We all know what AI is doing to the workforce but that’s no mystery. Has AI actually served you well, or is it all overhyped slop?
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The technology is remarkable, the implementation is lame, the impact is happening too fast for us to adapt, the damage to artists and creatives is to cry for.
Someone posted a meme yesterday comparing it to The One Ring from LOTR and I think it’s spot on.
Steve Wozniak: The AI is dangerous! Destroy it!
Sal Altman: No.
This is the largest technology con job right now. NFTs failed, the “metaverse” failed, now a badly trained AI is the “solution to humanity’s problems”. This is just as stupid as religion.
It’s simultaneously awesome and overhyped.
I would add one more adjective to complete the description: terrible. Depending on the situation, sometimes it’s awesome, sometimes it doesn’t live up to the hype, and sometimes it’s downright terrible.
I think Alan Tudyck get fucked over because Will Smith couldn’t handle not being the most likable character in a movie.
As soon as test audiences said they loved the robot, the cut back Tudyck’s scenes and completely dropped him from promotion and intro credits.
Slop
I use it daily as a glorified search engine. Ever since Google decided that showing ads is more important than showing search results ChatGPT is much better.
for the average person, it just provides an objectively inferior result to reading the results on google. like I cannot imagine thinking “Wow I really want an incorrect and incomplete response to my query that doesn’t even link me to additional context to fill in the gaps right now”
Did you somehow forget that 90% of the shit on the internet 3 years ago just before AI was just absolute garbage websites copy/pasting from every other website in existence and so full of ads that people couldn’t even find the actual content on the page?
All that garbage is still there, under the slop, under the Reddit and other promoted answers. It’s just another layer on top of what we were actually looking for.
I like how Yaron Minsky from Jane Street characterized LLM: “It is smarter than we expected it to be, but dumber than we needed it to be… It feels like something really dumb, but somehow memorized the entire internet.”
This is kind of what I feel: despite all these impressive BAR and IMO achievements, in my work, I feel they do a great job at parapherasing the internet, but fails when you need it to do something mildly intelligent.
Does it improve my efficiency? yes, but only at some very tedious and specific taskes, once I go slightly out of scope, it comes up with inelegant solution that I will need to rewrite from scratch.
It’s OK in some instances where it’s a tool that helps your hands. Once you start outsourcing your head to chatgpt, you’re voluntarily letting your mental faculties rot for the sake of percieved comfort.
We all know what AI is doing to the workforce
Do we?
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs
Summary
While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative. The picture of AI’s impact on the labor market that emerges from our data is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level. While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies, it is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs. The lack of widespread impacts at this early stage is not unlike the pace of change with previous periods of technological disruption. Preregistering areas where we would expect to see the impact and continuing to monitor monthly impacts will help us distinguish rumor from fact.
*The narrative that AI’s are causing job loss is a marketing strategy performed by the AI companies to boost their recognition through fear.
I recently completed a fairly complex implementation training in government for a team of non-technical users, including agents, agentic workflows, some RAG, and small-scale enterprise app deployments.
I find it a very cool technology, but it is dumb yet. When unbounded, AI does some cool stuff. But building for complex workflows, I find, has resulted in a mixed bag of results. Very specific functions, such as mining data patterns, it is not bad at. But add gray area and it kind of takes stabs in the dark, much like a badly defined Web search.
Even our technical teams sell it as a 10-20% increase in efficiency, not a firesale position replacement. And they’re mandated to adopt and distribute it as widely through govt as possible.
In short, I think this is a fair assessment lol AI may replace us one day, but the models are far too new yet
The only things it’s good for are kinda evil.
Over hyped trash.
What AI is not: Human connection. A creative.
What AI is: A very fancy search engine that gives human-like answers. Which includes the fallibility. People keep saying “you’re better off reading the page”… are you tho? Why are we suddenly defending the academy of google and “doing your own research”? People who are hell bent on being idiots will continue to be idiots, AI or no. Though AI has some chance to exposing logical fallacies in one’s arguments. If fucking anything, AI can help smart people with the exhausting task of dealing with gishgallop disinformation tactics in online discourse. And I mean SMART people, those who know better than to just have AI print a wall of text on their behalf, and who know the subject matter but don’t have every piece of proof at their fingertips at any given time (of course an argument can be made that a smart person wouldn’t get into this kind of argument in the first place - but ya’ll know how you are).
Also, as much as I dislike Google, there’s no viable alternative to YouTube. And Gemini is way better with YouTube searches.
And I’m happy to not be forced to go onto the garbage sites of Wikia etc. whenever I need to look something up in a videogame.
And it’s an utility that can help with the more tedious tasks of projects. Which isn’t an universally good thing since that usually implies more productivity, which implies more consumption. And we’re already over-consuming. But AI can also help production of something actually life-enhancing, from people who actually care and aren’t just looking to produce more to generate more profits.
It’s a tool, and a toy. And unfortunately a lot of people aren’t equipped to use it.
It’s what they’ll use to decrease the population when workers aren’t needed anymore
