AI megathread

[Laird]

Heard AI is coming for your job? For these copywriters, that 'future' arrived months ago

By James Purtill on 15 February, 2024 for ABC News

They showed within a few months of ChatGPT's launch, copywriters and graphic designers saw a significant drop in the number of jobs they got and even steeper declines in earnings.

And when they dug deeper into the data, the economists found an interesting trend.

Being a more skilled freelancer was no defence against loss of work or earnings.

This may seem counter-intuitive at first, Dr Reshef said, "but it makes a lot of sense on second thought".

"Who do we expect to benefit the most from a new technology that improves the quality of your work or your output? Probably those that didn't do a great job to begin with.

"Simply put, AI helps level the playing field across all workers."

In a recent Harvard Business School study, employees at Boston Consulting Group were randomly assigned access to GPT-4, OpenAI's latest large language model.

Those using AI completed 12.2 per cent more tasks while doing them 25.1 per cent faster. They also produced higher quality work compared to those not using AI.

As with the freelancer study, the least-skilled workers benefited the most from AI.

Heard AI is coming for your job? For these copywriters, that 'future' arrived months ago
By James Purtill on 15 February, 2024 for ABC News

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"Who do we expect to benefit the most from a new technology that improves the quality of your work or your output? Probably those that didn't do a great job to begin with.

"Simply put, AI helps level the playing field across all workers."
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It will work this way only until or if AI becomes significantly better* and cheaper than all the copywriters; after that, all the copywriters will be out of their jobs. That's capitalism.

* it may not need to be better (it might even be worse) - the public has repeatedly become accustomed, by the economic powers-that-be, to poorer quality when this  has been gradually slipped in as a cost-cutting technology. I would suggest that poorer quality is absolutely predictable, because large language processing AI systems are inherently limited in their "creativity" to the humanly written Internet material they were trained on, plus there are the other problems like the "hallucination" phenomenon and plagiarism/impersonation.

It will work this way only until or if AI becomes significantly better* and cheaper than all the copywriters; after that, all the copywriters will be out of their jobs. That's capitalism.

* it may not need to be better (it might even be worse) - the public has repeatedly become accustomed, by the economic powers-that-be, to poorer quality when this  has been gradually slipped in as a cost-cutting technology. I would suggest that poorer quality is absolutely predictable, because large language processing AI systems are inherently limited in their "creativity" to the humanly written Internet material they were trained on, plus there are the other problems like the "hallucination" phenomenon and plagiarism/impersonation.

Right.  Just ask the folks that used to work at Kodak.  Or those in the horse and buggy biz when Henry Ford burst onto the scene.  Painful but reality.

[Laird]

OpenAI launches video model that can instantly create short clips from text prompts

By Ange Lavoipierre on 16 February, 2024 for ABC News

Mind-boggling AI is thick on the ground in 2024, but even the most hardened AI experts are impressed by OpenAI's new text-to-video tool, Sora.

"This appears to be a significant step," according to Professor Toby Walsh, Chief Scientist at the AI Institute, University of New South Wales.

Sora, which is Japanese for "empty sky", can create detailed and convincing videos up to a minute long from simple text prompts or a still image.

OpenAI launches video model that can instantly create short clips from text prompts

By Ange Lavoipierre on 16 February, 2024 for ABC News

It's a worrying development. OpenAI is going to digitally sign the content generated by their software, but imagine the impact of the influx of Russian and Chinese propaganda generated by their equivalents in a short while.

It's a worrying development. OpenAI is going to digitally sign the content generated by their software, but imagine the impact of the influx of Russian and Chinese propaganda generated by their equivalents in a short while.

We already have Youtube content creators who believe everything they see online and are eager to spread it and create conspiracy theories that others lap up.  It is dangerous and it is absurd that the people creating this AI software are either unaware, or just don't care about the danger.

We already have Youtube content creators who believe everything they see online and are eager to spread it and create conspiracy theories that others lap up.  It is dangerous and it is absurd that the people creating this AI software are either unaware, or just don't care about the danger.

