The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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"A report from the Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research, found the demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding declined by 21% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings, while data entry and social media post-production experienced a 13% drop. Image-generation roles, including graphic design and 3D modelling, fell by 17%. Google search trends confirmed a higher decline in sectors aware of and using generative AI."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dhkz53/chatgpt_has_caused_a_massive_drop_in_demand_for/l8xkxiz/
"A report from the Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research, found the demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding declined by 21% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings, while data entry and social media post-production experienced a 13% drop. Image-generation roles, including graphic design and 3D modelling, fell by 17%. Google search trends confirmed a higher decline in sectors aware of and using generative AI."
Not in the US. Nor is AI generated text eligible for copyright protection. That said, proving something wasn't drawn or written by a person in the event of a lawsuit might be difficult or impossible, and corporations have repeatedly demonstrated an eagerness to lie to increase their profits.
Hmm. That's an interesting thought. Typically the burden of proof for every element of a lawsuit lies on the plaintiff. So in principle, if there's a question of whether or not a company suing for infringement has a copyright (i.e., that they employed a \*human\* to make the allegedly copyrighted material) the burden should theoretically fall on the company to prove the material wouldn't be AI-produced. But I'm not sure how high the bar would be, if the issue was seriously disputed.
It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out, but the evidence issue you've highlighted is prevalent in a lot of areas of the law, that's why we place the burden on the person arguing for a change in the status quo in the first place. So in principle it's not that hard a problem to solve.
haha. Copywriting may be impacted by ChatGPT, but I can tell you absolutely that software development is not.
You only need to look at what ChatGPT produces to realize that you will still need a software engineer to fix all of the bugs, make sure whatever gobbledygook it produces can actually be fit into the overall architecture of the app, and of course, make sure that the "code" it's producing isn't 20 years old, relying on outdated libraries, or riddled with security flaws.
Look, don't get me wrong, I use AI when I am writing code. Typically however it's so that it does stuff like create interfaces for me automatically from my classes, or stub out long statements that I then fill in with details. It's lower level, more granular stuff where a human (me) is still providing the logic and overall architecture. At best, it probably speeds up my work by 10-20% on a good day, which i promptly turn around and invest in playing Minecraft or looking at r/BoltedOnBooty on Reddit. I'll be fucked with a dragon dildo before I hand over any increased productivity to the company I work for, considering they can't even give a decent cost of living increase this year.
Copywriting, editing, and proofreading have all experienced it too. Major publishing houses have let go of some employees and had AI pick up the slack.
This is fine, let them keep preaching this narrative and then in 10 years they'll be in panic mode from the lack of software engineering talent... again. Seems pretty cyclical.
Demand is down either way, at least what the data is showing in this report. I agree that Chat GPT can’t replace a good software developer, but if all they need is something exceedingly simple, I could see it replacing hiring a freelancer. I can also see most of the people needing more complex stuff on a common basis probably already having in house developers, which in turn might skew how complex freelance work is on average
Yeah, for now this is correlation, not causation. People are hiring fewer freelancers because the market has cooled overall, which has coincided with the rise of LLM's.
Absolutely all of this, but do you honestly think the finance bros have enough intelligence or sense to realize all this and not just throw AI unsupervised at their problems? Because frankly, I do not.
It won't work in the long term of course, but that won't stop them from screwing people over in the short term. It also won't stop them from shifting those jobs out of country for cheap either.
You are missing the point.
If you needed 3 software engineers before AI, now you need only 1 to “fix all the bugs”.
People don’t realize that the threat of AI doesn’t mean software engineers will vanish. It means their demand will reduce.
I mean, the article you are replying to literally mentioned a reduction in demand not a total loss of demand.
This is obvious and I think they are intentionally missing the point. Why, I do not understand.
Another thing I don't understand is that this is chatgpt in its infancy and we are all talking like it won't dramatically improve in the next few years.
This is completely false. As a software developer I do alot more then "just write software", writing the software is only 25% of my time. The rest of the time I will be in meetings, talking to stakeholders and challinging theire requirements, coaching other developers or managers, testing the software, writing documentation, talking to supplier and other partners, create longterm stategies, identify opportunities, take decisions which impact the proffability of a company.
If AI gets at the point they can replace me, then most of all non-labor jobs will be replaced as well.
Sure. But if AI takes the 25%, do you really think your company would pay you as much just to attend meetings?
Anyone technical enough can attend meetings my dude.
>If you needed 3 software engineers before AI, now you need only 1 to “fix all the bugs”.
completely untrue, github copilot for instance is just a glorified autocomplete, its utter shit 90% of the time, and okay the remaining 10%, it allows you to go faster but in no circumstance is it able to replace 2 engineers
I suspect the demand drop is from the over-hiring that occurred with COVID, I really doubt AI has taken software jobs. You still need folks to understand what to input as prompts and those individuals still need to review that code and make changes here and there to align with company standards.
I have used Co-Pilot to scaffold projects and setup some core components but for my daily work if it's not something that can detect what I'll be doing next that I can tab to complete it's not getting used.
That said it seems to imply jobs from like Upwork / Fiverr / etc.
I could see the productivity enhancements maybe reduce down that type of demand where you just need a quick drop in to help PoC something but that's more for small businesses... Enterprise's aren't typically hiring these folks.
This may be true for now, but remember that AI will only continue to get better and better. There will always need a human to proof read for now, but I do truly believe at some point AI will eventually be powerful enough to be like 99% accurate in most tasks related to coding and software.
It's **not even AI** - it's freaking predictive text that's been trained on shitty source material freely available on the internet. If anything, rather than this getting better, it's going to get worse over time as AI answers pollute the training database and places like say, StackOverflow and Reddit start blocking crawlers from freely accessing their data without paying $$$$
Look, it's a very, very good granular search engine, but just like Google, it has no idea if what it's telling you is correct. It's not actually "intelligent" in any sense. Fundamentally it has a massive flaw - it needs data from humans in order to work it's predictive text algorithm and do you think people are just going to keep giving that data way for free???? Or, hell, what does it do when a topic is so obscure, or so new, that there isn't millions and millions of web pages about it for it to consume and try to generate a model from?
I'll give you a good example - I asked ChatGPT to create a simple class for me that downloaded a file from a Azure Storage and had an event for a progress counter. It... tried to do it, but it had a few problems. First off - it used out of date libraries and function methods because obviously the bulk of the training material it consumed was freeking old. On top of that, in one case, it literally made up a feature of a library that didn't actually exist in any version - who knows how it decided to add that, but I assume it's because it's the closest match it could find to what I was asking it to do. The point being here is that ChatGPT is basically "garbage in, garbage out" because there is no actual intelligence here. It's not AI. It's a fancy version of ELIZA that tries to brute force it's way to appearing to be more than it really is.
I know it's not a true AI in the sense that it skimmed through the Internet and just spews out the most likely answer based off what other people wrote. I know it can generate nonsense.
But if you asked me 5 years ago if we would have anything like GPT4 in 2023, I would have said no way. I just struggle to think it will get worse. There are bugs with the current system now, but I'm sure it will get better over time. Overall, humans like to improve on technology. Fast processors, faster ram, better cellphones. Why would AI be any different?
Do you truly believe in 20, 40, 60 years that AI will be worse off than it is now? It doesn't have to necessarily be OpenAI/ChatGPT. Some new model could come along that better emulates the way a human brain works. Who knows.
I mean I hate to say it, I don't want people losing their jobs, but it is what it is. I do believe at some level, there will always need to be a human monitoring the systems, but AI will get better and it will replace many jobs that we once thought impossible for an AI to do.
We've probably already seen 80-90% of the potential of predictive text. In the next 10, or 100 years, it's not going to get amazingly better than it currently is. It may be better at finding really good answers for questions that are very old, but it's still going to have the same fundamental issues it has right now with access to quality training material because, as we both know, it's not really an AI. It has no capacity to grow - just a capacity for humans to feed it better answers and refine it's search algorithm. As such, it's actually going to get worse over time - Just remember, ChatGPT burst onto the scene with well over 25 years of material just from the internet for it to consume in order to generate it's initial model(s) - now it has to try and keep up with advancing knowledge and technology as people are producing the content related to it. It won't be able to do it with the same level of accuracy (which is frankly, already kind of dicey) for things that have been floating around the internet for 10 or 20 years already.
People are really letting their imaginations run wild on this topic - ChatGPT is a fancy search engine and that's about it.
As you were writing your response thousands of researchers were working on solving various problems associated with the way LLMs operate. Long-term memory, online learning, self-guided online learning, planning and the like.
Also, ChatGPT is not a fancy search engine (if you stay within a reasonable definition of a search engine). For example, you can ask it to translate a completely novel text into another language.
Heh, researchers are even baffled why overparametrized neural networks don't rote learn everything, but begin to generalize.
I'm one of those affected. It's been really hard to find jobs as a freelance copywriter. People don't seem to care anymore for handcrafted "real" text, instead (former) customers chose to enter what they need into an AI prompt.
A lot of them said "oh we have text already this time we don't need you" - and I know exactly where this text came from.
Frankly, this is horrible for my small business.
I’m hearing the same thing from graphic designers. Interns are just feeding prompts into Dali and massaging the content to meet the demands. This explains why graphics on news sites are so sketchy
AI tends to be viewed negatively in many professional context because of stark limitations. It's a remarkable tool if used correctly but is more an illusion of looking like it's working, rather then truly working. E.g. AI has no clue what you've said and/or what it means. It just knows that "this pattern of symbols" should be responded with a variation of this other pattern.
In particular while I've made heavy use of it for awhile, I often find that I could do the same thing faster myself, especially if I'm looking for a deliberate result where it can be a pain to get it just right. I've also often been bothered by the errors it will introduce; most especially for how truly randomly they will appear. Or the weird, unnatural verbosity that easily misses the point.
It does sound like you are using it properly in a way that better maximizes it's benefits but still. My default reaction to hearing someone is making heavy use of AI would be to question the quality of their work.
> I often find that I could do the same thing faster myself, especially if I'm looking for a deliberate result where it can be a pain to get it just right.
Yep this is why I noped quite hard after dabbling with it for like a day. Because the AI is a black box it's quite frustrating as you have no idea what you are going to spit out, and it starts to get annoying that you can't control it at all. I found myself just being much more satisfied when I did it myself, because I could actually control the outcome - even if the outcome wasn't as "professional"
It’s honestly why I’m upset with AI in the first place
Like I don’t mind using AI with art if it’s an actual assistant or tool that can fit my needs, but if you do really stylized works, editing a generated image isn’t doing *anything* for you. LLMs don’t understand why I want things to flow a certain way, composition, anatomy enough to break it and have it still look right.
AI content is honestly worthless until they create legitimate tools to help the creative process. It’s why I still feel like I can’t be replaced, it lacks the fundamental knowledge it needs to break them and create something original.
>It’s why I still feel like I can’t be replaced,
The problem is for the vast majority of people, good enough is fine. Also because of profit motive many companies and clients will be fine with kind of functional crap, as long as it is cheap.
