make some knowledge workers moderately more productive but that excess will be absorbed
That seems to result in a higher burn out rate. The worker had to do more soul crushing check and verify work instead of doing knowledge work.
Comment on Get. Out
potatopotato@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
I unfortunately work with AI and actually understand how it works. It’s going to replace workers the same way that cocaine replaces workers.
It’ll make some knowledge workers moderately more productive but that excess will be absorbed like with any other tool and we’ll just do more shit as a society at the expense of continuing to destroy the environment.
Once the bubble bursts and things calm down there will probably be some job growth as the economy figures out how to better utilize these new tools. It’s like if you invented a machine that could frame 60% of a house and brilliantly declared you’d fire all the framers but then realized you’re now building a lot of houses and need more framers than before to finish the remaining 40%.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 13 hours ago
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 7 hours ago
Can confirm. It’s not AI but probably 80% of my job is just emailing other people to do shit, emailing other people status updates about their work, and verifying their completed work which is frequently wrong. It sucks.
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
IMO, the only thing to be taken seriously with text generators should be natural language processing.
- take this fat block of text and give me a bullet point list.
- what are synonyms for X?
- copy-paste a big TOS and tell me the key takeaways that are anti-customer.
- take these documents and make one coherent document about one page long.
- etc.
The problem is that even with things like this, it frequently fails because it hyperfixates on some details while completely glossing over others, and it’s completely random if it does that or if it’s good, and this uncertainty basically necessitates that you check everything it outputs, negating much of the productivity that you gain.
I once used it for a Python script, and I generated three outputs out of these three generations only. One regex function ended up in my real script, but I got the idea to use regex from it. And I used its output, which actually worked.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
You are thinking of office work, but there are a LOT of jobs that will be permanently replaced by AI-driven robotics, like fast food workers, retail shelf stockers, drivers, warehouse work, etc. Those are workers that can’t be easily trained UP, and many will likely become permanently unemployed.
Katana314@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
That has been happening for decades. It hasn’t actually made retail that much more automated, just massively reduced quality of service and quality of work for those remaining. Every store that has followed these methods still gets customers due to increased isolation and lack of choice, but no one likes going there.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
Yeah, they’ve been sneaking in industry killing technology for years. I had a nice career in the record business as a sales manager to retailers, until they shifted all music to easily pirated digital files on the Internet, closing 99% of the record stores in the country, and 1000s of people like me lost their jobs nearly overnight, without the media noticing it at all.
The tech to make any fast food outlet almost fully robotic is available right now, and every fast food corporation has a plan to implement it some point, and fire all those pesky humans. The only reason they haven’t done it, is because they know there will be a huge outcry, and almost certainly a crippling boycott of whichever company dives in first.
But make no mistake, as soon as one does it, they’ll ALL do it, and MILLIONS of fast food workers are going to lose their jobs. Teens, retirees, working moms, second incomes, etc., are all going to be in trouble.
sobchak@programming.dev 5 hours ago
I don’t buy that. There’s little reason to automate those jobs because the labor is so cheap. And as someone who has worked most of those jobs in the past, most of those workers could be easily trained for different jobs; most are actively taking it upon themselves to train to get out of them.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
Labor is cheap? Most cities are approaching $15 an hour, and even those immoral states that keep it at the Federal minimum of $7.75, a robot is still going to be cheaper in the long run. Then there are benefits, payroll taxes, personal issues, schedules, etc. People are a pain in the ass, and expensive in a lot more ways than money.
Besides, it almost certainly won’t be up to the franchisee. When corporate decides that they can be more efficient and more PROFITABLE with automation, the stores will go along with it, whether they like it or not.
It’s not an if, it’s a when. It’s definitely going to happen.
sobchak@programming.dev 4 hours ago
a robot is still going to be cheaper in the long run
x
vikinghoarder@infosec.pub 11 hours ago
I’m trying to figure out why everyone is so mad about AI?
I’m still in the “wow” phase, marveled by the reasoning and information that it can give me, and just started testing some programming assistance which, with a few simple examples seems to be fine (using free models for testing). So I still can’t figure out why theres so much push back, is everyone using it extensively and reached a dead end in what it can do?
Give me some red pills!
Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It doesn’t reason, and it doesn’t actually know any information.
What it excels at is giving plausible sounding averages of texts, and if you think about how little the average person knows you should be abhorred.
Also, where people typically can reason enough to make the answer internally consistent or even relevant within a domain, LLMs offer a polished version of the disjointed amalgamation of all the platitudes or otherwise commonly repeated phrases in the training data.
Basically, you can’t trust the information to be right, insightful or even unpoisoned, while sabotaging your strategies and systems to sift information from noise.
undeffeined@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
The less you know how LLMs work, the more impressed you are by them. The clever use of the term AI seems like the culprit to me since it will most likely evoke subconscious associations with the AI we have seen portraid in entertainment.
