If my experience with it at work is anything to go by, no. Increasing amounts of my time are spent fixing the sloppy output of coworkers who use AI. Far from being “left behind” I’ve become one of the few people who is actually able to solve complicated problems.
If you are just wanting to spam a bunch of copy over a network, quality wouldn’t matter. Say for example if you are running a propaganda campaign to undermine trust in the electoral system among American Conservatives quality does not matter. Just get the vibe right and spam out as much as you can.
Another obvious case is marketing. If you just need a bunch of Twitter accounts to say “B R A N D N A M E” over and over quality would not matter
This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don’t care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.
Bartering won’t really work well for an economy with a high degree of specialization, since the complexity of required exchanges will increase with the degree of specialization.
Of course you could get around that problem by introducing a new specialization, that of a broker who warehouses goods and give trades based on what people have on hand but that is just a more complicated version of money.
For some reason people have this mindset of “I must be in my car when I charge it”. I see it a lot when I go to DC fast chargers, which really only make sense on road trips. People sitting there in their car charging it up to 100%, which they do every time it needs a charge.
I’ve had conversations with people at charging stations where I explained that they should be charging at home and the reacted like it was the first time they even considered the possibility. If you only use fast chargers of course you are going ng to have a bad experience. That is a terrible way to operate an EV day to day, but it somehow became the default for a lot of people.
What about looksmaxing influencers? I can make fun of their job right?
Currently my favorite piece of art is accidentally transgressive. It is a kinetic sculpture, and fairly unimpressive for what it is. Apparently it is a rip-off of someone else’s style. It is owned by a hotel that put it on the sidewalk corner for whatever reason. Generally unimpressive on its own.
The thing that makes it interesting is that, unlike most sculptures I have seen, this one locks as in: the spinning parts are prevented from moving unless a special key is used to unlock them. And the hotel locks the sculpture during non-business hours. If you want to see the sculpture move, you have to visit it between the hours of 9-5 on work days. Presumably when the hotel staff can monitor your presence on the public sidewalk just outside their hotel. Otherwise it is locked. Something about putting a derivative sculpture in a public space, then taking steps to prevent the public from enjoying it is fascinating to me. Although I feel like a speech from a hotel lawyer about potential liability or whatever reason they so vigilantly lock it is an essential part of the art that I am missing.
Can you provide a single example of someone buying a house with a check that bounces and successfully evicting the rightful owners despite not paying for the house?
Where I live that transaction would be void by statute. No court would process an eviction or lien if they the buyer did a felony to get the deed signed over.
Once the house is in their name, the law is on their side.
If you negotiate a contract and the other party fails to fulfill their obligations, the law is not going to be on their side even if they got paperwork signed.
Obviously a court is not going to support an eviction if that eviction is part of a fraud. That’s ridiculous.
At work I do not think their use is ever justifiable because the rapidly increase the amount of satisficing behavior from my colleagues. I have had many experiences where obviously bad work was submitted that was clearly llm generated and it was clear that the person submitting it just generated the output and handed it over. People turn their brains off.
The other thing I have noticed about their use is, once you start caring about the quality of your work, their value plummets. If I were to use one for my work I would need to check its output by experimenting with code, doing research, thoroughly considering both sides of an argument, etc. But if I were not going to use one I would do my own work by experimenting with code, doing research, thoroughly considering both sides of an argument, etc. So what is the advantage to using one? Either way I am still putting forth the effort to ensure my work-product is high quality. Going clackity-clack on the keyboard is not the hard part of my job, all the other stuff is.
I got my current job a few years back. I made an account thinking it would help. It was basically useless for finding a job. The folks on there that were hiring would all demand you engage with their posts (I guess as a way of increasing “influence”) but would not actually hire.
It is possible that prospective employers might look at your account during a job interview process which is why I have kept my account. But it did not help me find a job.
So we have some time to prepare.
Unfortunately, as is the case with most group projects, this one will be put off until the last possible second.
I just want to share my thought process here in the vain hope that someone else might see the light of reading past the headline.
This is what went through my head as I was reading:
Immediately, several problems jump out at the use of this database for the conclusions the substack draws.
First, the definition of serial killer given in the report is “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” That is pretty broad, and would include things like a family murder (a man kills his wife, then goes to their kid’s school and kill their kid before committing suicide.), or murder for instrumental reasons (e.g. robbery). That is not usually what people think of when they think of serial killers.
