Emily Hanley says she and other out-of-work copywriters are only the first wave of AI collateral and calls the collapse of her profession the "tip of the AI iceberg."
I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real “evil” here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I’m old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.
This person explains all her failures: insted of adopting and using chatgpt herself, reducing price and finding more clients she did nothing.
She was writing most boring pieces of text than no one is reading (corporate blog posts and spam emails).
Refused to learn new things which would keep her in position.
Yes, some jobs disappear other appear. I believe that 90+% of today’s jobs didn’t exist even 50 years ago. Especially not without will to learn new ways of doing things. Imagine farmer with knowledge of 100 years ago. Or hotel front desk worker without computer and telephone.
For mid-level writers, which she was, using AI doesn’t work. The few remaining clients you have specifically don’t want AI to be used. So you either lie and deceive them or you stay away from AI.
And using AI to lower prices and finding new clients also doesn’t work. Writers are already competing against writers from nations with much lower cost of living who do the same work for a fraction of the cost. But the big advantage that domestic writers had was a batter grasp of the language and culture. These advantages are mostly lost if you start using AI. So if that’s your business plan you are in a race to the bottom. It’s not sustainable and you will be out of a job in maybe 3-5 years.
Her main issue was that most of her work came from a single agency. And that’s a common pitfall for freelance writers. Once that source dries up, you are left with too little to survive. But that has happened before AI as well.
It wasn’t that all her clients were happy with AI but the agency got fewer clients and instead of sharing the remaining clients with all their writers evenly they decided to cut a few writers completely.
The true shocking part is, that it is practically impossible to find new employment. She was looking for several months before having to take something else to survive.
But even if you are well diversified in your clients and are constantly looking for new clients, the number of available jobs has dropped and so did the price. Meaning many writers who once got by comfortably are now struggling or had to switch career.
Don’t you know that Free Market Capitalism tm is the solution to all the world’s problems? The almighty Competition shall sort the wheat from the chaffe and make everything perfect if only we’d let corporations do whatever they want with impunity.
I’m really having a hard time thinking about what jobs this would create though. I get the internet thing, as people needed to create and maintain all aspects of it, so jobs are created. If some massive corporation makes the AI and all others use the AI, there’s no real infrastructure. The same IT guys maintain the systems at AI corp. What’s left to be done with it/for it by “common folk?”
There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can’t (or don’t want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).
There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they’re generally high paying, but they’re also very highly skilled, so it’s difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.
Despite what the pseudo-intellectuals will tell you, ChatGPT is not some all powerful do everything AI. Say you want to use GPT to create your own chatbot for your company to give company specific info to people at your company, you cant just take existing chat GPT and ask it “how do I connect to the wifi” or “is the office closed on monday” you need an in-house team of people to provide properly indexed information, train and test the bot, update it, handle error reports, etc.
AI is not magic, its literally just an advanced computer script, and if your job can be replaced by an AI then it could have been replaced by a regular computer script or program, there just wasnt enough buzzwords and media hype to convince your boss to do it.
Except that the ‘AI’ is fed by the work of actual humans, and as time goes on, they will be trained more and more on the imperfect output of other AIs, which will eventually result in their output being total bizarre crap. Meanwhile, humans stopped training at whatever task since they couldn’t be paid to do it anymore, so there’s no new human material.
Yeah, I’ve gotten a couple ‘omg U dumb, ur wrong’ type responses when i mention this. However, it’s not my idea or something - this has been widely discussed.
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.
Wow you clearly have a very good understanding of economy and of how our species has been evolving in the lady hundreds of years.
You are the same as the people who didn’t want to lose their jobs in the coal mines and in the oil rigs. BeCauSE wE wON’t HavE JOooOBs…instead of diving into the ones created by renewables.
You prefer to be in stable shity conditions then in an turbulent way to improvement
I stated something factual that has been noted by many other people, including people who work on large language models. Accusing me of being a Luddite is hardly a relevant discussion.
“Oh ok you can’t understand”
The idea that you’re expressing an idea at all is sort of flattering yourself, but please, get back to it.
Well, in business school they teach you that running a company is an exercise in maximising profits as a constrained optimisation problem, so optimality for a classical company (not one of those weird startups that doesn’t make money for 10+ years) almost always is maximum profit.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious. The ‘evil’ is the same force that replaced carriages with cars? The world would be better if carriage-making was still a critical profession?
The this man doesn’t want the new jobs and the new innovations. He’s fine staying exactly like he is. As long as that means he doesn’t have to worry about adapting to future problems…
I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real “evil” here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I’m old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.
This person explains all her failures: insted of adopting and using chatgpt herself, reducing price and finding more clients she did nothing.
She was writing most boring pieces of text than no one is reading (corporate blog posts and spam emails).
Refused to learn new things which would keep her in position.
Yes, some jobs disappear other appear. I believe that 90+% of today’s jobs didn’t exist even 50 years ago. Especially not without will to learn new ways of doing things. Imagine farmer with knowledge of 100 years ago. Or hotel front desk worker without computer and telephone.
