It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I'm not even that old and it's super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It's not that we're doing more with less, it's a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.
But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.
No amount of "we can train AIs on AI-generated content" is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI's don't have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.
The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can't steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that's how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look "right" on a first glance.
I use it for software, but you really need to know what you are doing to understand what is wrong and ask it to redo it in a different way. I still think it saves time, but the ability to generate fully realized applications is a ways away.
The headline says "digital freelancers," so maybe it's talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
Namely, the fact that Apple charges a "Core Technology Fee" for developers who want to "steer" users to offers outside of its App Store. There's also an additional 3% that goes to Apple if a developer uses its payment processor.
I think a large part of this is that X is the only major social media which has no dedicated team for detecting and banning the propaganda bots / troll farms.
I have no idea how much of the Q / antivax / conspiracy material on social media is deliberate campaigns to destabilize American politics in general (as opposed to perfectly organic homegrown nuttiness which the US has always had plenty of anyway), but I know it's not 0.
It's not just to destabilize "American" politics, it's a series of worldwide campaigns to destabilize all information flow, to sow doubt and confusion among everyone, then out of the blue present an aligned front to push a certain narrative.
If people are kept in a "flux state of distrust", they're easier to convince when suddenly a bunch of their sources agree on some point, "it must be true if conflicting sources suddenly say the same".
then out of the blue present an aligned front to push a certain narrative.
This is a good point. I see this alot with ukraine. There are many famous shills (eg. max blumenthal) who have been promoting the fascist invasion of ukraine. Now these same shills are supporting Palestine. This would be good except they are just using the issue to lure people in. Then once they're hooked on all these shady accounts, they start talking about how ukrainians are nazis, how stalin was awesome, etc. It's so transparent but so dangerous. I imagine this happens on many fronts.
edit: Just remembered these podcasts about this: Part 2 and Part 3
The biggest problem with Ukraine... is that they aren't fully detached from Nazis:
During WW2, Ukraine was allied with Nazis and fascists, helping them exterminate Poles
21st century Ukraine, still uses Nazi symbology, the fascist salute, a fascist hymn, has set national support for WW2 Nazi combatants, and even their national shield is a fascist remnant.
All of that has nothing to do with the Russian invasion... but it does give Russia's propaganda machine an awesome excuse. It's just too easy to get people hooked up with some actual facts, then get them to do a leap of faith and fall straight into full propaganda... and Russia knows it.
Israel and Palestine is a particularly juicy case, where there are really shitty groups coming from both sides, ending up like an "all you can eat" buffet for every propaganda machine out there. No matter what narrative one wants to spin, chances are they'll find a latch point in the Israel vs. Palestine conflict, even contradictory ones for different audiences.
Judge Alsup isn’t wrong. Yet Disney routinely writes its own copyright laws and has Congress pass them. Musk is just trying to cut out the middle step.
Choosing to miss the forest for the trees here, I see. Being pedantic only brings something to the table if someine doesn't know the details you're being a pedant over.
Everybody here knows that legislative bodies pass laws.
I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.
Mandatory "I want a Drive Client for Linux" comment. Why should I care about features I won't be able to access out of a cumbersome web app without even a search tool?
Also, why should I since I won't be renewing anyway.
Really seems like Stanford is appeasing the far-right on everything these days. The leadership there has no grasp on the duties of their job and supporting their students.
It's tough when people like us sit here online and bicker at people for not doing their jobs.. when we can see they are literally overwhelmed by an avalanche of attack from rightwing douchebags who have infinite resources and infinite bootlickers to mindlessly repeat propaganda.
You should take a look at their endowment. It's not going to teachers. Maybe they should use it to fight back? Cause if a university capitulates to an attack on freedom of speech then what lesson are they teaching the student body?
Bonus trivia, sometimes you may see a downvote on a Beehaw post. As far as I understand the system, that's because someone on your server downvoted the thing. The system then sends it off to Beehaw to be recorded on the "real" post and Beehaw just doesn't apply it.
