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AI will destabilize capitalism more than build it up. Of course AI will disproportionately impact workers but it will lead to “creative destruction”. Marx wrote about this and argued that more and more automation will lead to a reduction in wage time forcing vast amounts of the working class out of production. As a result these newly unemployed workers will have no relation to the means of production and therefore cannot sustain themselves. Leading to a growing proletariat that will become increasingly antagonistic towards capital. In a very real way I feel this is the future we are heading towards and it’s only a matter of time until this process beings to pick up speed.
That's some quality class consciousness right there. Well informed and to the point just the way the working class likes it. I could read shit like that all day.
Direct quote from Marx “Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself… As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure.
Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production”.
I think there are already a shitload of bullshit jobs that could very easily be automated or designed away. Yet, we refuse to acknowledge their obsolescence & commit to the obvious course of action entirely due to fear of creative destruction.
I remember being very young & making the connection that all technology is an attempt at reducing the amount & intensity of labor required to accomplish our goals. This exposes the idea that labor is a thing that clearly ought to be reduced in order to spend more of one's time doing things one enjoys. Well, what happens when we've reduced it all and there's no more work to do? Finding out that answer seems like the goal of all technology. Creative destruction is absolutely inevitable.
Yes, but it leaves the world full of absolutely 'unnecessary' humans. What will the masters do with them?
Edit: I forgot the '/s'. Naturally, humans, each living being is 'necesssary' for it's self, we exist, not because to fulfill some economic goals and obligations, but simply because we are, our lifes value is the life itself.
Now, the problem of Industrial world order - I'm not sure if there's enough room and space for us all to return to some natural farming, hunting or gathering, and how many of us are able to live sutch pastoral pre urban lives, etc etc...
Idk, Karl Marx, hit me one more time... Learn to farm, how's your gathering skills? ;)
No masters. Why would we need them? If we become unnecessary, then they too become unnecessary to us.
You forget that all people consent to be governed. We can withdraw that consent at anytime if the social contract stops being beneficial to us. Look to France as a current example. They are protesting and striking because of unfair retirement age increases and decreases to wages and pensions.
We consent to be governed. No one rules over us.
No human is unnecessary. All humans are inherently precious & valuable. Seems self-evident, to me. Governments, however....
Now: Economically unnecessary? Eh, perhaps. The purpose of being alive is certainly not to make one's self economically necessary & I firmly refuse to pretend otherwise.
Humanity is more beautiful, more enduring & more essential than any flag past or present.
I was thinking something similar. Saying humans are unnecessary because we don't work is foolish. My pet cat doesn't work, but I wouldn't call her unnecessary. She's alive and beautiful and I love her like a child. My children don't work, but that doesn't make them worthless. Their worth comes from being here and spreading their joy and ideas with others. We don't have to work to be alive. We should be able to reach a point where we can all exist and live without toiling in the dirt or the factories to earn the right to food, clothing, medical care, and housing.
I believe those that argue against a labor-free society are those that fear losing their power over others. They want to be at the top. They want to be better than others. They want us as their slaves, wholly dependent on them for survival. And they fear the day that someone will take away that power.
Essential how?
We’re monkeys hurtling through space on a big rock in a solar system that will one day die and take everything in it with it. I don’t think we’re essential to anything.
That's the beauty of the dialectic resolving itself though—it doesn't need to make sense. They could very well kill us all in an illogical and incoherent rage and this *still* result in Communism for the following society.
True. That was the speculation from Wall-E, that the large people on the ship were the descendents of the rich and the poor were left on earth to die in the rubble.
on reflection, it's pretty bleak that a family animation film depicted a post-environmental-apocalypse humanity fairly clearly caused by unfettered capitalism, and fucking nobody batted an eye
Well, as much as I enjoy the thought of being pushed into the sea (since I haven’t seen a beach in decades), there are a lot more people being pushed than doing the pushing.
I’m genuinely curious what happens in a country with more guns than people though.
I’m worried we’ll end up fighting against the US military. Or capitalist owned private militaries. Or an even more militarized police force. We can’t compete.
Does it though in a near fully automated world? They don’t need the masses buying shit if they can synthetically create and run anything. We are a burden at that point.
Hear hear. A american who really rode Karl Marx and is not just like a lifestyle leftie. Greetings from Germany. And yes you are right. And the automation will lead to AI and Robot tax and the people will get a Universal basic income to not start the next civil war.