LLMs can be useful tools, when applied in restricted contexts and in the hands of specialists. This attempt to make it permeate every aspect of our lives is, in my honest opinion, insane
TerdFerguson@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
if you think about how little the average person knows
Average person… on the Internet
anise@quokk.au 6 hours ago
I’m sure you must’ve heard about the disastrous effects on the environment and the electrical grid by now, as well as the crisis in computer parts (GPUs, RAM, SSDs and now also HDDs) caused by AI data centres. Besides this, AI output is polluting the internet. This can be used to very quickly spin up a lot of sites to support a narrative, or to fill a site with “content” that increases SEO to get advertiser money. This makes looking anything up these days almost impossible. This is especially a problem because AI is unreliable. AI works purely off of statistics and doesn’t have any conception of truth or falsehood, so it generates what is in philosophical terms called “bullshit” (real term!). Output can be true accidentally, but you are never getting “the truth”. This property has already been exploited by companies by generating data optimised for LLM consumption in order to advertise their products. Many chatbots are also built in a way that is very dangerous. They are optimised to keep you using them, which is often done by making them agree with pretty much everything you say. This has been shown multiple times to cause psychotic breakdowns in all kinds of people, even if they started out using it to, for example, write code. However, the group most at risk of this are the people using the bots as an alternative to a therapist. unfortunately, AI companies encourage this usage through initiatives like gpt health. It also turns out that AI dependence can harm your ability to learn certain things. This makes sense intuitively, a coder who relies on a chatbot to write parts of the code or to debug is less likely to develop those skills themselves. This is especially a problem with increased usage in schools. Yet more ethical problems arise with the image generation modes of AI, which, unfortunately(but unsurprisingly) turn out to be trained on like… A LOT of child porn. This has been one of the controversies with grok recently. Unfortunately, there is no real way to stop someone from asking for anything in the training data. Best you can do is either try to give negative incentive to the model or to hardecode in a bunch of phrases to automatically reject. This is a fundamental problem with the architecture. Generation of revenge porn, child porn and misinformation has run rampant. AI is also a privacy and security nightmare. Due to the fundamental architecture of AI models there is no way to distinguish between code and instructions. This means that “agents” can be injected with instructions to, for example, leak confidential data. This is a big problem with parties like hospitals attempting to integrate AI into their workflow. This is in addition to pretty much all models being run “in the cloud” due to the high costs associated with running a model. Speaking of costs, all of these models currently operate at a gigantic loss. They are currently essentially circulating an IOU between themselves and a few hardware companies(nvidia), but that cannot last forever. If any of these companies survive, they will be way more expensive to use than now. Many of the current companies are also pretty evil, being explicitly associated by figures like Peter Thiel, whose stated goal in life has been to end democracy. There are also some arguments surrounding copyright. While I do not want to strengthen copyright law and so will be careful around my comments on this topic, it is certainly true that ai often outputs essentially exactly someone elses work without crediting them.
This is all I could think of off the top of my head, but there surely is more. hope this helps!
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I’m still in the “wow” phase, marveled by the reasoning and information that it can give me, and just started testing some programming assistance which, with a few simple examples seems to be fine (using free models for testing).
AI is fine with simple programming tasks, and I use it regularly to do a lot of basic blocking out of functions when I’m trying to get something working quickly. But once I get into a specialty or niche it just shits the bed.
For example, my job uses oracle OCI to host a lot of stuff, and I’ve been working on deployment automation. The AI will regularly invent shit out of whole cloth even knowing what framework I’m using, my normal style conventions, and a directive to validate all provided commands. I have literally had the stupid fuck invent a command out of thin air, then correct me after I tell it the command didn’t work about how that command didn’t exist and I needed to use some other command that doesn’t exist instead, or it gives me a wrong parameter list or something.
Hell, even in much more common AD management tasks it still makes shit up. Like, basic MS admin work is still too much for the AI to do in its own.
sobchak@programming.dev 5 hours ago
I’m working with people that seem to try to offload a lot of their work to AI, and it’s shit, and making the project take longer and shittier. Then they do things like write documents in AI and expect people to read that nonsense, and even use AI to send long, useless Slack messages. In short, it’s been detrimental to the project.
skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
There are many reasons. My biggest problem with it is that it enables the productions of a incredible deluge of cheap shitty content (aka slop), sufficient to drown out a lot of more interesting decent work.
This is coumpunded by big tech having decided that slop is preferable to real content. This leads to the general feeling that I’m drowning in an ocean of shit, and thus I dislike AI.
trublu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
Specifically regarding open source software development (what you might call “small tech”), this has led to a huge amount of slop pull requests that make it difficult to run these projects.
TRAHR@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
AI doesn’t work like that, it’s glorified autocorrect.
OhmeHose@feddit.org 10 hours ago
Thing is with at least the programming part is: It good at common issues, as in it re invents the wheel really good. But context is king, the better the model knows what the data and task looks like the better it can solve the problem at hand. It won’t fix any niche problems or actually spit out performant code. It uses what’s publicly available as Ressource and it’s inherently uncreactive at problem solving. All the chat assistants effectively did for me is replace stackoverflow.
These models only know how to re-produce already solved problems. There’s certainly great applications, like on the fly translation, summerizing and data extraction.
But it still is just a probability machine, trained on satisfying it’s customer. That’s also why it will confidently spit out complete garbage and be proud about it. And that’s also a reason why the early models are shit at math, they don’t to math, they just guess. Later models write python or other code to do the math, that’s then f.e. called “thinking”.
It will stay around but many many ai companies will fail, barely any are turning out profit, must just burn absolutely insane amounts of money in a circle jerk ai pit.
redsand@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
It’ll frame the whole house well enough for the layman but 40% will fail code compliance