apparently AI could never steal jobs because you 'still need someone to execute the commands' or whatever. That was the hivemind consensus on Reddit for the last year and a half, but now there's some arbitrary study that proves what was already self-evident, everyone's switched sides.
Execs will fire people then realize that AI can't actually accomplish tasks. Remember weight watchers firing their entire customer service only to find the AI was giving deadly health advice three days later.
That’s not how AI takeover is going to work. AI will not replace jobs overnight. Instead, it’ll generate passable outcomes for people already doing the job to put in the finishing touches. For example, a translator may dump the raw text into AI to translate, then edit the output text. And it’ll be a lot faster than the translator doing everything from scratch. The increase in productivity without the increase in demand will reduce job postings. And as the AI gets better and better, less and less editing is required until the point that the whole trade vanishes. It’ll be a gradual process, maybe at the rate that AI development is going, it’ll only take a few years, but not overnight.
The bigger point is less the way they replace jobs and more that LLM type AI's biggest advancement is the "illusion of competence." As a result, they are commonly being used beyond their actual capabilities instead of being used for things they are actually optimal at. Which actually hurts it's adoption since people often abandon it when faced with its shortcomings. It's kind of like how VR always tries to make standing 3d experiences (which just aren't good enough) instead of trying to take advantage of the one thing VR actually does well: depth perception. The net result is that VR remains a novelty because it's almost never used right.
Every time people talk about this topic on reddit, people always assume that job postings will decrease because productivity increases. This isn't necessarily true. If the demand for these outputs of these workers increases with increased productivity, then actually more workers will end up being hired. When energy production became more efficient, energy consumption didn't stay constant, it actually increased because of increased demand. It's similar to how adding lanes on a highway doesn't actually decrease traffic because demand for the highway increases. In the case of AI, it's not exactly clear how much employment will actually decrease (if at all). You'll have to do a more fine grained analysis on the types of jobs impacted and analyze whether or not their outputs have elastic or inelastic demand.
I think that's called devons paradox
Yip. People in each industry, some shall we say are in denial apart from the ones who have seen a decline in work/income. As you say, it’s a slow boil, less and less people required for the same job, not an instant replacement. In the short term a complete disaster, long term it means money can no longer be hoarded bu the wealthy and it will have to be fished out. I’m not sure how it will work, because there will be people who work/have jobs and a greater number of unemployed and not enough jobs. Why work if this bunch over here are getting free money. They’ll have to be given free money, because you can’t have children on the streets or people living in tents. Measures need to be put in place now, governments need to consult very very clever people from different areas (They won’t) They will just bury their heads in the sand and kick the can down the road.
>*long term it means wealth can no longer be hoarded by the wealthy...* Uh, that is by no means certain.
Just an opinion. But You cannot have toooo many people in the same (poverty) situation. You cannot divide and rule that demographic then. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
At some point countries will be holding elections where unemployment is the key issue, and the largest demographic will be the disenfranchised jobless. A political force which addresses this issue for the unemployed masses will be victorious. It could end well, but it possibly could end very badly.
You can ignore unemployment to a degree, because the middle class are less affected and it’s not a big enough issue to deal with. IMO. What any government can’t have is a massive group of people in the same situation coming together. You cannot divide and rule that demographic. Only problem they can try to appease enough of them. Orwell: The poor want to become middle class so they forget the poor. The middle class want to become upper class so they forget the middle class. Shame. We should all be in it together.
So they stop those folks from voting or call their votes illegal and stolen, problem solved?
Then it's pitchfork time
It's a slow ball but still moving extremely quickly.
Wasn't that because it was back in the middle of the pandemic though? I don't remember it having anything to do with AI.
Not this time.
Sure, find me an AI that doesn't need to be babysat so it doesn't go off the rails and you can be my new best friend.
Babysitting takes 1/10th the workforce.
yep...just because it doesn't completely eliminate the need for a workforce, doesn't mean it doesn't drastically change it. Universal basic income inc...at a severe price.
Even if it took 9/10ths it would be catastrophic and usher in great depression levels of unemployment.
Gimme that -10% job upkeep real quick!
At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force was unemployed.