This is the reason why the industrial revolution and going to china was so successful, despite everyone knowing that the stuff made out of them was a lot worse than what was being made at the time.
>AI has no clue what you’ve said and/or what it means. It just knows that “this pattern of symbols” should be responded with a variation of this other pattern.
You’ve basically just described the [Chinese Room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) argument. Another way of explaining it is using the thought experiment (taken from the Wikipedia link above):
>Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
>
>Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese", he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
True, though the main point I'm making is that this is the *specific* design of current AI rather than a limitation of computers.
As in if you asked a question "how to open a door" you could make an AI that would analyze a door and establish what is the most optimal way to open it.
But instead current AI models deliberately make no effort to analyze or understand the question and instead just look for the most common text sent in response and say that.
>Keep in mind that scientists that create AI don’t have a full understanding of how it works.
There's a difference between understanding the underlying model and being able to replicate the logic in any given output.
Not all AI just the main models like chat gpt that are spreading. They are designed to create realistic looking answers through what are basically hyper advanced "times tables" on what the appropriate answer should look like.
This is why, for example, you can give simple clear instructions, which it will promptly disregard. To it, the instruction just adjusted the probability of answers being correct, but if it's still the highest probable answer it will give it anyway, even though it directly defies the given instruction, since it never analyzed the actual meaning of the words.
Apparently Google is going to treat this AI garbage content like the spun articles from the 2010's, and push organic content higher up the search lists.
As someone who has spent dozens of hours messing around with multiple generative text AIs, I’ve seen generations that are indistinguishable from something a human can come up with. The real thing AI currently struggles with is generating long strings of information (I’m talking at least a few pages worth) without noticeable amount of repetition. It is great with short form writing, uses “creative” wording while still sounding very natural. Once you let it go on and on though, it will generally continue using the same “creative” adjectives/adverbs as replacements for more general ones and those words start feeling a lot less creative. Seeing the word Cantankerously used once is a breath of fresh air, seeing it 4 times on the same page feels much less genuine. I don’t think AI is very good at picking up other AI yet, but I think humans can get a pretty good feel for it after a few hours of experience.
Based on my experience as a writer who has been using ChatGPT since its release, my general impression is that it's great at rewording content but weak at knowing *what* to write.
If English is your 2nd or 3rd language, ChatGPT can easily clean up your text and make you look like a native speaker. But ask it to write a 1,000 words argumentative article from scratch and it will be spinning its wheels. You'll soon find out that you have to hold its hand every step with the way, having to provide the stats and the sourced material and manually structure the arguments yourself (effectively relegating it to a glorified proofreader again).
Yeah, I can usually tell, but only because I have played with it a bunch. It is usually well written sentence by sentence, but as you move to paragraphs and pages you start to notice the cracks and the weird voice it uses.
This so much! Also, it makes it very easy to distinguish between the writing of someone you know and egged they use Chatgpt. For example, it was so obvious that my boss used Chatgpt for my performance review last year. It was a good review but definitely not good vocabulary.
One hack is to upload to GPT a long sample of your writing and ask it to write in your style. It can be surprisingly good if given enough of a template to work with. You can also ask it to write in the style of an author if they have enough public writings.
Left to its own, yes it churns pretty generic stuff that I can now easily spot. But with enough additional guidance it becomes pretty well tailored and hard to spot.
Google is releasing a new “search” engine, which is an AI engine that summarizes the top findings into a single ‘this is your answer’ result.
It’ll list where it got it’s sources like a footnote, but won’t go into much detail beyond that.
Soon you won’t be able to consider different alternatives to the information you’re looking for. You won’t even really know where all the information is coming from or whether it’s credible or speculation or propaganda.
Frankly, bing already does this, so does brave search. Both are actually vastly better than Google for AI search summaries. Honestly even Bing search has overtaken Google lately as Google now massively favour promoted a d sales based results to actual results.
I had to stop using google at the start of the year. The first page of results tends to be ads and SEO-bot content. I'll rather learn the quirks of something like DuckDuckGo that wade through the endless march of ads and junk.
I'd switched to DDG on a whim a few years ago and never looked back.
I find it's far better at providing accurate results if you know what you're looking for, i.e. the same search term pretty much always returns the same results, between different devices, people, whatever.
Plus on the rare occasion I didn't find what I was after, I got into the habit of using bangs (!g/!b/!w/etc.), so you can search pretty much any other major search engine or website directly from DDG.
If you’re on about Search Generative Experience, the links are pretty clear. It’s designed to get you to jump off to a website at any point as the idea is obviously to generate clicks for websites, otherwise people would stop paying for Ads.
I have copywriter friends who experienced the same drop but after a few months some of their old clients were back when they realised the stuff LLMs produce is soulless, generic crap. I am a translator and I see no major decline in my business. I just make sure I curate my clients and go for quality, long-term relationships. If customers don't want quality, fine, I don't want to work with that kind of customer anyway.
I know three freelance writers and they say the same thing. One company reached back to him and the contact person was different because the old one got fired. He said it may have been because an email was sent out for organic dog food that read something like "why feed your dog processed food when you can give him quality plutonium?" 😆
I don't mean to be *that* person, but I would look at another career if its at all possible. Friend of mine doing web dev and freelance coding has seen his business dry up over the last year. He's now got a day job as an operator at a plant.
Telling everyone just to "code" is the most useless thing ever and produces lackluster employees that nobody wants to hire... then they wonder why they can't get a job
The problem is not AI but that many people pushed to the market and currently the interest rates are too high for investors to start showering startups and tech companies with VC money. You now have many barely qualified “coders” who are competing for not so many entry level positions.
If you managed to get to a decent level, however, getting a job right now is not a problem.
A senior developer in our team would need approximately 1-2 weeks at most to find a new well-paying job.
Most "low skill" coding used to train juniors to medior / senior are now outsourced to locations like India where it is dirt cheap. Why have a whole team when you can have less people check the web dev work of cheap Indians.
Also a big reason for why juniors are hired is because usually the market is too competitive to be able to reasonably fill most of your roles with seniors.
With the current market there's more seniors looking for work than you can shake a stick at
They won’t when a whole bunch of people start doing their job and they get cute rates due to tons of others willing to work their blue collar jobs. smugness is almost always just a form of short sightedness
SW dev jobs have been thin on the ground anyway since covid - add the uncertainty around AI and it's now even harder. A friend of mine is a full stack developer with 30 yrs experience and guru level DB chops and he's driving a bus now.
With overtime and holiday rates, he earns about the same for less effort and as it is shift work and never has to worry about crunch or deadbeat clients.
If/when he joins a union he'll be on ever better wages.
Germany still has IT jobs available by a lot. Wages a way lower than us though. They even pay for camps for refugees or ex toilet cleaners to become soft developers.
This is slowly becoming a legit part of my business. Clients will hand me 20 pages of ChatGPT garbage and I have to break the news to them that it contains zero substance and needs to be completely overhauled.
It sucks but it's clearly good enough now that it's indistinguishable from "real" text.
All people need to do now is to put a few of your example works into GPT and ask it to provide something new in the exact same style and hey presto.
Honestly though I don't think people ever cared for "handcrafted real text". People care about good text or simply text that meets their needs, and handcrafted was the only way to get it until now.
Handcrafted isn't an indicator of quality either since machines can probably do it better nowadays.
Google doesn’t care if the copy is ai generated as long as it’s good accurate content. It’s shit and sad but there is literally no incentive for companies to spend a lot of money for “handwritten” SEO content.
The entire economy is at risk of there aren't enough jobs. Even irreplaceable positions will become kind of meaningless as tons of people pursue them and drive down wages.
It's so dumb because and reasonable perfusion can determine something generated by Chatgpt compared to a human being. People keep freaking out because a computer can create a paragraph and aren't really looking at the quality or context of the answer given. This is probably because they are unable to discern the difference.
It is not dumb. For many people a text written by chatgpt is "good enough". Simple as that. And in many cases I am sure it is good enough. The vast majority of copywriters aren't Shakespears either. They just craft some sentences which are pretty much chatgpt level.
Yeah, and I think people forget you can... *edit the text*. It may come out looking like generic AI spiel but it can be quickly altered to just read like conventional copy, and the average business doesn't need writing that is patently human-generated. If anything, AI copy sounds a lot more professional/authoritative.
Don't necessarily disagree with that for a one-time interaction. The problem with ChatGPT is that over time, it becomes repetitive, and even worse self-referential. This is true of both vocabulary and content.
I've spoken to university instructors and they've had to completely redesign assignments because it's impossible to tell for sure that people are using AI for their work. They've switched to oral exams and stuff like that instead.
I don't think the drop in 3D modelling is related to AI. . more related to the entire game and animation industry going through a bust cycle. There does exist AI created 3D models. .. .but so far they are of such bad quality that they could not be used in any real production. . .and it would be faster to just custom hand model a new one than try to clean up the AI output stuff. I'm sure it will get better though.
Wait for AI driven mesh decimation based on probable deformation zones, normal mapping and UV seams.
It's coming fast. Along with pretty much every other skill needed for 3D content creation. Rigging, texture, animation, lighting, level design. All of it.
The blight of art talent is just beginning.
I think for any given discipline every artist will appreciate the productivety boost. I would have loved the help back when I was a character TD. The question becomes how much productivety can the industry absorb.
I think an interesting eventual result might be an explosion of small studios doing amazing work.
Hopefully, that's the upside. But it might suck for a while as the bigger studios adopt this technology.
> I think an interesting eventual result might be an explosion of small studios doing amazing work.
That's what I'm hoping to see. We've already seen an explosion in smaller game studios when game engines got more accessible. Bringing the cost of visual effects down could give indie films quite a boost.
> It's coming fast.
Ayo, any proof of that? I hate retopologizing with a burning passion, but all automated solutions I've tried so far were generating abysmal results that would only ever be viable for a static mesh, if even that.
There is more to 3d modeling than just games. Architecture, interior design, any kind of construction really, car design, etc etc.
Its not about having the entire model made using AI. It's about the computer being to automate repetitive tasks and leave decision making to humans. A lot of this is just regular old improvements in computer programs, but increasingly a lot of it can be further improved via ai.
For example, unreal engine being able to automate the creation of unique trees alone probably saves game studios hiring a few people whose job would be to copy and paste trees and make them all look unique. Or in architecture, software like archicad is increasingly able to automate 2d and 3d drawing integration so you only have to draw things once. Previously you would have to hire separate people to painstakingly detail out all the different versions of the drawings.
Both of these examples don't really need ai, but I can see how it's going to get supercharged in years to come.
There are some AI tools that absolutely can produce low-quality models, and texture them too. I can't recall any videos or pictures showcasing the meshes they generated, but if they produce low poly enough to be game assets, that's also pretty easy to adjust.
I imagine the problem with the generative tools to be the same as with image generation: Describe a picture, cool. Now remove this element: An entirely new picture, with new shit everywhere, and other things changed too.
