It just feels too good to be true.
I’m currently using it for formatting technical texts and it’s amazing. It doesn’t generate them properly. But if I give it the bulk of the info it makes it pretty af.
Also just talking and asking for advice in the most random kinds of issues. It gives seriously good advice. But it makes me worry about whether I’m volunteering my personal problems and innermost thoughts to a company that will misuse that.
Are these concerns valid?
The first downside is in the use of it exactly the way you’re using it. In this case, a company may decide they don’t actually need technical writers, just a low-paid editor who feeds tech specs into a prompt, gets a response, and tidies it up. How many skilled jobs are lost because of this?
Think of software devs. Feed a project spec into the prompt: “Give me a Django backend and Vue frontend to build an online calendar” and then you have just a QA dev who debugs and tests and maybe cleans up a bit. Now, instead of a team of software devs working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app, you have one or two low-paid testers who don’t understand the full architecture, can only fix bugs, and don’t understand the security issues inherent in the minimally viable code the bot spat out.
Think of writers. Just ignore actual creatives. Plug an “idea” into the prompt and then have an editor clean up any glaring strangeness and get it out the door. It can, and already is, flood the market with absolute drivel driving actual human creatives out. Look at the current writers strike. The Hollywood execs are fucking champing at the bit to just replace them all with an LLM and say to hell with the writers.
The core issue is: the people at the top with money only care about money. They don’t care if the product is good. Quality is irrelevant if they can crank it out at a tenth of the cost and at 1000x the volume. And every time you use it, you’re giving it training data. You’re justifying its use. And its use is, and will continue, to destroy entire industries, ruin web search, create mis- and disinformation, and endanger the sharing of actual human creativity.
You’re not selling me here. Specifically because using ChatGPT in the role you are talking about is exactly what software developers have been doing for years - putting humans out of work. To use your own description, I could ask a software team to “Give me a calendar app” and a team of software devs, testers, and QA will produce a will go about working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app which will them obsolete thousands upon thousands of secretaries across the world. They were fully employed making intelligent decisions about their bosses schedules, managing conflicts, and coordinating with other humans to make sure things ran smoothly - and you caused nearly all of them to be fired and replaced with one or two low-paid data entry clerks who don’t understand the business or why certain meetings and people have priority over others.
We can go on. Bank tellers? Most of them fired thanks to automated machines. Copywriters? Some lazy programmer puts a dictionary in word and all of a sudden 90% of all misspellings are going. Usage? Yup - getting rid of most of those too. We can go back further to when telephone switchboards were automated and there was no need to talk to someone to make your connection. Sure, those people are dead now, but they wouldn’t have jobs if they were alive. And all of those functions were automated to mimic, and then exceed the utility of, humans who used to do that work. Everything from the cotton gin and mechanical thresher to a laser welder and 5DOF robotic assembly station are eliminating jobs. Artists fearing losing their jobs to ml generation? Welcome to the world of
modernold school photography. Modern photography, of course, is digital and has destroyed the jobs of hundreds of thousands or millions of analog photography jobs.The only difference this time is that its you, or people of your intellectual station, who are in the crosshairs.
But this isn’t what’s happening here. It’s not replacing menial bullshit jobs. It’s trying to replace skilled jobs and creative jobs, something that only soulless grifters and greedy capitalists want. It’s a solution in search of a problem.
No, it didn’t. The only jobs lost were menial jobs in film production and development. Creatives didn’t lose their jobs. The medium just changed.
This is veering really close to the “creatives have been gatekeeping art and AI will ‘democratize’ it” bullshit
So, it’s okay to replace jobs which seem like menial bullshit to you, but not jobs you deem to be “creative.” We’re taking a bell curve of human ability and simply drawing the line of “obsolete human” in a different place and you’re disappointed that you’re way closer to it than you were a decade ago.
NB: I sat in a room with 200 other engineers this summer and they all scoffed at the idea that a computer could take their place. But I’m absolutely certain that what we do could be - is being - automated even as we claim to be the intelligent ones who are not in fear of replacement. My job is just the learned sum of centuries of human knowledge which is honed year after year and has to be taught, wholecloth, to every new human in my profession. There are people who will say I’m the smartest guy in the room (for a small enough room ;-) but 90% what I do is just applying a set of rules based on inputs and boundary conditions. We feel like this shouldn’t happen to us because we’re smart. We think independently. We have special abilities which set us apart from ML generated outputs. We’re also full of shit. There are absolutely areas were ML/AI will not surpass our value in the system for quite some time, but more and more of our expertise will be accomplishable by application of distilled large data sets.
The promise of automation absolutely is about riding ourselves of shit, low-paid, dangerous, menial labor so that we’re free to pursue things that we’re passionate about. But right now, AI is doing precisely the opposite. Actual creative and skilled people are being pushed out and ending up with shit, low-paid jobs, gig work and other exploitative jobs just to make ends meet.
I can hear the sneer in this, so I think my assumption was correct at the end of my last comment.
It’s absolutely pointless then to even bother with this, but I’m going power through anyway
This is the same argument of “AI art is just doing what humans do, looking at other art and mixing it up”. And it’s just as backward and fallacious when applied to any other industry. AI can only give you a synthesis of exactly what you feed it. It can’t use its life experience, its upbringing, its passions, its cultural influences, etc to color its creativity and thinking, because it has none and it isn’t thinking. Two painters who study and become great artists, and then also both take time to study and replicate the works of Monet can come away from that experience with vastly different styles. They’re not just puking back a mashup of Monet’s collected works. They’re using their own life experience and passions to color their experience of Impressionism.
That’s something an AI can never do, and it leaves the result hollow and meaningless.
It’s no different if you apply that to software development. People in tech love to think that development is devoid of creativity and is just cold, calculating math. But it’s not. Even if you never touch UI or UX, the feature you develop isn’t isolated. It interacts with everything else in the system. Do something purely follow rules? Maybe. But not all. There is never a point where your code is devoid of any humanity. There are usually multiple ways to solve a problem, and many times they’re all just as equally valid. And often theres a problem that it takes a human to understand the scope of to understand how the solution needs to be architected.
We need an environment that is actively and intensely hostile to AI tools and those that promote them. People calling themselves “prompt engineers” or people acting like they’re creative because they fed some bullshit into a blackbox need to be shamed and ostracized. This shit is dangerous and it’s doing real and measurable harm. The people who think that everything should only be about cold, quantifiable data, large enough data sets, and everything else ignored, are causing, and have caused, immense harm because they refuse to see the humanity in the consequences of their actions.
The ones who really think they’re the smartest people in the room are the people developing and promoting these tools. And who are they? Wealthy, privileged, white men who have no concept of the real world, who’ve gorged themselves on STEM-only curricula, and have no understanding of history, civics, or humanities in which to conceptualize the context of the shit they’re unleashing into the world.
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That’s not how life experience works. Also AI aren’t alive.
Ugh, that BS makes me want to blow up my own head with mind powers. Anyone can learn how to make art! It is not ‘democratizing’ art to make a computer do it and then take credit for the keywords you fed it! Puke worthy stuff, I appreciate you speaking out against that crap far better than I ever could. There’s enough of that BS on Reddit, can’t we just it leave it there?
Hear fucking hear. I want to shout this from the mountaintops but it feels like no one is listening
And it won’t ever hit programmers. Because once we have strong AI we will simply become AI psychologists.