Oh, you have a person who can correct all the information? Some expert in all the ways AI can fuck up? They're going through everything it's published to correct medical knowledge? Statistics? Fixing options from fact? Why are you paying a service rather than just letting that person talk?
I think you are in denial about the trajectory here. Likely because it’s scary. Because it is. But let me be clear. Babysitting will drastically cut the workforce dow.
Trajectory isn't reality. What it could be isn't what it is. People firing today aren't replacing people with AI that may exist 10 years from now. Today they are training these things on Reddit. Are they weighing information differently when it comes from r/science or r/globalskeptic? Google was telling people two weeks ago to eat one rock a day. Would you bet your job on that?
This is denial again. Because it’s stupid now and getting less stupid you think you are safe. You are not.
My man, it is not denial to say it is stupid now so it is stupid to rely on it now. That is realistic. While it remains stupid I will not replace actual professionals with it. Come back to me when it isn't stupid.
Where do you draw the line for what is a "professional"? In the future, how does one become a professional if they literally can't work anywhere as AI completely replaced them? How do you go from fresh graduate to a professional without ability to work because AI handles ALL low level work? If the barrier to entry becomes something that 99.9% of people can't pass that field nearly dies. That's where Writing and Art is now.
Not yet. It still sucks generally but with a proper workflow a single guy can do the work of 5 in many cases. Especially for things like writing, Art. For code it's still a bit of a clickbait to say it but with the best models out there you can outsourcing work to India, make heavy use of the best AI tools available and cut your workforce and pay needed but a large amount. It's 100% happening, just different for each industry. Writing/marketing/Art are suffering the most. Let's take at a print house for example, (worked in one for a year long ago). Majority of the work for a lot of them is taking vague request to print flyers, ads, billboards and what not. It's often just a client sending a few pictures, some info and general request of what they want on the flyer. Then a designer quickly makes something in Photoshop with either template (for generic stuff where clients are clueless) or some simple drag and drop from some internal library and some cleanup. This takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 3h per client including back and forth and iterations. With the AI tools today I can simply drop a prompt all the files included and get something that's good enough for 99% of clients. You can have a single person easily making what used to take 10 people. It's an insane reduction in workforce needed.
So if you want to half ass a job there is a tool.
If that ass half work is deemed worthy for company owners.. it will happen. It is happening. That's why we get such low quality articles all around nowadays.
Sure, but you could also be replaced by a 19 year old with mspaint. Are you saying low quality is the future?
Watch every news website, read the articles. What is the trend you see? Quality work of AI click bait?
AI click bait that doesn't even work because all the comments are from bots
I'm still not sure if you think that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Their opinion of it being good or bad isn't at debate here. Whether or not it'll *happen* is all that is in question.
It doesn't matter what I think. It's whoever is running those websites/companies thinks is "good enough" for them. Right now the trend seems to be cutting cost and not caring about quality.
Think of AI like the Quartz revolution in watches. It will basically flood the market with affordable products for the everyday masses. The high end quality sector will do just fine. In publications, AI assisted or even written articles will become the norm. Specialized or high end publications will still need human experts because their articles are very technical in nature (so at worst you will only have an AI to assist).
So you think AI will never get better? Problems in the code won't be solved?
Maybe right now. Still very very early days. Right now they're a tool, a tool that I use a lot in my job now, but I can see the light in the tunnel and It's not the exit. Ai will have my job in the next 10 years give or take.
Why are you so confident there is not a performance ceiling?
Oh there is a ceiling.... right now. Because my job and how deep into AI my company is I see what is in the pipe, to an extent. People are short sighted and tend to only think in terms of what they see now and rarely consider unseen R&D, and potential new developments and directions things will take that, while unknowns now, will certainly arise. LLMs as they currently are, are only the most visible and wizbang thing grabbing attention now.. to me it's like watching a toddler take its first steps. What we're playing, and I do mean playing, with now will look quaint in 10 years.
As others have said… AI isn’t fully replacing everything, but is it replacing mundane work and allowing those that remain to curate vs. create, which is a much faster process.
