@thomasfuchs my company just laid off a fifth of the dev team because someone in management thinks MS CoPilot is going to make the rest of us so much more productive. Ugly rehash of the “do more with less” corporate delusion.
I’d tell them they’re crazy, but I don’t really want to look for a new job right now 🫤
@keydelk deranged
@thomasfuchs yes but more complicated. Sure its not an 1:1 replacement, the quality will go down, but it costs way less and thats the only thing they care about.
I work as an QA engineer and even before AI my job got taken away by „we can do this automatically by software“ leading to „we can ignore this/dont do it at all“ and no one cares, most software is bugged and insecure and often companies will maybe only fix it after their customers complain enough or they have an incident.
@thomasfuchs We want AI to do the hard work, not the fun work......
@AnnaG31 AI can't do any work. It's not human, and doesn't creativity or intelligence.
@thomasfuchs It is not that AI is replacing all writers or all programmers or all artists, but it will definitely replace marginal artists, programmers, and writers. Where that margin is is yet to be determined.
When I started in aerospace an engineering organization was task oriented with eight engineers, a secretary, a draftsman, a tech aide, and a supervisor. There was one manager for eight such teams.
When I left the business, a team was about 20 engineers with a supervisor or team leader. There was one admin at the next level. The change was all due to process automation with a paradigm shift thrown in for good measure.
In the 1970s, when I first drove through metro Chicago on a regular basis, the Chrysler Blevidere plant ran 24/7 with a full parking lot. A few years back, when I went by, they were running one shift with a lot 1/3 full...and making more cars. That was due to automation. That is seen throughout US mfg. It is due to automation.
@Ralph058 yes, but robots and CAD software actually works—AI is hammers made out of butter who are allowed to just try to hit anything they want
@thomasfuchs Agreed.... but when we talk about AI, we need to always raise the point that it needs to replace executive management and BODs first.... they are the easiest jobs to replace that suck the most money out of any company.
@thomasfuchs this is different because society is different. Decisions on employment are based on share holder or investor value, not product. There will be coders (just like I can still get a buggy whip). There will be fewer developers (I am watching it happen). The artist that made their rent by prototyping or doing initial mockups are fired. People that make covers for small run books are fired. I do not need an entry level person to take notes and produce minutes meaning they aren’t in the room to learn. Think about it as the maturation of not needing a system admin in the server room during off hours because they are replaced by remote access and a script. That meant going from 3 shifts to one and a pager.
@thomasfuchs I agree in one sense, but, I mean they kinda are, though, right? At least their jobs are being replaced with shitty AI. The work, the actual quality art, that can't ever be replaced, not by AI or scabs, etc. But the jobs can be, and are.
And under capitalism, where you have to work to survive, and the work is being stolen, that's the differentiator that's at top of mind for a lot of artists who have been "replaced" by shitty AI. That's the definition that matters to them.
@danhulton They aren’t because AI cannot do their jobs.
Firstly, you’ll still need someone to come up with prompts or whatever and secondly the output of AI is not a usable work product.
It would be more accurate to say that other workers will have to work extra hours to make up for it, or that the work simply isn’t going to get done.
@thomasfuchs It sounds like you're thinking of "the work" as a static thing. Like, "an article covering the most recent days of the war in Ukraine to our previous high standards". But when people are replaced with AI like this, "the work" ends up being very malleable, and frequently gets redefined as "500 words on the war in Ukraine, rephrase these sources PASTE PASTE PASTE".
So the job, journalist, is replaced because the work, journalism, is replaced.
@thomasfuchs And that might feel like semantics, but if you are a journalist who has lost their job because an intern with a ChatGPT subscription has been hired to fill the column inches you used to fill, I guarantee you, the PRACTICALITY of those semantics matter.
@thomasfuchs With all due respect, this take is so simplistic that it is meaningless. For some real-world thinking, consider how AI ruined Quora: https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/quora-what-happened-ai-decline.html
@SarahBreau That is people using AI to ruin something else with generated garbage; not AI doing someone's job.
This might actually, perversely, generate jobs for people in case Quora decides to clean this mess up.
@thomasfuchs AI is unlocking new levels of enshittification exactly like cryptocurrency unlocked ransomware. There will be consequences and people will, directly or indirectly, lose their jobs because of it. We will remember pre-AI internet as a golden age. If you can't see the destruction already happening, I don't know what to tell you.
@jmbwell yup
@thomasfuchs carpenters replaced with pneumatic nail guns that fire in a pattern they determine themselves with unavoidable casualties
@thomasfuchs I think I've seen this drill before: Outsource sysadmins to save $. Later... Insource sysadmins to save $.
@thomasfuchs It’s just eats my motivation/my inspirations basically it’s visual litter (with arts) and for text: even I, a non native English speaker, is painful to read the generated text.
@boby_biq Yes, generative AI is mostly used as a tool to produce bad text and bad images.
LLMs themselves have some uses as well (for example translation works quite well; specifically anything that doesn't produce more than you put into it); but it's niche stuff and even in those niches it's hard to get them to work right.
It's being broadly used for little semi-relevant "concept sketch" style images in magazine articles and the like.
No clue if humans would otherwise be making any money on those, though. The same professional opportunity seems very susceptible to, like, stock photo sites.
PSA: neither writers, programmers nor artists are being “replaced by AI”.
AI is a tech hype—like so many before—and what companies are doing is using it as an excuse to fire writers, programmers and artists.
It’s a bit like if a construction company would say they’re replacing carpenters with hammers. And everybody believes them.