Second the number of killers in the report shoots up dramatically in 1960. That coupled with the fact that the sources for the data are a hodge-podge of administrative records and reporting would make me very cautious about the database. This is what the webstite the report comes from says:
The database was created using information collected by Radford University students from a variety of sources including prison records, court transcripts, media sources, true crime books, and the Internet. Great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information.
So, my guess is that the data are mostly from reporting. If that is true then the data are going to be biased towards “serial killers” that show up in news events.
So the data sources are not clear, we don’t know the distribution of legal records to news, we don’t know how records are initially identified. What is clear is that the database is not a sample of news or administrative records about violent crime. For example, the data were not collected by randomly sampling a set of judicial systems across countries then estimating counts of convictions where the offender fit the definition of “serial killer.” Rather, the data (according to a slide show on the website) “began with student serial killer timelines.” That same slide deck reports that one of the goals of the database is to provide accurate information for a forensic psychology course. That purpose suggests a focus on case studies rather than national estimates.
Since those students, along with the course and school, are in the US and since the data were collected in an ad-hoc manner relying in part (I suspect heavily) on news reporting, it is a safe bet that the reason the database has so many more US killers in it is because the folks who compiled it focused on collecting data from the US.
To wit: Why does the US have so many more serial killers? Because we spent more time measuring serial killers in the US.
The United States criminalizes poverty in ways that peer nations do not. Sex work is illegal across most of the country.
Sex work is actually illegal in many countries.
Among peer nations, the U.S. is an outlier on inequality by essentially the same margin it is an outlier on serial killing.
What? What does that even mean? How are they getting that figure?
Overall, I don’t think this is particularly credible. I hope now, that you too will be at least skeptical of the arguments put forth here.
There is a lot to hate about AI. A lot of dangers and valid criticism. But AI chatbots convincing people to kill themselves isn’t a problem with chatbots, it’s a problem with the user.
To me this seems like an obvious problem with the chat bots. These things are marketed as “PhD level experts” and so advanced that they are about to change the nature or work as we know it.
I don’t think the companies or their supporters can make these claims, then turn around and say “well obviously you shouldn’t take its output seriously” when a delusional person is tricked by one into doing something bad.
Sometimes this happens to me as well. Usually when a celebrity does something news worthy that is how I discover it. Or when sports things happen.
I will say though that, while you are probably right that only learning about news through memes is not a good way to be informed, the other extreme (obsessing over every headline) is probably bad too.
As unsolicited advice I’d recommend finding a few long form journalism sources and following them to get a better feel for the news. Doing the over time I have found that i am informed without the hysteria that often comes from 24 hour news cycles.
(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
In Texas they are using personal data collected from ALPRs to accuse women of getting abortions. There were also concerns that personal data collected by period tracker apps would be used to accuse women of getting abortions. You could be doing something that suddenly becomes illegal and then those data could be used to harm you
ICE is using facial recognition and a database of questionable veracity to accuse legal residents of being illegal immigrants. They are collecting facial data of protestors and, apparently, using it compile of list of domestic “terrorists”. You could be doing absolutely nothing illegal and the state could use your personal data to harm you.
Social media companies use data they collect about you to try to get you addicted to their products because you are easier to manipulate when you are addicted. They know a lot of their products have harmful impacts on people, but they don’t care because they make more money that way.
Last attempt, I swear.
By digressing to abstraction, good people can and do justify building tech for immoral purposes. It is irrelevant that tech is not inherently good or bad in cases where it is built to do bad things. Talking about potential alternate uses in cases where tech is being used to do bad is just a way of avoiding the issues.
I have no problem calling flock or facebooks tech stack bad because the intentions behind the tech are immoral. The application of the tech by those organizations is for immoral purposes (making people addicted, invading their privacy etc). The tech is an extension of bad people trying to do bad things. Commentary about tech’s abstract nature is irrelevant at that point. Yeah, it could be used to do good. But it’s not. Yeah, it is not in-and of-itself good or bad. Who cares? This instantiation of the tech is immoral, because it’s purposes are immoral.
The engineers who help make immoral things possible should think about that, rather than the abstract nature of their technology. In these cases, saying technology is neutral is to invite the listener to consider a world that doesn’t exist instead of the one that does.
Saying “tech is neutral” is a dodge. People say that to avoid thinking about the ethics of what it is they are doing.
I don’t think my colleagues are going to be replaced by ai. I think they are going to continue to use llms to generate “output” that needs someone like me to constantly fix until that becomes too expensive. At which point they will go back to doing their work the way they used to.
These llms are impressive word guessing machines, but the are nowhere near as capable as their companies say they are.