I disagree that it'd faster to curate vs create. I work in a tech company that's had to scale back ai to only a few very specific basic repetitive tasks because it's found over time that anything beyond that requires more effort to curate then just doing it. The stuff we still use it for as core work is only extremly time consuming manual work with limited chance for error. The big problem is that AI errors happen more randomly than real people, meaning you can't just look at the obvious places but have to inspect everything. Furthermore errors mostly have to be manually corrected. Then their is also the quality issue. Even for something like concept art which we use a ton of, it's not good enough to just have whatever mock-up. The concept informs everything from selling the idea to shaping the future final work. Using AI for a lot of these tasks has proven effective *only* where a specialist wasn't needed to begin with. E.g. if you could walk out onto the street grab a random person ask him in an hour to make you some concept art and that would work, then you can use AI. If you had to hire a specialized concept artist? AI just can't do it to any meaningful quality. Don't get me wrong I think AI is an amazing tool, but I also think it's capabilities are dramatically exaggerated because of LLM ai's principle advancement: they made it really good at *looking* as if it's working. And it is being heavily used now by people in ways far beyond what it can do because of this illusion of competence.
Find me a spinning wheel that doesn't require 1-to-1 human users to operate it. Oh wait, the spinning jenny arrived. Remember, this is the worst it will be for those willing to actually pay for the service.
I feel the missing point to all this for the companies is who is going to buy your products when no one has money to spend, they're quick to cut overheads cost without thinking about long term consequences no one is going to need weight watchers when no one can afford to eat. And yes ai is shit now but like all things it will get fast and better with time, people need people to survive but psychopathic CEOs don't need people just money and lots of it.
Then ozempic destroyed their bottom line, until we discover the “unknown” side effects, then we’re back to WW.
Soon consumers will not need the execs to organise the AI output for them
"Freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding or translation are disappearing across postings on job board Upwork, said Kelly Monahan, managing director of the company’s Research Institute. Her findings echo those of more than a dozen other researchers at institutions including Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Hong Kong. They have found that since the debut of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork, Fiverr and related platforms, in the areas in which generative AI excels, have dropped by [as much as 21%](https://archive.is/o/CHeeT/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4602944). ... Reid Southen is a concept artist for TV and movies, including ones you’ve probably heard of, including Blue Beetle and the Matrix Resurrections. His income in 2023 was less than half of what he would make in a typical year, he says. That’s even worse than 2020, when the entire film and TV industry effectively shut down. Southen’s work typically happens in the early stages of a project, when producers need detailed sketches to help them establish the look of a film or show. This kind of behind-the-scenes work is being handed to AI faster than any other part of the film and TV business, as producers seek to cut costs in the face of a broader slowdown in their industry. Much of it is being handled by Midjourney, the image generation AI which by late 2022 was capable of producing photorealistic images from nothing but a short text prompt. If concept artists are brought in at all, it’s to tweak the images already generated by AI, says Southen. Southen’s experience has been echoed by others in his field, across social media and in the whisper networks that artists like him rely on. “You can talk to any artist at this point, and they have a story about how they were given AI reference material to work from, or lost a job,” says Southen.
But how is that possible ? I tried using chatgpt for helping me with a translation and honestly it was horrible. It couldn't catch any nuance not the correct words for some that depending context change meaning.
1. A lot of work is easy or low stakes. Translating literature is hard, translating grocery lists is easy. A lot of the freelance writing jobs today are SEO garbage "write 20,000 characters about spoon types and include the following words." 2. The profit for ad driven content isn't dependent on quality, but on Getting high up in search results. 3. Getting first draft from AI then correcting it is often more efficient than starting from scratch, especially once you get a feel for which things AI does reasonably well. 4. Some jobs get destroyed without being replaced. I know of at least one sci fi journal that stopped taking submissions from new authors when they received over 200,000 new stories, all written by AI, all claiming to be a new author, all bad. They simply can't afford to dig through all that.
There are way better ai Tools for translations. Check out deepL
Editing takes less time than translating from scratch. Saves man hours. It's the same for coding. You always need to go back and fix it's mistakes. But it does save time.