Can confirm. My server has had federation issues, and when that has happened you can still post or vote on outside communities, but it's not mirrored anywhere else.
Yes, that wasn't a random example for anyone OOTL. The thing the OG Luddites would do is break into factories and smash mechanical looms. They wanted to keep doing it the medieval way where you're just crossing threads by hand over and over again, because "muh jerbs".
"Recall is currently in preview status," Microsoft says on its website. "During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users."
I read "so, yeah, we built in all the telemetry connections we swear we'll never use ... just for testing, ya know?"
Probably more what MangoKangoroo and B0rax talked about, that enterprises can opt out of this telemetry, due to compliance or Intellectual Property protection.
So only the commoners get mandatory full-scale surveillance, Ehm I mean "ai enhancement"
Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.
You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.
I don't really care about the "human element" or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It's still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can't trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don't.
Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren't interested in search anymore.
You will never be able to consistently find the truth when AI optimizes for overfitting to get any result as long as something is show with ads next to it.
AI has no way of understanding truth. It's autocomplete trained on just anything it can find truth or not.
AI can also understand extra weights for hand picked sources of truth. Whether you then agree with the choices of whoever is doing the hand picking, is a separate matter.
That's your takeaway? It's like Walmart moving into a town and undercutting indie business prices until the indie businesses close, then raising prices.
What doordash is doing is scraping restaurants' websites for prices, taking a temporary loss, then going to the restaurants saying, "We got all these orders, it's a win for both of us!" to sell the contact, then raising prices and tacking on extra fees, making money off the restaurants and the customers
Especially at the prices the bill comes out to be. I had a day years ago where my car was in the shop, so I used one of them to get lunch. A $10 sandwich ended up costing me $30, and some people do this every day. Fuck avocado toast (which is delicious), this is why people are broke.
I'm not sure the comparison is quite apt, I'm not familiar with any independent food delivery services beyond just asking your buddy to grab some snacks on the way over for a hangout or something.
But I am vaguely familiar with the idea of loss-leading and think its despicable. If no regulation is ever going stand in the way of practices, then knowing they're being exploited by folks like pizza dude makes me feel a bit better, at least.
In some ways, loss leading can be done in more or less ethical ways. For instance, a small mom n pop hardware loss leading on lumbar or hammers and taking a reasonable profit on ten penny nails. Or something, maybe a better example is the Costco 1.50 all beef foot-long dog and soda but their memberships are reasonable profit for those who would go often enough and buy enough to make it worth it. It's late and I'm tired, I hope you get the general gist. But yes, doordash is just double-dipping on the sleazy. And maybe loss leading isn't ever acceptable, but I'm simply unaware/haven't thought of reasons that make it so. I'm willing to hear any argument against any of it, though.
I've never understood the supposed problem. Either AI is a gimmick, in which case you don't need to worry about it. Or it's real, in which case no one's going to use it to automate art, don't worry.
I'm sure it will be used a lot in the corporate space, and porn. As someone who did b2b illustration, good riddance. I wouldn't wish that kind of shit "art" on anyone.
The problem is that shit art is what employs a lot of artists. Like, in a post-scarcity society no one needing to spend any of their limited human lifespan producing corporate art would be awesome, but right now that's one of the few reliable ways an artist can actually get paid.
I'm most familiar with photography as I know several professional photographers. It's not like they love shooting weddings and clothing ads, but they do that stuff anyway because the alternative is not using their actual expertise and just being a warm body at a random unrelated job.
I'm sorry, but it's over. Just like photography killed miniature portrait painting. Or Photoshop killing off lab editing and airbrush touchup. Corporate art illustration is done and over with. For now, technical illustration is viable but I don't know for how long. It sucks but this is the new reality.
All of my artist friends also found it soul sucking, they just needed to make (real) money. Friends of friends with the occasional $20 to spare for a commission just don't pay the bills. I think the only artist friends I have that make a living off their chosen medium and don't hate their job are lifestyle photojournalists.
They should go ahead and be against Photoshop and, well, computers all together while they're at it. In fact spray paint is cheating too. You know how long it takes to make a proper brush stroke? No skill numpties just pressing a button; they don't know what real art is!