For mid-level writers, which she was, using AI doesn’t work. The few remaining clients you have specifically don’t want AI to be used. So you either lie and deceive them or you stay away from AI.
And using AI to lower prices and finding new clients also doesn’t work. Writers are already competing against writers from nations with much lower cost of living who do the same work for a fraction of the cost. But the big advantage that domestic writers had was a batter grasp of the language and culture. These advantages are mostly lost if you start using AI. So if that’s your business plan you are in a race to the bottom. It’s not sustainable and you will be out of a job in maybe 3-5 years.
Thank you for good insight, I was just thinking if all here clients are satisfied with AI, then
Is not completely true.
Her main issue was that most of her work came from a single agency. And that’s a common pitfall for freelance writers. Once that source dries up, you are left with too little to survive. But that has happened before AI as well.
It wasn’t that all her clients were happy with AI but the agency got fewer clients and instead of sharing the remaining clients with all their writers evenly they decided to cut a few writers completely.
The true shocking part is, that it is practically impossible to find new employment. She was looking for several months before having to take something else to survive.
But even if you are well diversified in your clients and are constantly looking for new clients, the number of available jobs has dropped and so did the price. Meaning many writers who once got by comfortably are now struggling or had to switch career.
Don’t you know that Free Market Capitalism tm is the solution to all the world’s problems? The almighty Competition shall sort the wheat from the chaffe and make everything perfect if only we’d let corporations do whatever they want with impunity.
I’m really having a hard time thinking about what jobs this would create though. I get the internet thing, as people needed to create and maintain all aspects of it, so jobs are created. If some massive corporation makes the AI and all others use the AI, there’s no real infrastructure. The same IT guys maintain the systems at AI corp. What’s left to be done with it/for it by “common folk?”
There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can’t (or don’t want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).
There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they’re generally high paying, but they’re also very highly skilled, so it’s difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.
Despite what the pseudo-intellectuals will tell you, ChatGPT is not some all powerful do everything AI. Say you want to use GPT to create your own chatbot for your company to give company specific info to people at your company, you cant just take existing chat GPT and ask it “how do I connect to the wifi” or “is the office closed on monday” you need an in-house team of people to provide properly indexed information, train and test the bot, update it, handle error reports, etc.
AI is not magic, its literally just an advanced computer script, and if your job can be replaced by an AI then it could have been replaced by a regular computer script or program, there just wasnt enough buzzwords and media hype to convince your boss to do it.
At the end of the day if an AI can do the job to an acceptable standard a human doesn’t need to be doing it.
As you say it’s happened to countless industries and will continue to happen.
Except that the ‘AI’ is fed by the work of actual humans, and as time goes on, they will be trained more and more on the imperfect output of other AIs, which will eventually result in their output being total bizarre crap. Meanwhile, humans stopped training at whatever task since they couldn’t be paid to do it anymore, so there’s no new human material.
No? Wtf are you talking about? This is such a nonsense take.
Yeah, I’ve gotten a couple ‘omg U dumb, ur wrong’ type responses when i mention this. However, it’s not my idea or something - this has been widely discussed.
Here, you can read this research paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
or this consumer article:
https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/
Okay fair enough.
I acted like a smug prick, but you’re absolutely right.
Wow you clearly have a very good understanding of economy and of how our species has been evolving in the lady hundreds of years.
You are the same as the people who didn’t want to lose their jobs in the coal mines and in the oil rigs. BeCauSE wE wON’t HavE JOooOBs…instead of diving into the ones created by renewables.
You prefer to be in stable shity conditions then in an turbulent way to improvement
That was mildly offensive and didn’t really have anything at all to do with what I said. Are you an AI chatbot?
Oh ok you can’t understand, dw I won’t waste your time.
In case you really want to know; I am saying it’s amz how you can predict the future.
I stated something factual that has been noted by many other people, including people who work on large language models. Accusing me of being a Luddite is hardly a relevant discussion.
The idea that you’re expressing an idea at all is sort of flattering yourself, but please, get back to it.
Anyway, here’s an article about what I said:
https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/
You can dispute it with them. In fact, it cites a research paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
Not optimality. Maximum profit. Very different from any definition of optimal I would personally use.
Well, in business school they teach you that running a company is an exercise in maximising profits as a constrained optimisation problem, so optimality for a classical company (not one of those weird startups that doesn’t make money for 10+ years) almost always is maximum profit.
What a little, ridiculous, narrow-minded view of the world.
I agree, but that is how it is taught.
Always blew my mind that the word car comes from carriage
And you just blew my mind right now
Carriage > motorised carriage > motorcar > car.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious. The ‘evil’ is the same force that replaced carriages with cars? The world would be better if carriage-making was still a critical profession?
Unrelated agreement, the world would be better off if we had skipped cars.
The this man doesn’t want the new jobs and the new innovations. He’s fine staying exactly like he is. As long as that means he doesn’t have to worry about adapting to future problems…
“I’m worried about how the cotton gin might collapse an entire labor market” I think was the point to be made
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