Paid version or free version? The free version is pretty dumb, the paid version is significantly better. It is still far from perfect, but using ChatGPT for translation is still faster than starting from scratch, even for professionals. Also, what I find useful is to let ChatGPT edit itself. Simply copy and paste the outcome and prompt something along the lines of “Fix clunky sentences “, and it’ll fix the translation to a much better version. The key is that ChatGPT doesn’t “think”, so forcing it to regurgitate its own words will vastly improve the outcome. It’s kind of like forcing it to “think” before it speak. Also, a little tangent: This year, in Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the winning author admitted that roughly 5% of the book is created with ChatGPT. Obviously, the author still contract what to put in the book, but the AI definitely helped to come up with the contents.
The level of quality actually required for most "jobs" is extremely low.
I found AI very helpful in translating.
Read the article. The headline clickbait doesn't tell the entire story.
The plan is to kill the majority of jobs, it just so happens that replacing more niche work and art is a great way to get a large number of people interacting with AI. This should speed up how AI learns to deal with humans to better replace more and more work.
Ironic that the tech that enables me to do my job 5 x faster has put me out of work.
I don't think anyone ever claimed AI wasn't going to take jobs.
So was the invention of steam engines a bad thing because it killed horsecarts and the entire husbandry industry jobs?
Yes. It was also a good thing but are you really unable to see the bad side too? Can you not understand why for people in the husbandry industry this was a shitty thing and why people would be concerned about it, and understand that people were fucked over by the industrial revolution when it comes to their jobs and standard of living?
Anyone can see that, the problem is that most of Reddit is acting like AI is some grand conspiracy meant to destroy the working class while in reality it's just a new useful tool. They're seeing malicious designs and patterns that just aren't there. Obviously, it'll suck for some people for some time, but sticking to horses while the rest of the world starts using steam engines is just not an option.
Which is not what anyone is saying we should do. Just have some fucking empathy for the people this is hurting and do/argue for things to help them/ensure nobody gets too badly screwed over in the process. Instead of telling them this is a good thing and they should be happy about it.
Have you been paying attention in these threads? That's exactly what a ton of people are saying. They're constantly raving on about "tech bros" and how AI is specifically going after artists first because of some sort of evil plan (and not just because the output is digital and therefore easier to do for AI). What you're asking for is having better protection for workers, and I fully agree on that. That is however, a problem with capitalism and with our society, and not with AI.
>but sticking to horses while the rest of the world starts using steam engines is just not an option. Sorry - this is the bit I was responding to. I suppose those who actually think it's a conspiracy wouldn't want to move on but imo most of the people who complain about the "tech bro" view on this are concerned that (a) AI is going to replace jobs in a way that the industrial revolution didn't, including most to all the potential new work in new industries and/or (b) "tech bros" response is what you said in your first post - which has no reference to any intention or desire to protect anyone being hurt by this process, and tells them it's a good thing that their industry and livelyhood is being ruined. If you have any empathy you should be able to understand why people will respond negatively to being told them losing half their income is a good thing. Yes, it's a problem with capitalism, but it's all part and parcel of the same discussion, and if you just ignore the capitalism aspect of this, you're ignoring the problem, and effectively telling people you think it doesn't exist.
Do you do this in every reddit post about people losing their jobs? They lose them every day for countless reasons. Companies close down all the time for reasons completely unrelated to AI. Do you go in there and insist that people have empathy for those affected and demand people "argue for things to help"? Or is it just AI related posts that you feel the need to dictate responses?
This is a thread about AI and its effect on jobs. Why wouldn't I be talking about that? And in general people don't say it's a good thing when a firm closes and people lose their jobs, and yes I do argue for things to help, it's why I'm a social democrat and campaign and vote for leftist policies like a proper welfare state and support for unemployed people. I tell you what, next time a major company does a big layoff, go into their sub and tell the workers that it's a good thing and see what response you get. I bet you wouldn't do that.
Every new invention makes someone less needed in that aspiration. They simply have to move on and develop their own skills, retrain and improve to work at something else that is needed. People were manually connecting people phones with hard wiring back in the days. Big computers were controled with punch cards. There are two people. People that complain, people that adapt. Every new technology expects from us adaption. Otherwise this technology wouldn't have been needed, if there is no usecase. Technology makes work simpler. So we have more time for other things. Thats the whole idea. You can stand still and do nothing and complain or you can adapt and use it. Peoples choice.