As an example of the YouTube content you're referring to, I believe we will soon see tons of videos claiming the Earth is flat, perhaps even suggesting it's carried on the backs of two elephants.

As an example of the YouTube content you're referring to, I believe we will soon see tons of videos claiming the Earth is flat, perhaps even suggesting it's carried on the backs of two elephants.

Doesn't surprise me.  I'm a fan of Scimandan's Flat Earth  Friday where he is constantly debunking flat Earthers and it is bizarre what they believe or claim to believe.

A sign of the threatening times for a lot of jobs - humanoid AI driven robotic workers able to do tasks requiring some degree of dexterity plus mobility. It seems to me that the mass advent of this sort of AI technology is bound to cause a lot of suffering and turmoil in the job market and in the population in general.

From https://newatlas.com/robotics/openai-1x-...noid-work/ :

"(There is a lot of) excitement around general-purpose humanoid robot workers, a concept that's always seemed far off in the future, but that's gone absolutely thermonuclear in the last two years.

Norwegian AI humanoid robot maker 1X's humanoids look oddly undergunned next to what, say, Tesla, Figure, Sanctuary or Agility are working on. 
The Eve humanoid doesn't even have feet at this point, or dextrous humanoid hands. It rolls about on a pair of powered wheels, balancing on a third little castor wheel at the back, and its hands are rudimentary claws. It looks like it's dressed for a spot of luge, and has a dinky, blinky LED smiley face that gives the impression it's going to start asking for food and cuddles like a Tamagotchi. Note: Walking and multi-finger dexterity have already been solved by several companies.
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The vast majority of early use cases would appear to go like this: "pick that thing up, and put it over there" – you hardly need piano-capable fingers to do that. And the main place they'll be deployed is in flat, concrete-floored warehouses and factories, where they probably won't need to walk up stairs or step over anything.
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There's a whole stack of complete-looking robots, doing a whole stack of picking things up and putting things down. They grab 'em from ankle height and waist height. They stick 'em in boxes, bins and trays. They pick up toys off the floor and tidy 'em away.
They also open doors for themselves, and pop over to charging stations and plug themselves in, using what looks like a needlessly complex squatting maneuver to get the plug in down near their ankles.

In short, these jiggers are doing pretty much exactly what they need to do in early general-purpose humanoid use cases, trained, according to 1X, "purely end-to-end from data." Essentially, the company trained 30 Eve bots on a number of individual tasks each, apparently using imitation learning via video and human teleoperation . Then, they used these learned behaviors to train a "base model" capable of a broad set of actions and behaviors. That base model was then fine-tuned toward environment-specific capabilities – warehouse tasks, general door manipulation, etc – and then finally trained the bots on the specific jobs they had to do."

While I share concerns with the ongoing evolution of AI tech, I find myself wary of being alarmist.  I'm not sure this is fundamentally any different that many leaps of human technology/industry/engineering from our past.

I spend too much time on social media, especially of late.  While I try like hell to challenge my own biases, I feel like I'm holding on to my core belief in rationality.  That said the social media world, especially Twitter/X, seems like a cesspool of grifters, anarchists, and a lot of the irrational.  That's why I said I'm probably spending too much time there.  Its really quite depressing to see so many peddling partisan bullshit (both left/right) and especially so many who hold positions of real influence in the world.  (e.g., Musk, others)

Its always darkest before the dawn as they saying goes so I expect some of these AI developments to create real societal stress while we adjust to this new paradigm.  However, I also see the potential for amazing things in:

Medicine
Commerce
Increases (perhaps geometric) in Standards of Living
Transparency, education, exchanges of (real, thoughtful) ideas, etc

As always, we're a messy species.  We screw things up.  But most people that I personally know, those in my broadest social network (i.e., family, friends, business, etc.) are overwhelmingly good and kind people.  You don't get this sense scanning through Twitter, but I think its just the ugly, early stage of the digital landscape.

Time will tell I guess.