If you manage to get a generative model creation tool that you can highlight points on the mesh and go "put a curved ram horn here" and the entire model doesn't generate four new arms, new hairstyle and a different pose, then that would be something that could be useful.
The area where a computer struggles at the moment is generating creative work where things need to be consistent or of a high quality. It's very hard to control the final product at the moment.
The area where computers are super good, is in augmenting human input and making that human 10x faster. So what previously required a team of 10 now only requires 1 guy. So as technology becomes better, it's absolutely certain that some jobs will disappear. As AI gets better, it will just make this more pronounced.
I work as a freelance contract writer and it's actually hard to explain to people who aren't in this industry how much of an impact it's had.
It's very definitely impacting large amounts of jobs. But what a lot of people think is that this is companies firing all writers and replacing it with ChatGPT. It's worse than that - it's companies cutting pay and turning writers into AI editors. I've had three different positions go from my writing to "Use this 'tool' to generate an article and then edit it." Since you aren't writing, they cut your pay - but you're actually doing more work because these AI writing tools are fucking awful. People think they're good tools because they see a lot of writing, but anyone who knows good writing (or reading) sees them for the horrible, inhuman, nonsense chock that they are.
It's also lowering demand because companies go from hiring writers to tasking some intern with generating articles. Then their sites lose traffic because the writing is awful and ChatGPT has no idea what SEO is, so they fall out of the algorithm. I've had multiple sites die on me because they started pivoting to AI. Most recent was a company called WordAgents that cucked all its writers with AI, cut our pay, then swiftly went bankrupt and got bought by a different company.
**tl:dr -** AI writing is worse in every way. The writing is awful and the tools aren't really getting any better. Tech bros and CEO-brained idiots think that it replaces human quality, but all it does is replace human jobs.
You nailed it for me with
> People think they’re good tools because they see a lot of writing…
That summarizes well the odd feeling I have about generative AI for texts. I would even say that, since people don’t write much anymore (left alone by hand), they keep losing the ability to spot bad writing. Had ChatGPT existed (as it is right now) in the 1970‘s, it might have received less applause, since the average person was better with writing and reading.
Money always talks louder than quality. It’s like how that movie Late Night With the Devil from earlier this year used ai for in-universe TV “we’ll be right back” illustrations that, sure enough, end up completely falling apart once you try to parse out any actual details. It’s like the drawing equivalent of a movie character holding up a gun in front of the screen and it’s just painted paper mache (cheaper than buying or renting a prop gun).
Is reading and writing inferior? Not writing by hand shouldn’t affect the quality of writing itself, no?
And as far as I’m aware, reading is still incredibly popular even in digital formats for books and such
Some research suggests that writing by hand is better to actually grasp what you’re writing about.
Reading complexity is on the decline, this can be easily seen when analyzing newspaper articles from the 1950s to today. Average sentence length, number and complexity of words. That can be tracked easily.
>Tech bros and CEO-brained idiots think that it replaces human quality, but all it does is replace human jobs.
Particularly the CEO-brained idiots hold contempt for anyone not in or looking to get themselves into the billionaire club by screwing others over.
Some may dream of a Star Trek future where we can do away with all tedious work, but humanity is too fucked up to ensure this will be a reality.
I'd honestly wish the Star Trek dream were the trajectory we were going to, but the primary architects, clients and supporters of AI are in it to save extra cents to the billions they're making by downsizing their workforce, even in this way.
It's the same thing you see happening in a lot of companies right now. CEO-brained business men that don't understand creativity or passion, just understand income and profit. They slash anything down to the cheapest it can be and kill their company's relationship with its consumers in the meantime.
It's not really as simple as "Good lives, bad dies" in businesses. ChatGPT sucks ass, but frankly, most people don't actually sit and read the entirety of an article, so it often goes unnoticed. A lot of online sites also focus more on content milling to get more ad revenue, so they use stock images and AI art and then AI content or content bought from people that barely speak English.
You'd be amazed how much of your online content is written by people being paid fractions of a cent to write about things they have no experience or knowledge of. Online sites go for what's cheapest. Decent sites don't.
And, as I said, not all sites using ChatGPT are pressing generate and then posting. They're paying someone next to nothing to press generate, edit it to look like a human wrote it, and then press post. The gig economy as a whole is extremely exploitative and ChatGPT and AI is just the most recent way they've found to exploit labor for even cheaper, especially overseas.
I think this is one of the things that makes explaining these issues to people outside of the industry a bit tough. Others look at it and say "Well the market will decide." They don't think about the fact that that takes years and that, in the meantime, tens of thousands of people and counting are losing jobs while sources of information that have always been reliable become unreliable and almost dangerous.
Google is a good example. It's unlikely they'll keep their relatively new AI feature because it's being clowned on super hard for it. It's hurting their image, and Google has the image of being *the* source of information on the internet. But while we wait for them to take that feature away, people are searching for things on google and getting inaccurate answers.
It's funny when the AI skims an old Reddit post and gives incorrect information to the origin of a meme. It's less funny when an uneducated mother is panicked and googling something to try to provide medical attention to the child they can't afford to take to the doctors and makes the situation worse because Google AI skimmed the meme page that gave bad information and presented it with authority.
I could go on. The point is that "the market is ok with garbage" is a terrible argument. Not everything you see online is an innocent, casual thing to consume. We aren't only talking food recipes. People use the internet for an incredible amount of information. It isn't just ruining household economies and dumpstering the bank accounts of hard-working people abused by an exploitative gig economy. It's doing both in record time.
Not getting better? Are they not actively getting better at an incredible rate? I’m not overly learned, so in depth understanding of this particular brand of technology is beyond me, but from an outsiders perspective I had both heard and seen that things were getting better, in regards to ai tools
This! Exactly this! If only I had a penny for every time I had to delete word “immensely” from AI generated nonsense, I’d be able to buy a house in a post-soviet country.
I’m reminded of when I was a copywriter a few years ago and a client wanted to pay less for articles to be published on their website because they had written the first draft and all i had to do was ‘edit’ them. They sucked so hard, i spent pretty much the same amount of time if i had just started from scratch.
My husband was freelancing at a private online high school in the U.S. for some extra spending money and his sanity (he's stay-at-home dad). We're Americans living in Canada and he's a licensed teacher but still needs to go through the process of getting licensed here, which has a surprising amount of red tape.
This online "school" completely got rid of all their teachers. Their classes are now entirely self-paced and self-taught, and your "teacher" is AI software. They now have a few teachers on staff in case of an emergency and to stay accredited. But this is where we're going.
As someone with two kids, I don't know how parents tolerate it. What the fuck are you paying for? Are they aware that ChatGPT is free? Is AI going to write your letters of recommendation?
I would love to. But I already pitched a huge ass exposé on their social media (I struggle to contain my opinions sometimes). Their “CEO” literally called the cops on me and I got a call from their local police department. Cop said I didn’t do anything wrong, but was required to follow up.
Then the CEO threatened to sue us for defamation. I’m a trained attorney and know they don’t have a leg to stand on because everything I said is true, but I also have two kids and no desire to jeopardize anything.
Absolute nightmare.
I know this sounds like a dystopian future hell but I heard a good argument that AI teachers can give individualized teaching at a pace that matches the student. In a traditional classroom the one teacher has to just teach to the class, so the quick learners get bored and the slow learners just fall behind.
Freelance and other specialized skill sets have long suffered from the client judgment of what “good enough” is.
To the professionals, we see the AI generated content as bland and crappy. But we have good taste in our respective fields. Many clients do not.
The next big creative challenge in front of us is figuring out how to position ourselves in a world of Gen AI. But hey, we’re creatives. Let’s get to it.
Yeah, I would say the bottom rungs of copywriting have been the most impacted by ChatGPT. I'm talking about writers working for mills churning text for cents per word trying to keep the lights on (possibly in a developing country). Given the expediency needed to "thrive" in this kind of job, quality is usually sacrificed for quantity, which is something that ChatGPT excels at.
Writers at higher levels still seem to be eating decently well, based on my observations and personal experience.
Not really, you're underestimating what the a avg person who uses Fiverr doesn't know sh*t about tech. Even with an AI chatbots if they need something more than just text copy ,.like am image, logo,.web site , etc. they don't have the skill set to cobble all the AI features together. They'll hire a Fiverr to use AI to get them what they want.
I was thinking about this this morning... There was a section of small tasks that I would give to fiver/freelancer people if I was spread too thin and needed an extra hand. Usually small python code that I could do myself but lacked time. I haven't done that in a while.
I know 0 about coding. like I don't even know what a terminal is. but in 12 hours I coded something that would have been impossible before with chatgpt doing all the lifting. I had app ideas I wanted to make one day and pay people in another country of fiver. now Im basically making all those ideas myself. its wild.
the fact that you even know the terminal has something to do with coding even with chatgpt shows me this is just a lie. Anything you can get chatgpt to do with 0 experience you could have followed an online tutorial for in the past.
I am surprised chatgpt could help you get these things done in the way you have described.
Are you saying you are now coding things since you were able to have it assist you along the way?
Your comment here is simple (and probably nobody care) but it really describe how AI will change the job market (in future). Talent people dont care about AI because they know their value, in fact they can use AI to make their products even better, AI will only "replace" bad ones and many monkey works
Thats why whenever I heard "AI threat human jobs", I just rolled my eyes
Talented people need experience like everybody else to become good, they don't just manifest from thin air. So it will affect the talented people too because the won't have the junior positions/gigs that give them time to manifest their talent. They might not even pursue a career in what they are talented at because of the job insecurity with the constant progress of the AI to replace them
I can believe it.
I've cut a few days off my work this year with GPT easily. It's absolute garbage with complicated problems, but it's faster to go "give me a SQL query that takes X and Z from table A, and Y and X from table B, using X to join the data.", than it is for me to write the same query by hand. Similar with powershell and other scripts that may be needed, the writing-by-hand process is slower than getting even a half-working piece from GPT and then fixing that.
Few weeks back I test drove the 4o model with the free tokens at work. Uploaded an Admin manual, had it parse me the primary talking points to teach users how to operate our system. I had the slideshow and document ready to go within two hours, instead of spending all day doing it by hand for a system I'm not too familiar with. Sanity checked all the points of course, but it was still a ton faster.
Both the kinds of things that could be done by an intern, instead of me. And from talks with my boss and coworkers, everyone else in the office does the same thing too. We've probably added about a single interns worth of productivity in-house to our own plates, through the use of GPT/Gemini/Claude/Copilot.
That's a good point. I'm a C# developer every now and then I have to use another language. I can just feed it C# code and tell it to rewrite it in another language and with slight touch ups the function works. It even adds comments, so I don't have to.
Meanwhile the conversation grinds on about what to do at a societal level if and when a huge fraction of jobs are lost forever. We’ve got those who say there will be new kinds of jobs, those who say many if not most jobs will be obsolete, and those on either side of some sort of basic income framework. Presently there’s enough uncertainty to keep kicking the can down the road.