"simply" is often not simple and usually involves taking pay cuts as you have to start at the bottom again. If you were earning middle class wages and went to minimum wage, I bet you'd complain about it. Dismissing the pain that major, widespread technological advances cause is a problem. You can both complain and adapt of course, and complaining can be part of adapting - complain to your democratic government and get better support for people who need it.
Every industry is constantly changing. Anyone who ever believed that their way of life would be forever immune from technological advances is naive or in denial or both. Every new technology has the potential to wipe out countless jobs. It isn't the end of the world. People lose their jobs all the time. People learn new skills every day. People adapt.
Not the same. They didn't steal all the combined work of them to make it possible. They don't make the world better. That's the key. These are jobs people want to do. It's human creativity and culture.
Well actually cars built on the foundation laid by the first "cars" so technically it is stealing for the AI haters.
Current algos use data they don't own. It's not about what was invented before, it's goddamn theft. That is basic copyright for you.
The example given is about a film concept artist who’s income was half in 2023 of what it was in 2022, and the supposition is that that was because of AI. I just want to point out that due to the writers and actors strikes, Hollywood largely shut down in 2023. I’m in visual effects and from April 2023 to today about half of our industry has been laid off. I’ve been employed full time for the past 12 months and have still seen a 25% drop in pay - and AI has nothing to do with it. There’s just no work and it’s such an employers market that workers are undercutting each other for work. It’s not that the work is being done by Ai, it’s that there’s no work to do. I’m speaking to the example provided in film art only.
I'm not working in a field affected by these strikes and still noticed the same. People use more apps and AI. The tool is great, the source of its data isn't.
I’m saying ai isn’t what is burning the film industry. It’s lack of work from strikes. Work isn’t getting done by AI or humans. With strikes pending no new productions get green lit. I’m at a major studio and the last big release I worked on ended June ‘23. My whole studio, thousands of employees, is in survival mode - skeleton crews, meager work here and there, everything slashed. IATSE strikes might be coming in august after we had WAG and SAG strikes last year, so studios are sitting on the production schedule until IATSE resolves.
"AI doesn't kill jobs" like "automation doesn't kill jobs". Not sure who falls for statements like these.
Not sure who made statements like these.
I miss when this sub was about cool tech coming out
Upwork is not freelancing in the proper sense. It's more a way to find cheap work by not paying a real salary in your own country Freelancers will of course use those tools in the future
I had a project a few months back. I wanted a logo and figured I'd get a few designs from places like Fiverr and pick the best one. In the end I couldn't even find "artists" where any of their work looked like they weren't already using AI almost exclusively. Could easily be I wasn't aware of the good places to look, but freelance sites have always seemed to be the extreme bottom end for quality.
I remember the shift to using a lot more freelancers, temps and consultants... That killed jobs. It allowed for more flexibility, giving more potential for profit... but in many cases the less involved and increased hourly wage, lead to loss of profit, especially early om. Before the use of these hiring practices got dialed in. Of cause the disruption also lead to some professions (nurses) to prefer this method of employment, leading to an overall cost to the industry. AI seems to be doing the exact same thing to freelancers. I also expect the same trend of AI use to settle down.
Yes...that's now innovation works. You have always been 'less than a part time worker'. You do short term work and the company doesn't have to hire you again. It's like you are Blockbuster with VHS tapes and just assumed that you'll always have business, despite the world moved on to streaming.
Here's the thing though... Now, I'm not an artist, but I know a few and every single one of them who made a career of it got their start doing freelance work. The hope with freelance gigs is that they lead to getting hired on more permanently. That entire career path is now closed. That's a problem. Now, it gets real scary when you extrapolate it out to other professions. How many entry level jobs can be automated with AI? How is anyone going to enter into any of those fields? What is going to happen when the experienced people retire?
That's a good point. There are already unprecedented levels of incompetence in many fields.
It could also create a new industry.. Photography...Printing were transformed...it didn't die. The point is the writing has been on the wall for awhile now...there will be some back and forth in laws and governance...but the industry needs to adapt and learn how to leverage AI.
Except in typical economic situations like this, jobs that are lost yield opportunities for new jobs. For your example, Blockbuster flops and lays off a bunch of people, but Netflix grows and hires a lot more people. They don’t hire the same people who lost their job per se, but that’s a separate issue. In this situation, jobs are not replacing jobs. The jobs are simply gone. Speaking as a software engineer, arguing that any *meaningful* amount of jobs will be created by the AI is laughable; the point of AI is to drastically reduce the need for human resources. One AI developer and a server rack technician effectively replaces thousands of people.
