I mean if we're getting rid of jobs that don't contribute high quality, let's start replacing CEOs with AI.
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
She's the CTO, you're just agreeing with every person who has held that role since the beginning of time. I guarantee that's her first wish to the genie. Like, seconds after rubbing the lamp. Wouldn't even let it get to the "crick in the neck" part.
CEO isn't a job, it's a position. And yes, the CEOs office is already the one where AI use is generally starting from in corpo environments.
It's viable for the actual work of being a CEO, but then it becomes a "who gets to prompt it" issue.
No one gets to prompt it… let it run continuously generating output/orders from the big data about company and external environment instead of prompts. The prompts are the weekly state of affairs at the company. There is one initial prompt to set it up and running. Let’s see this company crumble
That already sounds like better work than most c-suite d-bags manage
”It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair
I like how AI has all this knowledge out of nowhere without requiring input.
Great thing AI.
If you go down that line you'll reach a point where you'll also start arguing that art/literature should also be restricted for (human) educational use. And I would rather die than ever support publishers having that power.
I fairness, that is not how knowledge works, for anyone or anything. You don't know things without input. You had an education, you receive sensory input and are able to formulate conclusions off past experiences and information. This particular argument is simply a bad faith attempt at a jab. There are much better arguments against AI.
"that is not how knowledge works, for anyone or anything. You don’t know things without input"
That's not the argument though. AI's don't "learn" in the traditional sense. Their work is purely derivative. There is no logic or creative mind. They take something that exists, simplify it into algorithms and then spit out something similar.
Tomorrow, a brand new style of whatever could become popular. Without being fed the direct reference that AI would not be able to recreate it, depending on its complexity.
If you take away the source, AI will only work in the confines of its knowledge base. If the the only other inputs AI sees, is AI outputs, entropy is inevitable.
In the same light, I think what people will eventually find is AI will net creative jobs. Which is comical. To generate enough source material for the AI to "learn" something we will end up creating more then we would have to then just creating it in the first place. And use twice the resources to do it.
Edit:
For example, ask AI to make a image in the style of into the spider verse.
Now attempt to get similar results without directly asking it to mimic into the spiderverse.
Second, using AI for creative work is by definition a down grade. It has certain capabilities but their is no comparison to actual intelligence. Good luck to the schmuck capitalists that attempt to use it as a replacement rather than a tool.
"should" by what metric? We have creative work because we want to, not because we must
I mostly agree with you, but industries in which creativity plays a big role are BIG money. So it's not a "because we want to" scenario anymore. It's a must for many capitalists.
AI could be a great boon. AI could give us space to do less of which we dont. However AI will belong to the rich. The masses will be forced to do ever more degrading service jobs like we see springing up now.
I hope i am wrong.
There's a pretty big free open source community around AI and many of the best models are completely free.
It's ironic a bit because I'm guessing big companies like openai are the ones pushing the AI is theft issue since open source wouldn't be able to afford the price asked by data aggregators like Reddit, Getty, Adobe, etc. Sadly, getting paid was never in the cards for individual artists, most of the data is owned by specific websites.
In the same vein, OpenAI was lobbying for Congress to enact laws because AI could be "dangerous". It's quite clear they wanted to essentially outlaw any competition from small organisations by pilling on even more costs.
So yes, they might end up owning all of AI and by extent the economy, but we'd have to let ourselves be manipulated into giving it to them. Sadly a lot of people only deal in emotive knee jerk reactions so it might work.
Especially people here and on the Reddit equivalent of this community.
Nobody's out here defending gigacorpos or grifters like Musk etc., and yet luddites always want to turn this consequence of capitalism into some culture war, because all they can really think of to do about any of this is bully the nerds, the queers and the neurodivergent for knowing more about technology than they do.
If they did not exist you would not be able to train AI on them and therefore not have the AI in the first place. How does that compute?
So, to be fair, the line after the quote refers specifically to those that produce "low quality" output.
So a charitable but not unreasonable read might be that she's saying any creative role that's easily replaced with AI isn't really a loss. In some cases, when we're talking about artists just trying to make a living, this is really some vile shit. But in the case of email monkeys in corporations and shitty designers and marketeers, maybe she's got a point along the same lines as "bullshit jobs" logic.
On the other hand, the tech industry’s overriding presumption that disruption by tech is a natural good and that they're correctly placed as the actuators of that "good" really needs a lot more mainstream push back. It's why she felt comfortable declaring some people in industries she likely knows nothing about "shouldn't exist" and why there weren't snickers, laughter and immediate rebukes, especially given the lack (from the snippet I saw) of any concern for what the fuck happens when some shitty tech takes away people's livelihoods.
If big tech's track record were laid out, in terms of efficiency, cost, quality etc, in relation to the totality of the economy, not just the profits of its CEOs ... I'm just not sure any of the hype cloud around it would look reasonable anymore. With that out of the way, then something so arrogant as this can be more easily ridiculed for the fart-sniffing hype that it so easily can be.