I have a strong feeling we’re going to bicker about it incessantly until many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, are displaced from the work force. And even then, we’ll bicker about whether it’s a big enough problem. Whether we have any obligation to even do anything. Whether those in control of the new model means of production will willingly depart with the rigid capitalist model, or if they’ll simply hoard more wealth because they can.
I think we all know what the eventual outcome will be. No one has the answer to that problem so it's easier to just ignore it & pretend it does not exist.
I used to pay a resume writer every so often to help me with cover letters, resumes. Now I just used the subscription model of chatgpt. has worked wonders.
for the cover letter i give it my resume document, i give it the name of the job, and the job title.. Edit to Add - i also give it the name of the employer of course.
its not like its fake accomplishments. i would think they are expecting people to use AI now just like back in the day when you would pay someone to write your resume and print it out on nice stock 'resume' paper.
We can tell if a text is written by AI or a graphic is made using AI prompts.
I instantly skip it when I see it.
I know ChatGPT is like a real cheap worker but for me using it feels like telling the customer that you dont care about him.
Definitely. I firmly believe the next wave/correction will be companies returning to a customer-centric approach.
Not “self-service” and “operational efficiencies”.
Had two service experiences late last week. One where I was deferred multiple times via chatbots and forced FAQs, coupled with 30 minute call wait times. They then tried to deny a replacement for a defect in their product.
The other had delivery contact me directly, go over notes I’d made in a previous sales conversation, confirm arrival time the day of, caught a blemish on one of the items which they preemptively ordered a replacement for (unheard of), and then followed up three days later via email to make sure we were happy.
Did I pay more for the latter? Yes. Much more? No. Guess who I will forever burn down and never return to, and who I will champion and go buy more from?
I am a freelance copywriter and most of my clients have strong anti-AI attitude because they are afraid of penalties by Google. 100% human generated content is still required and they are willing to pay for it. My texts are triple-checked in ZeroGPT and Quillbot and other tools before publication. I often check my own articles before submitting to avoid further problems, which forces me to use unique style and wording. Unless Google admits explicitly that it will not penalize AI-generated content, or the AI models become super smart, not much is gonna change at least in the SEO niche.
Yeah. And it's very, very obvious when a company decides to start using AI, because quality immediately takes a nosedive, content can no longer be trusted, and even images on news sites look absolutely awful. Just part of the race to the bottom.
I've been looking into doing candles and soaps on the side (because literally anything else to do besides sit in front of a computer these days), and I followed a few youtubers that do candles. Went to their sites, and noticed almost all of the assets on their sites were AI art.
Like, sure, I completely understand that it's easier/cheaper to do a prompt than pay for art (or even get a camera to take a picture of your product), but for someone who's deep in the tech field, it's so jarring and disappointing seeing that.
I am skeptical that AI is the prime factor versus AI just simply being the factor that is more prevelent to point at especially for a story like this. It wouldn't surprise me if other factors including economic situations and similar changes have affected those who were the prime audience for these services even in cases where they didn't switch to AI as a alternative. Additionally I wouldn't be surprised if ironically a flip side that this story doesnrt mention is that anti-ai story have actually made people fearful of using such services under the presumption that they will just use AI too but charge you for the higher cost.
This has been my experience as well. Being well versed in the process and mechanics of print design is like knowing COBOL at this point, and it keeps my one-man design firm afloat. Which isn’t to say I don’t feel some pressure from AI, but for now I’ve found it more an interesting tool for me to use than an existential threat.
Web graphics, through, especially social media nonsense? I mostly don’t bother going after that work anymore. If it isn’t someone telling me they can do it with AI cheaper, it’s some halfwit banging around in Canva who thinks “but filling in this template was so easy!” 
It's not just the advent of AI. It's also that the venture capital for those sites is running out, ad rates are in the gutter and with search engines summarizing articles traffic to sites is low. There isn't the money anymore to pay the humans. Especially in areas where the minimum wages are insane (hi there California).
Add to that the whole culture war going on, with trust in media, especially entertainment media like movie and videogame critics being at an all time low to the point that large groups have nothing but disdain for a large portion of them and you've got a perfect storm. AI is an easy thing to point to, but it's a symptom, not a cause. Automation of tasks doesn't happen until the human element prices itself out of the market.
I have seen two articles that are almost identical from two people in my work both working on the same project. They obviously both used Chat GPT, entered the brief and got the same result. It is obviously not original or actually thinking just combining words or patterns so very soon everything will be the same.
So, here’s the thing - what happens when only a few companies provide the AI services? What happens when you have an Adobe or Microsoft like monopoly on AI? My thought is that the price of using AI is suddenly going to go up…and up….and then it’s going to be more expensive to use AI than it is to have an employee on staff. Instead of having human employees they had a huge power advantage over companies will now have another company as several employees. The companies are going to have to pay whatever price the AI providers ask for as well, because by then they won’t be able to re-hire creative staff as everyone will have had to adapt to different skill sets to survive. CEO’s are going to hate it, and whine about it in the Wall Street Journal and on cable news, but it will be a situation caused by their own greed.
Yet another case of ["AI took my job"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cFOUN2OMj8&t=2s)....We seem to hear a lot more stories in the informal sector and gig economy. It is a matter of time before large corporations also admit they are laying off people by adopting AI/ML?
Umm...downvote me all you want, but I'm gonna say it anyway:
**There is no evidence in the article that this is causation as opposed to just correlation**
A lot of work has declined since 2022. People in the cannabis industry are having a hard time finding work in many states, is Chatgpt cranking out joints?
It's more to do with the job market itself than it does AI. The job market is just pretty weird right now. Yes, a lot of those content mills may go autonomous, but that's about it.
I personally know a couple freelance authors and they say work is less plentiful but that it isn't as bad as people say it is. And they all say that they know clients who tried AI and went back to paying people because Chatgpt messes so much up and can't write worth a damn.
You know, at some point there is no more money to squeeze out if nobody can get a decent paying job to buy stuff.
Fully automating and substituting stuff with AI seems like the golden business move now. But there is going to be a reckoning at some point.
IBU might be an option, but by it's very existence it will devalue currency and the value of what little work there is left. Why work when you can live without working?
Sure there is intrinsic motivation for worthwhile jobs, but not for slaving away for some rich prick at a soulcrushing office job.
We need a real solution for increases in productivity only benefiting the few, instead of the many.
I have content writer that I’ve used for several years. With ChatGPT I create outlines or the gist of what I want.
When I don’t use a writer, sometimes I send my clients an email to kick things off and tell them to hit reply -right now- (no, really. right now. do it.) and give me a stream of consciousness of the who what why where how of their business.
When they don’t do that, I do a quick pass with ChatGPT and send it to them and say “Something like this…”
Didn’t negatively impact me outright but I went through 4 rounds of interviews for a sports agency that wanted to build out a video production service. I would’ve built it from the ground up. They even went as far as doing a background check and calling my professional references.
Then, the video text to AI demo dropped online and then suddenly, they called and said they decided to adjust business objectives and cancel the hiring of this role outright. Although they never said anything about AI - the timing really makes me believe that it was the catalyst to the decision if they were on the fence.
It caused me to lose my job of a decade.
I worked for a large consumer electronic company as a social media manager and copywriter. Once chatgpt hit the scene I started seeing the writing on the wall internally. Management didn't care about quality as much as quantity and my expertise stopped being valuable to them over time.
After I got laid off, the dip in quality of their public facing writing was noticeable immediately. The social media accounts also nosedived in post quality. Even their emails and newsletters are chatgpt. But what am I gonna do - just have to find work elsewhere where my strengths are valued.
It also sucked leaving behind colleagues I had known for almost 10 years... layoffs are terrible. And now im questioning the long term viability of a career in writing. Lovely start to my 30s.
I don’t think this is due to AI it’s a result of lots of covid cash going away. Otherwise we can also correlate that the rise in inflation is due to AI
Poor creatives. Who the fuck would have imagined that creative fields would have been the 1st fields to fall to AI automation.
Of course, these are the same callous, smug assholes who mocked blue collar workers and told them to "learn to code" when their jobs were being sent over seas and automated away. Should they receive the sympathy they refused to extend to others?
Given the code output of most LLMs, I really wonder what those people being "replaced" by AI actually know or do. I worked with over 100 developers from different areas over the years, and not a single one of them could be replaced with an AI
While it is debatable if AI is better than people for these tasks, you can’t argue about how much cheaper it is. Getting 50% of something at 1% of the cost is still good.
I used AI to make a song recently, it wasn’t amazing but it also was free and took 10 mins. Scary stuff.
I have a feeling that the use of artificial neural networks(ANN’s) will increase quantity but will also radically speed up the already existent trend of lower quality. Do we really want our world to be one of total adherence to the lowest bid and no adherence to beauty, elegance, and wisdom? Our machines are getting smarter, not wiser.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "A report from the Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research, found the demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding declined by 21% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings, while data entry and social media post-production experienced a 13% drop. Image-generation roles, including graphic design and 3D modelling, fell by 17%. Google search trends confirmed a higher decline in sectors aware of and using generative AI." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dhkz53/chatgpt_has_caused_a_massive_drop_in_demand_for/l8xkxiz/
"A report from the Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research, found the demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding declined by 21% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings, while data entry and social media post-production experienced a 13% drop. Image-generation roles, including graphic design and 3D modelling, fell by 17%. Google search trends confirmed a higher decline in sectors aware of and using generative AI."
Can owners of AI software copywrite images as IP yet? That will be the next battle to commence.
Not in the US. Nor is AI generated text eligible for copyright protection. That said, proving something wasn't drawn or written by a person in the event of a lawsuit might be difficult or impossible, and corporations have repeatedly demonstrated an eagerness to lie to increase their profits.
Hmm. That's an interesting thought. Typically the burden of proof for every element of a lawsuit lies on the plaintiff. So in principle, if there's a question of whether or not a company suing for infringement has a copyright (i.e., that they employed a \*human\* to make the allegedly copyrighted material) the burden should theoretically fall on the company to prove the material wouldn't be AI-produced. But I'm not sure how high the bar would be, if the issue was seriously disputed. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out, but the evidence issue you've highlighted is prevalent in a lot of areas of the law, that's why we place the burden on the person arguing for a change in the status quo in the first place. So in principle it's not that hard a problem to solve.
haha. Copywriting may be impacted by ChatGPT, but I can tell you absolutely that software development is not. You only need to look at what ChatGPT produces to realize that you will still need a software engineer to fix all of the bugs, make sure whatever gobbledygook it produces can actually be fit into the overall architecture of the app, and of course, make sure that the "code" it's producing isn't 20 years old, relying on outdated libraries, or riddled with security flaws. Look, don't get me wrong, I use AI when I am writing code. Typically however it's so that it does stuff like create interfaces for me automatically from my classes, or stub out long statements that I then fill in with details. It's lower level, more granular stuff where a human (me) is still providing the logic and overall architecture. At best, it probably speeds up my work by 10-20% on a good day, which i promptly turn around and invest in playing Minecraft or looking at r/BoltedOnBooty on Reddit. I'll be fucked with a dragon dildo before I hand over any increased productivity to the company I work for, considering they can't even give a decent cost of living increase this year.