Real artists mix their own pigments, ask Leonardo da Vinci (*).
(*: or have a studio full of apprentices doing it for them, along with serially copying their masterpieces, some if them made using a "camera obscura" which is totally-not-cheating™, to sell to more clients. YMMV)
Maybe other artists should do that too. Art isn't built from nothing but the sheer magical creativity of the artist. If that were true we'd have Sistine cave paintings instead of the finger painting we currently have in prehistoric caves. Inspiration, is in fact, a thing.
Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.
I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?
does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?
I've spent every summer vacation in my teens traveling Europe with my parents, going to every church, monument, art museum, cave, etc. available. I had no control over the thousands upon thousands of images I was trained on. I definitely don't know which images I've seen and which not, and would have a really hard time knowing.
If I now make a painting, am I less of an artist for it?
We've had a ton of advances in inspiration. Artists constantly get inspired by the works of those before them, whether to repeat or to break up with previous styles. Nowadays you can even do it online... which is exactly what all these AIs have done.
Yeah and what is the first thing they teach you in art school? History. From day one you're studying the works of other artists and its implications. How they managed to make an impact on the viewers and how it inspires you. Then we produce output that's judged by our teachers on a scale and we use that as weighted training data.
If you make a painting now, it wouldn't be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.
The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.
The funny thing is that this is probably lobbying from NTT Docomo, who lost their own app store monopoly for feature phones the moment smartphones arrived.
My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I've lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.
From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk... I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.
I don’t believe humans are meant to manage loss in this way — stretching out an imitation of our loved one. As painful as it is, I personally believe humans need to say goodbye. I feel this gets in the way of feeling and truly accepting the loss so that a person can move forward.
Loss is truly heavy, but I do not believe this is better or healthy.
People who can't get over someone losing will sorrow for the rest of the life, or until they get over it. And AI won't help to get over it. Death is part of our life and as soon as you don't accept it, it becomes pain.
It's last year I think when I read someone created the lost son (or some other family member, I forgot) of a mother, in a VR environment. And she could see him/her again in the VR. Absolutely madness! What does this do to the person? Now couple that with an AI... man the future is grim...
I had this conversation with my wife once. I let her know that it is my advance wish that you must allow me to complete the cycle of life. Anything else, any reconstruction of me that technology allows, is to me, an abomination. Keep the pictures, keep the memories, but don’t keep me here when I am gone.
I refrain from judging the decisions of others where possible, but this is my personal wish.
Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I've always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to "let go" an accept it being over.
It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.
Idk though, maybe I'll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It's hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.
I don't believe humans are "meant" to do anything. We are a result of evolution, not intentional design. So I believe humans should do whatever they personally want to do in a situation like this.
If you have a loved one who does this and you don't feel comfortable interacting with their AI version, then don't interact with their AI version. That's on you. But don't belittle them for having preferences different from your own. Different people want different things and deal with death in different ways.
Meant, in this context, refers to the conditions that humans have faced over a long period of time and may be more suited to coping with from a survival point of view. I'm an atheist, so I find it strange that you chose to read my comment as highlighting intentional design. Certainly, AI has existed for a much shorter time than the phenomenon on a human encountering the death of a loved one. Indeed, death has been quite a common theme throughout history, and the tools and support available to cope with it and relate to other human experiences far exceed those for coping with the potential issues that come with AI.
I think one can absolutely speak of needs and adaptation for something as common a human experience as death. If you find something belittling about that opinion, I'm not sure how to address you further. I may simply have to be wrong.
Just gonna say that I agree with you on this. Humans have evolved over millions of years to emotionally respond to their environment. There's certainly evidence that many of the mental health problems we see today, particularly at the scale we see, is in part due to the fact that we evolved to live in a very different way to our present lifestyles. And that's not about living in cities rather than caves, but more to do with the amount of work we do each day, the availability and accessability of essential resources, the sense of community and connectedness with small social groups, and so on.