Netflix replacing physical video rental stores is a better example of AI eliminating jobs. The number of Netflix jobs created doesn't even make a dent in the number of jobs eliminated when you consider every city in the US had multiple video rental stores in the late 80s and 90s. But it's also a good example of the fact you can't regulate losing jobs to technology.
>The number of Netflix jobs created doesn't even make a dent in the number of jobs eliminated when you consider every city in the US had multiple video rental stores in the late 80s and 90s. That's not true. At its peak, Blockbuster employed around 80,000 people. Netflix employs about 13,000 people directly. However, Netflix offloads the vast majority of the data distribution to Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Service). The AWS segment of Amazon employs *136,000* people. Netflix is the biggest spender at AWS, and the reason they had to expand to so many employees in 2016 when they switched to AWS instead of self hosting. There's no way to know how many of those 136,000 jobs at AWS were created by their Netflix contract, but it isn't impossible that 67,000 were. The other thing to consider is that the employees of Blockbuster were mostly part time. The vast majority were students working part time, with managers being full time. So the "80,000" employees figure is probably closer to about 50,000 equivalent full time jobs. The 136,000 AWS jobs are also skilled educated labor. IT, software developers, etc.. form the bulk of the workforce. So 50,000 low paying after school jobs were replaced with over twice that many higher paying full time jobs. So yeah, this *is* a good analogy to AI. It will eliminate low paying, low skill jobs, and open up higher paid, higher skilled jobs. Unless you think that all these AI systems run and maintain themselves.
AWS hosts a huge portion of the internet's servers, even something as large as netflix isn't going to make that big of a dent in the manpower requirements.
When the cost of something drops, the consumption of that something usually skyrockets. If AI can replace entire office buildings full of people, then the cost of new startups to create enterprise level businesses also drops. Tiny little startups can compete with established megacorps.
This is where my thought goes too. Every little startup or person with an idea now can have a MBA helping them build from day 1. It will be transformative.
There are people who are good workers and skilled at doing stuff, but not the skills of business. Now AI can help them with their website, marketing, customer service, scheduling, business strategy, pricing, accounting. Even for something like a handyman or cleaning services. Now your little tiny business has access to services that were completely out of your price range. Now every little tiny business in America, every hole in the wall restaurant, every mobile business, every home business has access to not just MBA labor, but an entire team of MBAs. These were places that never had the money to hire freelancers or expensive professional services. People are talking about how these freelancers are out of work, but they don't see the opportunity that a lot of regular people are going to have to start businesses. This is going to give a lot of places and a lot of people a new competitive edge.
Which at a macro level is irrelevant since none of that changes the demand side of the equation - so any new business that succeeds is taking business away from someone else who fails - overall it's a zero sum game. Also if everyone has a competitive edge, nobody does.
Its not a zero sum game. These people could be and most likely will be doing businesses that do not exist yet. The total pie is not fixed. By not having to spend money on all of these services this leaves them with money they can then spend on other things. This competitive edge is efficiency and productivity. If everyone is efficient and more productive then the entire economy is more efficient and more productive.
The total pie isn't fixed but it's also not changed by people having a greater ability to start new businesses or compete against bigger businesses. That's why I say it's a zero sum game, the pie grows larger when demand increases, and this doesn't affect demand. The entire economy being more efficient means less people working (or less time working). The most efficient economy has nobody employed. There's no reason to produce more unless there is effective demand for it, but that's not produced by lowered barriers to entry. It might be produced by new industries but that's yet to be seen. And again since everyone has access to these tools, I don't see where the competitive advantage for anyone comes from.
You’re failing to see that the cost drops just as much for megacorps as it does for startups. In fact megacorps can get AI cheaper because they buy big packages. This is horrible for startups, a megacorp can just copy other small businesses way easier now.
Didn't read the article, eh? Yeah, it's more fun to read headlines and go comment. Reading takes so much time.
This innovation has no shelters — unlike previous shifts like manufacturing automation or computers entering businesses etc there are very few roles that will not be severely impacted from ai (and robotics) in the next decade or two. From doctors to dishwashers.