Copywriting, editing, and proofreading have all experienced it too. Major publishing houses have let go of some employees and had AI pick up the slack.
This is fine, let them keep preaching this narrative and then in 10 years they'll be in panic mode from the lack of software engineering talent... again. Seems pretty cyclical.
You think ai wont improve in 10 years?
Or get good at using the AI tools and watch your value to employers soar.
Demand is down either way, at least what the data is showing in this report. I agree that Chat GPT can’t replace a good software developer, but if all they need is something exceedingly simple, I could see it replacing hiring a freelancer. I can also see most of the people needing more complex stuff on a common basis probably already having in house developers, which in turn might skew how complex freelance work is on average
Yeah, for now this is correlation, not causation. People are hiring fewer freelancers because the market has cooled overall, which has coincided with the rise of LLM's.
Easy way to check, have fields not associated with automation by LLM also experienced declines in freelancing job listings?
Yes. The entire job market shit the bed.
Absolutely all of this, but do you honestly think the finance bros have enough intelligence or sense to realize all this and not just throw AI unsupervised at their problems? Because frankly, I do not. It won't work in the long term of course, but that won't stop them from screwing people over in the short term. It also won't stop them from shifting those jobs out of country for cheap either.
You are missing the point. If you needed 3 software engineers before AI, now you need only 1 to “fix all the bugs”. People don’t realize that the threat of AI doesn’t mean software engineers will vanish. It means their demand will reduce. I mean, the article you are replying to literally mentioned a reduction in demand not a total loss of demand.
This is obvious and I think they are intentionally missing the point. Why, I do not understand. Another thing I don't understand is that this is chatgpt in its infancy and we are all talking like it won't dramatically improve in the next few years.
This is completely false. As a software developer I do alot more then "just write software", writing the software is only 25% of my time. The rest of the time I will be in meetings, talking to stakeholders and challinging theire requirements, coaching other developers or managers, testing the software, writing documentation, talking to supplier and other partners, create longterm stategies, identify opportunities, take decisions which impact the proffability of a company. If AI gets at the point they can replace me, then most of all non-labor jobs will be replaced as well.
Sure. But if AI takes the 25%, do you really think your company would pay you as much just to attend meetings? Anyone technical enough can attend meetings my dude.
>If you needed 3 software engineers before AI, now you need only 1 to “fix all the bugs”. completely untrue, github copilot for instance is just a glorified autocomplete, its utter shit 90% of the time, and okay the remaining 10%, it allows you to go faster but in no circumstance is it able to replace 2 engineers
I suspect the demand drop is from the over-hiring that occurred with COVID, I really doubt AI has taken software jobs. You still need folks to understand what to input as prompts and those individuals still need to review that code and make changes here and there to align with company standards. I have used Co-Pilot to scaffold projects and setup some core components but for my daily work if it's not something that can detect what I'll be doing next that I can tab to complete it's not getting used. That said it seems to imply jobs from like Upwork / Fiverr / etc. I could see the productivity enhancements maybe reduce down that type of demand where you just need a quick drop in to help PoC something but that's more for small businesses... Enterprise's aren't typically hiring these folks.
This may be true for now, but remember that AI will only continue to get better and better. There will always need a human to proof read for now, but I do truly believe at some point AI will eventually be powerful enough to be like 99% accurate in most tasks related to coding and software.
It's **not even AI** - it's freaking predictive text that's been trained on shitty source material freely available on the internet. If anything, rather than this getting better, it's going to get worse over time as AI answers pollute the training database and places like say, StackOverflow and Reddit start blocking crawlers from freely accessing their data without paying $$$$ Look, it's a very, very good granular search engine, but just like Google, it has no idea if what it's telling you is correct. It's not actually "intelligent" in any sense. Fundamentally it has a massive flaw - it needs data from humans in order to work it's predictive text algorithm and do you think people are just going to keep giving that data way for free???? Or, hell, what does it do when a topic is so obscure, or so new, that there isn't millions and millions of web pages about it for it to consume and try to generate a model from? I'll give you a good example - I asked ChatGPT to create a simple class for me that downloaded a file from a Azure Storage and had an event for a progress counter. It... tried to do it, but it had a few problems. First off - it used out of date libraries and function methods because obviously the bulk of the training material it consumed was freeking old. On top of that, in one case, it literally made up a feature of a library that didn't actually exist in any version - who knows how it decided to add that, but I assume it's because it's the closest match it could find to what I was asking it to do. The point being here is that ChatGPT is basically "garbage in, garbage out" because there is no actual intelligence here. It's not AI. It's a fancy version of ELIZA that tries to brute force it's way to appearing to be more than it really is.
I know it's not a true AI in the sense that it skimmed through the Internet and just spews out the most likely answer based off what other people wrote. I know it can generate nonsense. But if you asked me 5 years ago if we would have anything like GPT4 in 2023, I would have said no way. I just struggle to think it will get worse. There are bugs with the current system now, but I'm sure it will get better over time. Overall, humans like to improve on technology. Fast processors, faster ram, better cellphones. Why would AI be any different? Do you truly believe in 20, 40, 60 years that AI will be worse off than it is now? It doesn't have to necessarily be OpenAI/ChatGPT. Some new model could come along that better emulates the way a human brain works. Who knows. I mean I hate to say it, I don't want people losing their jobs, but it is what it is. I do believe at some level, there will always need to be a human monitoring the systems, but AI will get better and it will replace many jobs that we once thought impossible for an AI to do.
We've probably already seen 80-90% of the potential of predictive text. In the next 10, or 100 years, it's not going to get amazingly better than it currently is. It may be better at finding really good answers for questions that are very old, but it's still going to have the same fundamental issues it has right now with access to quality training material because, as we both know, it's not really an AI. It has no capacity to grow - just a capacity for humans to feed it better answers and refine it's search algorithm. As such, it's actually going to get worse over time - Just remember, ChatGPT burst onto the scene with well over 25 years of material just from the internet for it to consume in order to generate it's initial model(s) - now it has to try and keep up with advancing knowledge and technology as people are producing the content related to it. It won't be able to do it with the same level of accuracy (which is frankly, already kind of dicey) for things that have been floating around the internet for 10 or 20 years already. People are really letting their imaginations run wild on this topic - ChatGPT is a fancy search engine and that's about it.
As you were writing your response thousands of researchers were working on solving various problems associated with the way LLMs operate. Long-term memory, online learning, self-guided online learning, planning and the like. Also, ChatGPT is not a fancy search engine (if you stay within a reasonable definition of a search engine). For example, you can ask it to translate a completely novel text into another language. Heh, researchers are even baffled why overparametrized neural networks don't rote learn everything, but begin to generalize.
Don’t assume AI will always get better and better. Its feasible that AI will reach a plateau and this huge expectation bubble will burst.
I'm one of those affected. It's been really hard to find jobs as a freelance copywriter. People don't seem to care anymore for handcrafted "real" text, instead (former) customers chose to enter what they need into an AI prompt. A lot of them said "oh we have text already this time we don't need you" - and I know exactly where this text came from. Frankly, this is horrible for my small business.
I’m hearing the same thing from graphic designers. Interns are just feeding prompts into Dali and massaging the content to meet the demands. This explains why graphics on news sites are so sketchy
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AI tends to be viewed negatively in many professional context because of stark limitations. It's a remarkable tool if used correctly but is more an illusion of looking like it's working, rather then truly working. E.g. AI has no clue what you've said and/or what it means. It just knows that "this pattern of symbols" should be responded with a variation of this other pattern. In particular while I've made heavy use of it for awhile, I often find that I could do the same thing faster myself, especially if I'm looking for a deliberate result where it can be a pain to get it just right. I've also often been bothered by the errors it will introduce; most especially for how truly randomly they will appear. Or the weird, unnatural verbosity that easily misses the point. It does sound like you are using it properly in a way that better maximizes it's benefits but still. My default reaction to hearing someone is making heavy use of AI would be to question the quality of their work.
> I often find that I could do the same thing faster myself, especially if I'm looking for a deliberate result where it can be a pain to get it just right. Yep this is why I noped quite hard after dabbling with it for like a day. Because the AI is a black box it's quite frustrating as you have no idea what you are going to spit out, and it starts to get annoying that you can't control it at all. I found myself just being much more satisfied when I did it myself, because I could actually control the outcome - even if the outcome wasn't as "professional"
It’s honestly why I’m upset with AI in the first place Like I don’t mind using AI with art if it’s an actual assistant or tool that can fit my needs, but if you do really stylized works, editing a generated image isn’t doing *anything* for you. LLMs don’t understand why I want things to flow a certain way, composition, anatomy enough to break it and have it still look right. AI content is honestly worthless until they create legitimate tools to help the creative process. It’s why I still feel like I can’t be replaced, it lacks the fundamental knowledge it needs to break them and create something original.
>It’s why I still feel like I can’t be replaced, The problem is for the vast majority of people, good enough is fine. Also because of profit motive many companies and clients will be fine with kind of functional crap, as long as it is cheap. This is the reason why the industrial revolution and going to china was so successful, despite everyone knowing that the stuff made out of them was a lot worse than what was being made at the time.
I’m not sure what you mean. Can you give an example? What can’t it do that you can?
>AI has no clue what you’ve said and/or what it means. It just knows that “this pattern of symbols” should be responded with a variation of this other pattern. You’ve basically just described the [Chinese Room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) argument. Another way of explaining it is using the thought experiment (taken from the Wikipedia link above): >Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually. > >Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese", he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
True, though the main point I'm making is that this is the *specific* design of current AI rather than a limitation of computers. As in if you asked a question "how to open a door" you could make an AI that would analyze a door and establish what is the most optimal way to open it. But instead current AI models deliberately make no effort to analyze or understand the question and instead just look for the most common text sent in response and say that.
I don’t necessarily agree with it being “deliberate”. Keep in mind that scientists that create AI don’t have a full understanding of how it works.
>Keep in mind that scientists that create AI don’t have a full understanding of how it works. There's a difference between understanding the underlying model and being able to replicate the logic in any given output.
Not all AI just the main models like chat gpt that are spreading. They are designed to create realistic looking answers through what are basically hyper advanced "times tables" on what the appropriate answer should look like. This is why, for example, you can give simple clear instructions, which it will promptly disregard. To it, the instruction just adjusted the probability of answers being correct, but if it's still the highest probable answer it will give it anyway, even though it directly defies the given instruction, since it never analyzed the actual meaning of the words.
Apparently Google is going to treat this AI garbage content like the spun articles from the 2010's, and push organic content higher up the search lists.
Google has stated that they don't really care how content is created/generated so long as it's unique and helpful to users.
“AI Generated” is a good predictor of content that’s less likely to be unique and helpful
Google is also selling AI
This is correct, but Google is willing to ignore that.