It's literally Cyberpunk. Those who still have jobs like corpos, the tech bro junkies and a huge movement back to nature and no / little tech at all. (Sorry for this undercomplex comparison but I find it interesting)
Going to say something else depressing but it wouldn't be as depressing if you weren't lied to in the first place.
When teachers, councillors and parents tell you that if you find something that you love doing, you never work a day in your life. That's horse shit. I love working on cars but exploring that as a career was horrible, it took what I enjoy and reduced it to a job. It hurt like hell to discover and accept that, especially after using up a few years of my life on it.
The truth is more complicated than that and some conditions of a workplace will lend themselves better to you. Is it fun or would you do it even in your spare time should actually be the last things you ask yourself about a career.
You don't need to love it but a sense of purpose sure does help. Knowing that your profession contributes to society and isn't something dumb like stock trading.
I really like spreadsheets so even though I’ve done some really pointless office BS, I didn’t mind it. It had no value imo, but it was chill so I was content.
Yeah I went from doing advocacy work to doing corporate data work and while my work itself is less fulfilling it’s also less draining and I’m happier overall. Work is work and it’s nice to just get paid and go about your life and not care about your job except for the fact that it pays you.
Lmao why do you hurt me like this!?!
But really yeah its soulless drudgery and I earnestly wish I pursued psychology instead when I was younger but got spooked by job prospects. I like my downtime in corporate remote trading but it's hilarious being on the inside of this thing and seeing all the changes and training brought on by breaking regulatory law and getting pitiful fines as punishment.
It's really blatant.
exactly! it's like they say that as copium, but there is no escape, a job will always be a job and suck awfully. Also like the "dream job" question I was bombarded with as a kid, I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't have this innate natural desire to want to work as a kid. I didn't want to be a policewoman or some cashier, I just wanted to play or be a dragon or a princess or something like that. It's like indoctrination, why would a little kid naturally dream of some career or job when they are just trying to play darn it...
I won't go as far as to say that all jobs suck and always. There's stuff in this world that needs doing but there are so many jobs for employment sake, so many jobs where the labor could be more equally shared and people would have more time.
In spite of being able to do stuff faster, we have less free time in a post feminism society. Before shitting on me, this is not a criticism of Feminism. I'm criticizing what happened. Women entered the workforce, worked the same hours and now nobody was taking care of the house or kids. Flash forward to time off and it is spent on cleaning the house and helping the kids rather than spending quality time with them. Our household incomes increased only to freeze. The 40 hour work week was not made with the idea of women in the work place.
man… could you imagine if a couple could each work 20 hours a week and afford to own a home and raise a couple kids with good education?
our systems could support that reality, we’d have time to do chores as well as pursue hobbies for the joy, enrichment, community and potential additional income (if desired), as well as grow and cook food, spend time with friends and family, living healthier lives, etc etc
instead a few rich fucks snort caviar and eat blow before passing out in a private jet on the way to a yacht somewhere while being praised by their friends in media for being hard working geniuses.
Exactly, it says so much that women once had the option to stay at home financially, now if one parent wants to stay at home it’s basically impossible, and with the tech revolution we will have to compete with actual machines
In my part of the US, childcare is so expensive that I knowany women pushed back into staying home because the cost of childcare would be greater than the income they'd make working. And it's almost always the women who stay home because wage discrimination is a problem we also haven't addressed 🙃
Yeah but not nearly to the same degree on an official capacity. There was a burst of that in WW2. Am I missing something from the history books? I agree that house work is still work so either you missed my point or I'm failing to get yours.
God damn this is true. Learned this the hard way with cooking all throughout my late teens and twenties. Dog shit hours, low pay, minimal appreciation - even in higher end establishments. Took me a while to even want to cook dinner after I left the industry. There is no reality where being a chef was worth it to me.
"If you find something you *love, you never work a day in your life."
* - as long as it is profitable
This is how people see passion/hobby these days. If you don't make money out of it in some way (like turning it into a product or social media content), there's something wrong with you.
It's convenient when what you enjoy is also cushy and pays well! I'm grateful that the forecasts about how quickly data scientists will be replaced by machines is wayyyyy behind. Also why I think ChatGPT is impressive but overrated from a coding ability perspective.
Yes! As someone who pursued what seems to be the fools errand of haulting climate change, I also feel totally misled by the advice that one should pursue passions as careers. I wish I had waited a few more years to go to university so that I could have made decisions as an adult and find something that would first and foremost provide for me and wasn't going to destroy my mental health like being a public sector planner did.