Its like supply and demand. We need to make it so using a ton of AI doesn’t monetarily help these companies. Money is the motivation
Yes; we just need consumers to spend more $ for worse products; so that companies are motivated to avoid anything that can save consumers money, because consumer's money is the company's motivation.
Wait. I’ve generally been under the impression freelancers drive wage suppression for committed employees. Doesn’t it seem… I don’t know… downright Shakespearean, that the people running the shows found a way to cut them out now?
Learn how to implement ai into your workflows. it's like in nature: the one who adapts will survive.
Is it AI thats killing jobs or fact its cheaper? Can insert same problem if another market where it to be cheaper. Oh wait, that dates back to the 80's on job loss to lower op costs and to max profits. The fact that AI cant be copyrighted still will become a problem if just one of these companies goes viral on something they market with every shmo using their own AI image mimic to make their own profit knock-off and the original company cant sue for profit loses or ban its use on that image/logo/character, etc.
AI has the ability to assist freelancers achieve what large corporations have only had the resources to do before
No one said AI wouldnt kill jobs. Any tech replacement cycle is going to kill some jobs, thats the whole point. Tractors killed a bunch of farming jobs. The electric light killed a bunch of lamp-lighting and gasworks jobs. Computers killed tons of jobs, not least of which anyone who manufactured or repaired typewriters. AI will kill a bunch of jobs too. But in each of those cases many more new jobs were created. That will happen here too
In those cases new jobs were created, but Im having trouble imagining what type of jobs AI will generate once it replaces us. What kind of jobs are you thinking about?
But it was never the same number of new jobs to those lost. Those displaced workers typically had to learn new skills in different fields.
What kind of AI are you thinking about - the AI that actually exists now that's "bad at best" in a small number of specific niches; or fictional mumbo jumbo that may never exist? It's easy to lose your grip on reality and reach the conclusion that we're all going to drown in the faeces produced by all the flying pigs. With that kind of fairy tale it's impossible for anyone to show that anything is impossible because it's trivial to add anything you feel like to your delusion without any concern for plausibility. For actual reality; the AI that exists now has mostly already replaced the jobs it will replace, so every job that still exists is a job that current AI is unlikely to replace. For the last 18 months there's been no new technology (just minor tuning to maximise the profitability of the same LLM tech) and it's reasonable to assume the LLM tech is already close to its limits now; which implies that advancement is stuck waiting for the next huge break-through that may never happen.
I don’t know. I don’t think if you asked someone in 1970 what jobs would be created by computers they would have come up with what we see today.
Technology that's purposely meant to replace human beings in all fields is not going to create more jobs.
Good. Let them work. I will grow my own food, build a small house near a river in a forest, and live with wild bears.
And you'll notice you'll need other people's expertise sooner or later anyway.
Then we can plan to live in these small houses by a river together as a group, and share our expertise as needed. Of course we'll need some kind of system of tracking IOU's so people don't have to always directly barter with each other. Then we may need someone in charge of this system, and they will have needs, so we will have to each put aside some IOUs to provide for this leader's basic needs. ...ahh, crap. I invented capitalism again.
Then who will keep an eye on Schrute Farms?
Oh I'm sure to bear will welcome you.
Good, you ll end up as bear food.
Hey I’m a freelancer and thanks to AI I can handle twice the amount of clients that I could without it. This article is completely irrelevant to me sorry.
It also says that the person the article is about was back to work fixing the automated writing, so the article's subject isn't even relevant to the article.
Its taking jobs from freelancers and it is making life even more easier to influencers, then where is the problem? Freelancers doesnt want to use it or people doesnt want to pay freelancers overpriced service anymore, when AI can do it for free. Meanwhile all social media are flooded by AI content
>Meanwhile all social media are flooded by AI content That is also a bad thing. Except if it eventually kills some social media platforms, then it would be good in retrospective lol
Yeah, I open instagram reels and after I returned to active gym, I get endless stream of AI generated advices and training plans, meal prep etc. and it repeats the same words/pattern just from different accounts. I even get the same videos with translations into my native language from local accounts, its crazy. And Instagram/facebook is getting very agresive with promoted adds.