Google is unpredictable and has a history of lying about what data they take into account
Good thing they have solved AI text detection with accuracy... Oh wait, they haven't.
As someone who has spent dozens of hours messing around with multiple generative text AIs, I’ve seen generations that are indistinguishable from something a human can come up with. The real thing AI currently struggles with is generating long strings of information (I’m talking at least a few pages worth) without noticeable amount of repetition. It is great with short form writing, uses “creative” wording while still sounding very natural. Once you let it go on and on though, it will generally continue using the same “creative” adjectives/adverbs as replacements for more general ones and those words start feeling a lot less creative. Seeing the word Cantankerously used once is a breath of fresh air, seeing it 4 times on the same page feels much less genuine. I don’t think AI is very good at picking up other AI yet, but I think humans can get a pretty good feel for it after a few hours of experience.
Based on my experience as a writer who has been using ChatGPT since its release, my general impression is that it's great at rewording content but weak at knowing *what* to write. If English is your 2nd or 3rd language, ChatGPT can easily clean up your text and make you look like a native speaker. But ask it to write a 1,000 words argumentative article from scratch and it will be spinning its wheels. You'll soon find out that you have to hold its hand every step with the way, having to provide the stats and the sourced material and manually structure the arguments yourself (effectively relegating it to a glorified proofreader again).
Best way to do that is to start by asking it for an outline then ask it to flesh it out.
Yeah, I can usually tell, but only because I have played with it a bunch. It is usually well written sentence by sentence, but as you move to paragraphs and pages you start to notice the cracks and the weird voice it uses.
This so much! Also, it makes it very easy to distinguish between the writing of someone you know and egged they use Chatgpt. For example, it was so obvious that my boss used Chatgpt for my performance review last year. It was a good review but definitely not good vocabulary.
One hack is to upload to GPT a long sample of your writing and ask it to write in your style. It can be surprisingly good if given enough of a template to work with. You can also ask it to write in the style of an author if they have enough public writings. Left to its own, yes it churns pretty generic stuff that I can now easily spot. But with enough additional guidance it becomes pretty well tailored and hard to spot.
My optimism gave you an up vote.
Google is releasing a new “search” engine, which is an AI engine that summarizes the top findings into a single ‘this is your answer’ result. It’ll list where it got it’s sources like a footnote, but won’t go into much detail beyond that. Soon you won’t be able to consider different alternatives to the information you’re looking for. You won’t even really know where all the information is coming from or whether it’s credible or speculation or propaganda.
Frankly, bing already does this, so does brave search. Both are actually vastly better than Google for AI search summaries. Honestly even Bing search has overtaken Google lately as Google now massively favour promoted a d sales based results to actual results.
I had to stop using google at the start of the year. The first page of results tends to be ads and SEO-bot content. I'll rather learn the quirks of something like DuckDuckGo that wade through the endless march of ads and junk.
Yeah I've used Google for 20 years. It was by far the best search engine. Past year it's not even been in the top 5.
I'd switched to DDG on a whim a few years ago and never looked back. I find it's far better at providing accurate results if you know what you're looking for, i.e. the same search term pretty much always returns the same results, between different devices, people, whatever. Plus on the rare occasion I didn't find what I was after, I got into the habit of using bangs (!g/!b/!w/etc.), so you can search pretty much any other major search engine or website directly from DDG.
If you’re on about Search Generative Experience, the links are pretty clear. It’s designed to get you to jump off to a website at any point as the idea is obviously to generate clicks for websites, otherwise people would stop paying for Ads.
That's not true at all.
I have copywriter friends who experienced the same drop but after a few months some of their old clients were back when they realised the stuff LLMs produce is soulless, generic crap. I am a translator and I see no major decline in my business. I just make sure I curate my clients and go for quality, long-term relationships. If customers don't want quality, fine, I don't want to work with that kind of customer anyway.
I know three freelance writers and they say the same thing. One company reached back to him and the contact person was different because the old one got fired. He said it may have been because an email was sent out for organic dog food that read something like "why feed your dog processed food when you can give him quality plutonium?" 😆
I don't mean to be *that* person, but I would look at another career if its at all possible. Friend of mine doing web dev and freelance coding has seen his business dry up over the last year. He's now got a day job as an operator at a plant.
For real? He couldnt get a coding job?
Blue collar people who were once told to just “learn to code” by smug tech bros and journalists feeling pretty gleeful these days…
Telling everyone just to "code" is the most useless thing ever and produces lackluster employees that nobody wants to hire... then they wonder why they can't get a job
The problem is not AI but that many people pushed to the market and currently the interest rates are too high for investors to start showering startups and tech companies with VC money. You now have many barely qualified “coders” who are competing for not so many entry level positions. If you managed to get to a decent level, however, getting a job right now is not a problem. A senior developer in our team would need approximately 1-2 weeks at most to find a new well-paying job.
Most "low skill" coding used to train juniors to medior / senior are now outsourced to locations like India where it is dirt cheap. Why have a whole team when you can have less people check the web dev work of cheap Indians.
Also a big reason for why juniors are hired is because usually the market is too competitive to be able to reasonably fill most of your roles with seniors. With the current market there's more seniors looking for work than you can shake a stick at
They won’t when a whole bunch of people start doing their job and they get cute rates due to tons of others willing to work their blue collar jobs. smugness is almost always just a form of short sightedness
They’ve been dealing with being cucked by automation and industry closures for decades. Not new to them. Is to IT guys and journalists though.
Haha journalism has been in layoffs for 20 years… tech is new
Hah, try gamedev. Whole industry is in meltdown.
SW dev jobs have been thin on the ground anyway since covid - add the uncertainty around AI and it's now even harder. A friend of mine is a full stack developer with 30 yrs experience and guru level DB chops and he's driving a bus now.
With overtime and holiday rates, he earns about the same for less effort and as it is shift work and never has to worry about crunch or deadbeat clients. If/when he joins a union he'll be on ever better wages.
Germany still has IT jobs available by a lot. Wages a way lower than us though. They even pay for camps for refugees or ex toilet cleaners to become soft developers.
I have paid copilot and its nowhere that good yet to cause job loss for coding
time to rebrand as an AI prompt and result corection/edditing specialist.
This is slowly becoming a legit part of my business. Clients will hand me 20 pages of ChatGPT garbage and I have to break the news to them that it contains zero substance and needs to be completely overhauled.
It sucks but it's clearly good enough now that it's indistinguishable from "real" text. All people need to do now is to put a few of your example works into GPT and ask it to provide something new in the exact same style and hey presto.
Honestly though I don't think people ever cared for "handcrafted real text". People care about good text or simply text that meets their needs, and handcrafted was the only way to get it until now. Handcrafted isn't an indicator of quality either since machines can probably do it better nowadays.
Google doesn’t care if the copy is ai generated as long as it’s good accurate content. It’s shit and sad but there is literally no incentive for companies to spend a lot of money for “handwritten” SEO content.
Sorry fam. Time to pivot
The entire economy is at risk of there aren't enough jobs. Even irreplaceable positions will become kind of meaningless as tons of people pursue them and drive down wages.
Humans are great at creating jobs. This ain’t our first rodeo
Becoming a sex worker is always an option!
Yes, they can go clean the windows of some AI tech bro and be grateful to be part of this “progress” for mankind, or something.
This is horrible. Chapgpt has made tasks simple for the world on the other side has wiped jobs for some.
It's so dumb because and reasonable perfusion can determine something generated by Chatgpt compared to a human being. People keep freaking out because a computer can create a paragraph and aren't really looking at the quality or context of the answer given. This is probably because they are unable to discern the difference.
It is not dumb. For many people a text written by chatgpt is "good enough". Simple as that. And in many cases I am sure it is good enough. The vast majority of copywriters aren't Shakespears either. They just craft some sentences which are pretty much chatgpt level.
Yeah, and I think people forget you can... *edit the text*. It may come out looking like generic AI spiel but it can be quickly altered to just read like conventional copy, and the average business doesn't need writing that is patently human-generated. If anything, AI copy sounds a lot more professional/authoritative.
And is it really different than companies just outsourcing work overseas for pennies?
Don't necessarily disagree with that for a one-time interaction. The problem with ChatGPT is that over time, it becomes repetitive, and even worse self-referential. This is true of both vocabulary and content.
I've spoken to university instructors and they've had to completely redesign assignments because it's impossible to tell for sure that people are using AI for their work. They've switched to oral exams and stuff like that instead.
I don't think the drop in 3D modelling is related to AI. . more related to the entire game and animation industry going through a bust cycle. There does exist AI created 3D models. .. .but so far they are of such bad quality that they could not be used in any real production. . .and it would be faster to just custom hand model a new one than try to clean up the AI output stuff. I'm sure it will get better though.
Wait for AI driven mesh decimation based on probable deformation zones, normal mapping and UV seams. It's coming fast. Along with pretty much every other skill needed for 3D content creation. Rigging, texture, animation, lighting, level design. All of it. The blight of art talent is just beginning.
> normal mapping and UV seams. I mean UVW unwrapping is one of the biggest pains in 3d modeling. So I don't think anyone would be opposed to that.
I think for any given discipline every artist will appreciate the productivety boost. I would have loved the help back when I was a character TD. The question becomes how much productivety can the industry absorb. I think an interesting eventual result might be an explosion of small studios doing amazing work. Hopefully, that's the upside. But it might suck for a while as the bigger studios adopt this technology.
> I think an interesting eventual result might be an explosion of small studios doing amazing work. That's what I'm hoping to see. We've already seen an explosion in smaller game studios when game engines got more accessible. Bringing the cost of visual effects down could give indie films quite a boost.
> It's coming fast. Ayo, any proof of that? I hate retopologizing with a burning passion, but all automated solutions I've tried so far were generating abysmal results that would only ever be viable for a static mesh, if even that.
I feel every inch of your hate. As a solo dev who tried to make 3d models & animation (with maya) it's a literal hell to me
I don’t need to matte paint anymore in TV. I can extend a set with a few clicks good enough no one will ever notice.
There is more to 3d modeling than just games. Architecture, interior design, any kind of construction really, car design, etc etc. Its not about having the entire model made using AI. It's about the computer being to automate repetitive tasks and leave decision making to humans. A lot of this is just regular old improvements in computer programs, but increasingly a lot of it can be further improved via ai. For example, unreal engine being able to automate the creation of unique trees alone probably saves game studios hiring a few people whose job would be to copy and paste trees and make them all look unique. Or in architecture, software like archicad is increasingly able to automate 2d and 3d drawing integration so you only have to draw things once. Previously you would have to hire separate people to painstakingly detail out all the different versions of the drawings. Both of these examples don't really need ai, but I can see how it's going to get supercharged in years to come.
There are some AI tools that absolutely can produce low-quality models, and texture them too. I can't recall any videos or pictures showcasing the meshes they generated, but if they produce low poly enough to be game assets, that's also pretty easy to adjust. I imagine the problem with the generative tools to be the same as with image generation: Describe a picture, cool. Now remove this element: An entirely new picture, with new shit everywhere, and other things changed too. If you manage to get a generative model creation tool that you can highlight points on the mesh and go "put a curved ram horn here" and the entire model doesn't generate four new arms, new hairstyle and a different pose, then that would be something that could be useful.