We know that death has been a constant of our existence for as long as life has existed, so it logically follows that dealing with death and grief is something we've evolved to do. Namely, we evolved to grieve for a member of our "tribe", and then move on. We can't let go immediately, because we need to be able to maintain relationships across brief separations, but holding on forever to a relationship that can never be continued would make any creature unable to focus on the needs of the present and future.
AI simulacrums of the deceased give the illusion of maintaining the relationship with the deceased. It is certainly well within the possibility that this will prolong the grieving process artificially, when the natural cycle of grieving is to eventually reach a point of acceptance. I don't know for sure that's what would happen... but I would want to be absolutely sure it's not going to cause harm before unleashing this AI on the general public, particularly vulnerable people (which grieving people are.)
Although I say that about all AI, so maybe I'm biased by the ridiculous ideology that new technologies should be tested and regulated before vulnerable people are experimented on.
There may not have been any intentional design, but humans are still meant to eat food, drink water, and breathe oxygen, and going against that won't lead to a good end.
Even with that, being absolutist about this sort of thing is wrong. People undergoing surgery have spent time on heart/lung machines that breathe for them. People sometimes fast for good reasons, or get IV fluids or nutrients provided to them. You don't see protestors outside of hospitals decrying how humans aren't meant to be kept alive with such things, though, at least not in most cases (as always there are exceptions, the Terri Schiavo case for example).
If I want to create an AI substitute for myself it is not anyone's right to tell me I can't because they don't think I was meant to do that.
Sure, you should be free to make one. But when you die and an AI company contacts all your grieving friends and family to offer them access to an AI based on you (for a low, low fee!), there are valid questions about whether that will cause them harm rather than help - and grieving people do not always make the most rational decisions. They can very easily be convinced that interacting with AI-you would be good for them, but it actually prolongs their grief and makes them feel worse. Grieving people are vulnerable, and I don't think AI companies should be free to prey on the vulnerable, which is a very, very realistic outcome of this technology. Because that is what companies do.
So I think you need to ask yourself not whether you should have the right to make an AI version of yourself for those who survive your death... but whether you're comfortable with the very likely outcome that an abusive company will use their memories of you to exploit their grief and prolong their suffering. Do you want to do that to people you care about?
This is speculation of corporate action completely divorced from the specifics of this technology and particulars of this story. The result of this could be a simple purchase either of hardware or software to be used as chosen by the person owning it. And the person commissioning it can specify exactly who such a simulacrum is presented to. None of this has to be under the power of the company that builds the simulacrums, and if it is structured that way, then that's the problem that should be rejected or disallowed, not that this particular form of memento exists.
It could still be a bad idea even if the profit motive isn’t involved.
One might be trying to help with the big surprise stash of heroin they leave to their widow, and she might embrace it fully, but that doesn’t make it a good idea or good for her.
Sure, and that point is being made in multiple other places in these comments. I find it patronizing, but that's neither here nor there as it's not what this comment thread is about.
My sister has hundreds of YouTube videos she used to help her students learn between music lessons. It will be two years soon since she died, I haven't been able to watch even one.
I like to remember her in my mind, it hurts less than seeing her when she was alive.
I tried things like character AI to play with talking to "celebrities". It was novel, it was fun. For about 15 minutes. Then... Eh. It's not the person, and your brain knows it's not them. It's always an imitation. I got bored talking with people I've always wanted to talk to.
I can't imagine it being a lived one who has passed. It would feel hollow, empty, and wouldn't make the pain leave. Idk, it just wouldn't be good at all
One of my colleagues has something along the lines of superior autobiographical recall. He remembers in great detail major and minor events from childhood to today. It's difficult for him to forget.
I myself have forgotten long stretches of my life, and even looking at pictures of myself from those times it feels unfamiliar.
There are some things that I wish I could remember better, but overall I prefer my forgetful brain to his never forget brain.
I’ve got that biographical detail and it’s kind of weird being able to remember times with my friends that they can’t remember.
Just feels lonely. Like imagine being the only person who can remember more than an hour ago. How your life would feel different than those living within that 1-hour window.
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