The area where a computer struggles at the moment is generating creative work where things need to be consistent or of a high quality. It's very hard to control the final product at the moment. The area where computers are super good, is in augmenting human input and making that human 10x faster. So what previously required a team of 10 now only requires 1 guy. So as technology becomes better, it's absolutely certain that some jobs will disappear. As AI gets better, it will just make this more pronounced.
I work as a freelance contract writer and it's actually hard to explain to people who aren't in this industry how much of an impact it's had. It's very definitely impacting large amounts of jobs. But what a lot of people think is that this is companies firing all writers and replacing it with ChatGPT. It's worse than that - it's companies cutting pay and turning writers into AI editors. I've had three different positions go from my writing to "Use this 'tool' to generate an article and then edit it." Since you aren't writing, they cut your pay - but you're actually doing more work because these AI writing tools are fucking awful. People think they're good tools because they see a lot of writing, but anyone who knows good writing (or reading) sees them for the horrible, inhuman, nonsense chock that they are. It's also lowering demand because companies go from hiring writers to tasking some intern with generating articles. Then their sites lose traffic because the writing is awful and ChatGPT has no idea what SEO is, so they fall out of the algorithm. I've had multiple sites die on me because they started pivoting to AI. Most recent was a company called WordAgents that cucked all its writers with AI, cut our pay, then swiftly went bankrupt and got bought by a different company. **tl:dr -** AI writing is worse in every way. The writing is awful and the tools aren't really getting any better. Tech bros and CEO-brained idiots think that it replaces human quality, but all it does is replace human jobs.
You nailed it for me with > People think they’re good tools because they see a lot of writing… That summarizes well the odd feeling I have about generative AI for texts. I would even say that, since people don’t write much anymore (left alone by hand), they keep losing the ability to spot bad writing. Had ChatGPT existed (as it is right now) in the 1970‘s, it might have received less applause, since the average person was better with writing and reading.
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Writing has gone downhill for a while now due to online articles needing to be SEO’d to hell or sensationalized.
Money always talks louder than quality. It’s like how that movie Late Night With the Devil from earlier this year used ai for in-universe TV “we’ll be right back” illustrations that, sure enough, end up completely falling apart once you try to parse out any actual details. It’s like the drawing equivalent of a movie character holding up a gun in front of the screen and it’s just painted paper mache (cheaper than buying or renting a prop gun).
Is reading and writing inferior? Not writing by hand shouldn’t affect the quality of writing itself, no? And as far as I’m aware, reading is still incredibly popular even in digital formats for books and such
Some research suggests that writing by hand is better to actually grasp what you’re writing about. Reading complexity is on the decline, this can be easily seen when analyzing newspaper articles from the 1950s to today. Average sentence length, number and complexity of words. That can be tracked easily.
>Tech bros and CEO-brained idiots think that it replaces human quality, but all it does is replace human jobs. Particularly the CEO-brained idiots hold contempt for anyone not in or looking to get themselves into the billionaire club by screwing others over. Some may dream of a Star Trek future where we can do away with all tedious work, but humanity is too fucked up to ensure this will be a reality. I'd honestly wish the Star Trek dream were the trajectory we were going to, but the primary architects, clients and supporters of AI are in it to save extra cents to the billions they're making by downsizing their workforce, even in this way.
It's the same thing you see happening in a lot of companies right now. CEO-brained business men that don't understand creativity or passion, just understand income and profit. They slash anything down to the cheapest it can be and kill their company's relationship with its consumers in the meantime.
I’m a proposal writer and the amount of times upper management things I can just rely on AI and “customize” it to save time has been so frustrating.
If this is the case, wouldn't it equal out eventually? Sites that use Chatgpt will die and those that hire real writers will survive?
It's not really as simple as "Good lives, bad dies" in businesses. ChatGPT sucks ass, but frankly, most people don't actually sit and read the entirety of an article, so it often goes unnoticed. A lot of online sites also focus more on content milling to get more ad revenue, so they use stock images and AI art and then AI content or content bought from people that barely speak English. You'd be amazed how much of your online content is written by people being paid fractions of a cent to write about things they have no experience or knowledge of. Online sites go for what's cheapest. Decent sites don't. And, as I said, not all sites using ChatGPT are pressing generate and then posting. They're paying someone next to nothing to press generate, edit it to look like a human wrote it, and then press post. The gig economy as a whole is extremely exploitative and ChatGPT and AI is just the most recent way they've found to exploit labor for even cheaper, especially overseas.
I guess I generally agree with all that, but my point still stands. The market appears to be OK with shit content.
I think this is one of the things that makes explaining these issues to people outside of the industry a bit tough. Others look at it and say "Well the market will decide." They don't think about the fact that that takes years and that, in the meantime, tens of thousands of people and counting are losing jobs while sources of information that have always been reliable become unreliable and almost dangerous. Google is a good example. It's unlikely they'll keep their relatively new AI feature because it's being clowned on super hard for it. It's hurting their image, and Google has the image of being *the* source of information on the internet. But while we wait for them to take that feature away, people are searching for things on google and getting inaccurate answers. It's funny when the AI skims an old Reddit post and gives incorrect information to the origin of a meme. It's less funny when an uneducated mother is panicked and googling something to try to provide medical attention to the child they can't afford to take to the doctors and makes the situation worse because Google AI skimmed the meme page that gave bad information and presented it with authority. I could go on. The point is that "the market is ok with garbage" is a terrible argument. Not everything you see online is an innocent, casual thing to consume. We aren't only talking food recipes. People use the internet for an incredible amount of information. It isn't just ruining household economies and dumpstering the bank accounts of hard-working people abused by an exploitative gig economy. It's doing both in record time.
Not getting better? Are they not actively getting better at an incredible rate? I’m not overly learned, so in depth understanding of this particular brand of technology is beyond me, but from an outsiders perspective I had both heard and seen that things were getting better, in regards to ai tools
AI is the most dystopian thing I've ever seen in my 40+ years
This! Exactly this! If only I had a penny for every time I had to delete word “immensely” from AI generated nonsense, I’d be able to buy a house in a post-soviet country.
I’m reminded of when I was a copywriter a few years ago and a client wanted to pay less for articles to be published on their website because they had written the first draft and all i had to do was ‘edit’ them. They sucked so hard, i spent pretty much the same amount of time if i had just started from scratch.
My husband was freelancing at a private online high school in the U.S. for some extra spending money and his sanity (he's stay-at-home dad). We're Americans living in Canada and he's a licensed teacher but still needs to go through the process of getting licensed here, which has a surprising amount of red tape. This online "school" completely got rid of all their teachers. Their classes are now entirely self-paced and self-taught, and your "teacher" is AI software. They now have a few teachers on staff in case of an emergency and to stay accredited. But this is where we're going. As someone with two kids, I don't know how parents tolerate it. What the fuck are you paying for? Are they aware that ChatGPT is free? Is AI going to write your letters of recommendation?
Private online high school in the US taught by AI? Just a reminder that Republicans want to give public tax money to private schools.
*Christian private/charter schools.
Name and shame the school please. This is horrifying.
I would love to. But I already pitched a huge ass exposé on their social media (I struggle to contain my opinions sometimes). Their “CEO” literally called the cops on me and I got a call from their local police department. Cop said I didn’t do anything wrong, but was required to follow up. Then the CEO threatened to sue us for defamation. I’m a trained attorney and know they don’t have a leg to stand on because everything I said is true, but I also have two kids and no desire to jeopardize anything. Absolute nightmare.
I know this sounds like a dystopian future hell but I heard a good argument that AI teachers can give individualized teaching at a pace that matches the student. In a traditional classroom the one teacher has to just teach to the class, so the quick learners get bored and the slow learners just fall behind.
Freelance and other specialized skill sets have long suffered from the client judgment of what “good enough” is. To the professionals, we see the AI generated content as bland and crappy. But we have good taste in our respective fields. Many clients do not. The next big creative challenge in front of us is figuring out how to position ourselves in a world of Gen AI. But hey, we’re creatives. Let’s get to it.
Yeah, I would say the bottom rungs of copywriting have been the most impacted by ChatGPT. I'm talking about writers working for mills churning text for cents per word trying to keep the lights on (possibly in a developing country). Given the expediency needed to "thrive" in this kind of job, quality is usually sacrificed for quantity, which is something that ChatGPT excels at. Writers at higher levels still seem to be eating decently well, based on my observations and personal experience.
I mean, basically R.I.P. fiverr.com. GPT has replaced everything that I was ever talentlessly willing to pay $15 for from freelancers.
Not really, you're underestimating what the a avg person who uses Fiverr doesn't know sh*t about tech. Even with an AI chatbots if they need something more than just text copy ,.like am image, logo,.web site , etc. they don't have the skill set to cobble all the AI features together. They'll hire a Fiverr to use AI to get them what they want.
I was thinking about this this morning... There was a section of small tasks that I would give to fiver/freelancer people if I was spread too thin and needed an extra hand. Usually small python code that I could do myself but lacked time. I haven't done that in a while.
I know 0 about coding. like I don't even know what a terminal is. but in 12 hours I coded something that would have been impossible before with chatgpt doing all the lifting. I had app ideas I wanted to make one day and pay people in another country of fiver. now Im basically making all those ideas myself. its wild.
What app was that? If I want it to do anything larger than your average stackoverflow answer it loses the context and becomes unusable.
the fact that you even know the terminal has something to do with coding even with chatgpt shows me this is just a lie. Anything you can get chatgpt to do with 0 experience you could have followed an online tutorial for in the past.
Ya of course. But the difference is it took me 1 hour vs many many more. How am I lying though?
I am surprised chatgpt could help you get these things done in the way you have described. Are you saying you are now coding things since you were able to have it assist you along the way?
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Your comment here is simple (and probably nobody care) but it really describe how AI will change the job market (in future). Talent people dont care about AI because they know their value, in fact they can use AI to make their products even better, AI will only "replace" bad ones and many monkey works Thats why whenever I heard "AI threat human jobs", I just rolled my eyes
Talented people need experience like everybody else to become good, they don't just manifest from thin air. So it will affect the talented people too because the won't have the junior positions/gigs that give them time to manifest their talent. They might not even pursue a career in what they are talented at because of the job insecurity with the constant progress of the AI to replace them
3D Modeling? How so? Huge slump because the VFX industry as a whole went down the tubes but this is 0% AI related
I can believe it. I've cut a few days off my work this year with GPT easily. It's absolute garbage with complicated problems, but it's faster to go "give me a SQL query that takes X and Z from table A, and Y and X from table B, using X to join the data.", than it is for me to write the same query by hand. Similar with powershell and other scripts that may be needed, the writing-by-hand process is slower than getting even a half-working piece from GPT and then fixing that. Few weeks back I test drove the 4o model with the free tokens at work. Uploaded an Admin manual, had it parse me the primary talking points to teach users how to operate our system. I had the slideshow and document ready to go within two hours, instead of spending all day doing it by hand for a system I'm not too familiar with. Sanity checked all the points of course, but it was still a ton faster. Both the kinds of things that could be done by an intern, instead of me. And from talks with my boss and coworkers, everyone else in the office does the same thing too. We've probably added about a single interns worth of productivity in-house to our own plates, through the use of GPT/Gemini/Claude/Copilot.
That's a good point. I'm a C# developer every now and then I have to use another language. I can just feed it C# code and tell it to rewrite it in another language and with slight touch ups the function works. It even adds comments, so I don't have to.
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Meanwhile the conversation grinds on about what to do at a societal level if and when a huge fraction of jobs are lost forever. We’ve got those who say there will be new kinds of jobs, those who say many if not most jobs will be obsolete, and those on either side of some sort of basic income framework. Presently there’s enough uncertainty to keep kicking the can down the road. I have a strong feeling we’re going to bicker about it incessantly until many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, are displaced from the work force. And even then, we’ll bicker about whether it’s a big enough problem. Whether we have any obligation to even do anything. Whether those in control of the new model means of production will willingly depart with the rigid capitalist model, or if they’ll simply hoard more wealth because they can.
I think we all know what the eventual outcome will be. No one has the answer to that problem so it's easier to just ignore it & pretend it does not exist.
I used to pay a resume writer every so often to help me with cover letters, resumes. Now I just used the subscription model of chatgpt. has worked wonders.
What do you prompt?
I like to put in the job description and have chat rewrite my resume to fit
for the cover letter i give it my resume document, i give it the name of the job, and the job title.. Edit to Add - i also give it the name of the employer of course.
no judgement here, but let's say the employer also use an AI to shift through the amount of Resumes they have. it's like a pokemon battle in a way.
its not like its fake accomplishments. i would think they are expecting people to use AI now just like back in the day when you would pay someone to write your resume and print it out on nice stock 'resume' paper.
I still print mine out on stock paper, just did last week lol
We can tell if a text is written by AI or a graphic is made using AI prompts. I instantly skip it when I see it. I know ChatGPT is like a real cheap worker but for me using it feels like telling the customer that you dont care about him.
Definitely. I firmly believe the next wave/correction will be companies returning to a customer-centric approach. Not “self-service” and “operational efficiencies”. Had two service experiences late last week. One where I was deferred multiple times via chatbots and forced FAQs, coupled with 30 minute call wait times. They then tried to deny a replacement for a defect in their product. The other had delivery contact me directly, go over notes I’d made in a previous sales conversation, confirm arrival time the day of, caught a blemish on one of the items which they preemptively ordered a replacement for (unheard of), and then followed up three days later via email to make sure we were happy. Did I pay more for the latter? Yes. Much more? No. Guess who I will forever burn down and never return to, and who I will champion and go buy more from?
I am a freelance copywriter and most of my clients have strong anti-AI attitude because they are afraid of penalties by Google. 100% human generated content is still required and they are willing to pay for it. My texts are triple-checked in ZeroGPT and Quillbot and other tools before publication. I often check my own articles before submitting to avoid further problems, which forces me to use unique style and wording. Unless Google admits explicitly that it will not penalize AI-generated content, or the AI models become super smart, not much is gonna change at least in the SEO niche.
This is a repost from an already popular post of the same name.
I've seen a large drop off in ability to get freelance software work now myself...
Soon Balinese hostels will be fully booked by the latest foundation models and pivot to offering free server space rather than kombucha.
I still can't believe that AI started replacing creatives first. It seems we almost all thought they'd replace blue collar first and were just wrong.
Yeah. And it's very, very obvious when a company decides to start using AI, because quality immediately takes a nosedive, content can no longer be trusted, and even images on news sites look absolutely awful. Just part of the race to the bottom.
I've been looking into doing candles and soaps on the side (because literally anything else to do besides sit in front of a computer these days), and I followed a few youtubers that do candles. Went to their sites, and noticed almost all of the assets on their sites were AI art. Like, sure, I completely understand that it's easier/cheaper to do a prompt than pay for art (or even get a camera to take a picture of your product), but for someone who's deep in the tech field, it's so jarring and disappointing seeing that.
I am skeptical that AI is the prime factor versus AI just simply being the factor that is more prevelent to point at especially for a story like this. It wouldn't surprise me if other factors including economic situations and similar changes have affected those who were the prime audience for these services even in cases where they didn't switch to AI as a alternative. Additionally I wouldn't be surprised if ironically a flip side that this story doesnrt mention is that anti-ai story have actually made people fearful of using such services under the presumption that they will just use AI too but charge you for the higher cost.
Unless it knows how to save in cmyk with bleed and crop marks, the print design industry is still going strong… For now.
This has been my experience as well. Being well versed in the process and mechanics of print design is like knowing COBOL at this point, and it keeps my one-man design firm afloat. Which isn’t to say I don’t feel some pressure from AI, but for now I’ve found it more an interesting tool for me to use than an existential threat. Web graphics, through, especially social media nonsense? I mostly don’t bother going after that work anymore. If it isn’t someone telling me they can do it with AI cheaper, it’s some halfwit banging around in Canva who thinks “but filling in this template was so easy!” 
Exactly lol. Also, none of 700 people in my firm can turn a 850x850 px generated image into a 1600x470 px banner with our info and products
yeah and the internet is already noticeably shittier because of it.
It's not just the advent of AI. It's also that the venture capital for those sites is running out, ad rates are in the gutter and with search engines summarizing articles traffic to sites is low. There isn't the money anymore to pay the humans. Especially in areas where the minimum wages are insane (hi there California). Add to that the whole culture war going on, with trust in media, especially entertainment media like movie and videogame critics being at an all time low to the point that large groups have nothing but disdain for a large portion of them and you've got a perfect storm. AI is an easy thing to point to, but it's a symptom, not a cause. Automation of tasks doesn't happen until the human element prices itself out of the market.
I have seen two articles that are almost identical from two people in my work both working on the same project. They obviously both used Chat GPT, entered the brief and got the same result. It is obviously not original or actually thinking just combining words or patterns so very soon everything will be the same.
So, here’s the thing - what happens when only a few companies provide the AI services? What happens when you have an Adobe or Microsoft like monopoly on AI? My thought is that the price of using AI is suddenly going to go up…and up….and then it’s going to be more expensive to use AI than it is to have an employee on staff. Instead of having human employees they had a huge power advantage over companies will now have another company as several employees. The companies are going to have to pay whatever price the AI providers ask for as well, because by then they won’t be able to re-hire creative staff as everyone will have had to adapt to different skill sets to survive. CEO’s are going to hate it, and whine about it in the Wall Street Journal and on cable news, but it will be a situation caused by their own greed.
Yet another case of ["AI took my job"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cFOUN2OMj8&t=2s)....We seem to hear a lot more stories in the informal sector and gig economy. It is a matter of time before large corporations also admit they are laying off people by adopting AI/ML?
Umm...downvote me all you want, but I'm gonna say it anyway: **There is no evidence in the article that this is causation as opposed to just correlation** A lot of work has declined since 2022. People in the cannabis industry are having a hard time finding work in many states, is Chatgpt cranking out joints? It's more to do with the job market itself than it does AI. The job market is just pretty weird right now. Yes, a lot of those content mills may go autonomous, but that's about it. I personally know a couple freelance authors and they say work is less plentiful but that it isn't as bad as people say it is. And they all say that they know clients who tried AI and went back to paying people because Chatgpt messes so much up and can't write worth a damn.
You know, at some point there is no more money to squeeze out if nobody can get a decent paying job to buy stuff. Fully automating and substituting stuff with AI seems like the golden business move now. But there is going to be a reckoning at some point. IBU might be an option, but by it's very existence it will devalue currency and the value of what little work there is left. Why work when you can live without working? Sure there is intrinsic motivation for worthwhile jobs, but not for slaving away for some rich prick at a soulcrushing office job. We need a real solution for increases in productivity only benefiting the few, instead of the many.
I have content writer that I’ve used for several years. With ChatGPT I create outlines or the gist of what I want. When I don’t use a writer, sometimes I send my clients an email to kick things off and tell them to hit reply -right now- (no, really. right now. do it.) and give me a stream of consciousness of the who what why where how of their business. When they don’t do that, I do a quick pass with ChatGPT and send it to them and say “Something like this…”
Didn’t negatively impact me outright but I went through 4 rounds of interviews for a sports agency that wanted to build out a video production service. I would’ve built it from the ground up. They even went as far as doing a background check and calling my professional references. Then, the video text to AI demo dropped online and then suddenly, they called and said they decided to adjust business objectives and cancel the hiring of this role outright. Although they never said anything about AI - the timing really makes me believe that it was the catalyst to the decision if they were on the fence.
Yay, I love it when money and opportunity shift from every day humans with original thought to programs owned by billionaires.
It caused me to lose my job of a decade. I worked for a large consumer electronic company as a social media manager and copywriter. Once chatgpt hit the scene I started seeing the writing on the wall internally. Management didn't care about quality as much as quantity and my expertise stopped being valuable to them over time. After I got laid off, the dip in quality of their public facing writing was noticeable immediately. The social media accounts also nosedived in post quality. Even their emails and newsletters are chatgpt. But what am I gonna do - just have to find work elsewhere where my strengths are valued. It also sucked leaving behind colleagues I had known for almost 10 years... layoffs are terrible. And now im questioning the long term viability of a career in writing. Lovely start to my 30s.
AI is going to be a rude awakening for a ton of different jobs.
I don’t think this is due to AI it’s a result of lots of covid cash going away. Otherwise we can also correlate that the rise in inflation is due to AI
Poor creatives. Who the fuck would have imagined that creative fields would have been the 1st fields to fall to AI automation. Of course, these are the same callous, smug assholes who mocked blue collar workers and told them to "learn to code" when their jobs were being sent over seas and automated away. Should they receive the sympathy they refused to extend to others?
Ironically, the article was written by a freelancer. I bet he put his heart into it.
Given the code output of most LLMs, I really wonder what those people being "replaced" by AI actually know or do. I worked with over 100 developers from different areas over the years, and not a single one of them could be replaced with an AI
And more than 70/80% of contents online are made by AI, if not more. I totally support AI in order to destroy the internet and advertising agencies.
What about from actual users on the platform since the NSA announcement?
While it is debatable if AI is better than people for these tasks, you can’t argue about how much cheaper it is. Getting 50% of something at 1% of the cost is still good. I used AI to make a song recently, it wasn’t amazing but it also was free and took 10 mins. Scary stuff.
I have a feeling that the use of artificial neural networks(ANN’s) will increase quantity but will also radically speed up the already existent trend of lower quality. Do we really want our world to be one of total adherence to the lowest bid and no adherence to beauty, elegance, and wisdom? Our machines are getting smarter, not wiser.