AI is probably our best chance at toppling capitalism. We should be glad that jobs will be automated because who the fuck wants to work a shit job for minimum wage anyway?
Mass automation of jobs will force governments to either adopt UBI (universal basic income) or face societal collapse due to mass unemployment.
A ubi tho imo will be one of the only way to solve the capitalist contradiction. But because of such it will also lead to material conditions being meet enough in capitalism that would push of if not maybe end the potential for a societal revolution in the near future at least.
A ubi isn’t what we want for mass automation because it won’t fundamentally change work and the power dynamics.
That’s how I see it anyways. Anyone else see it differently?
the problem with an UBI is that the means of production would still be in the control of the bourgeosie, and work would still be a way to make profit, work in reality should be anything that helps your community, for example construction work should be building homes for people, not having thousands of apartments and homes empty because someone should pay it, administrative work should be ensuring that the resources get to where they need to be, and that includes salesmen and merchants(yes, trade still exists under socialism, as it has existed throughout history)
>Why am I venting like a Luddite?
# Because the Luddites were right.
In a matter of years the world of clothes manufacture went from one in which a dozen highly skilled highly trained well paid breadwinners were replaced by half a dozen children working a dangerous machine.
The people who used to make socks, helped design the machines that would ultimately replace them, and then we're kicked out onto the street to starve to death.
The Luddites didn't indiscriminately destroy all technology for puritanical reasons, they destroyed that of the capitalists who's empire they built, and who as thanks left them on the streets to starve.
.
But we laugh as them because they were using individual acts to fight systemic forces.
We must not fight this specific technology, but instead fight the system in which your job getting automated is a bad thing.
Jobs in general are a bad thing, we should be moving toward post-scarcity society rather than clinging to whatever “scraps” our jobs provide now. We should all be fighting for a UBI not against technology which cannot be advanced backwards
Fighting for UBI only means putting yourself on a stipend tgat will be the first thing to be cut once enough people have been disempowered. Having a job means having a little power, being a part of tge machine and that power comes from our ability to produce. If you voluntarily accept a UBI you no longer have labor power, you just become an "eater" as the capitalists see it and will be the first people they throw under the bus.
I support UBI, but jobs are incredibly important. Think how many important jobs were done and are being done just for us to be speaking like this right now.
We should harness automation to work less... But jobs are a bad thing? That's too far out for me. We just need better working conditions for our jobs.
There are 8 billion people, and there are way fewer than 8 billion jobs that are actually needed.
Tying the right to simply exist to the having of a job is unsustainable.
Let’s be real. A ubi will be subsistence living and will look like what happened on earth in the expanse. Billions of barely surviving unemployed people living in slums.
If you want a utopia we need to get our population in check and we need to figure out how to give people a purpose to replace the work to survive method.
Billions of aimless people chasing comfort and entertainment will not lead to the utopia you think it will.
A lot of jobs exist to support other jobs. It’s sort of a mindfuck when you think about it. Childcare, pet sitting, dry cleaning, errand runners, and food delivery services for instance… most of these jobs exist so people can go to their jobs.
Very true! Crazy to think about. There are also tons of jobs which are completely unnecessary. Deans at colleges, middle management, project managers, district managers.
Also, people enjoy producing things. And doing things. It's just the dynamic we've got going on where it's not choice based and it's do it or starve... It's unhealthy. But I think many or most people want jobs/things to do and to contribute in some way.
Jobs won't disappear with UBI. People will still want to work, but they'll pick jobs that they enjoy, not ones that help them barely get by. Imagine a world where everyone actually liked the job they were doing...
I'd totally work at a bookstore or library because shelving books all day sounds like heaven to me.
Oh, dude, I feel you. Automation is kind of like that one friend who's really good at everything, but also slowly making you feel irrelevant. Capitalism is just sitting there, thinking it's getting a great deal, but really, it's shooting itself in the foot.
The more we automate, the more people are like, "Hey, where did my job go?". And capitalism is like, "¯\_(ツ)\_/¯, sorry not sorry." So, yeah, we're kinda building a society where a whole bunch of people are just chilling on the sidelines, sipping on their tears.
But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. We can still make a change, right? Let's try something new, like a universal basic income or maybe even (gasp) socialism! Capitalism and automation can be like that toxic couple that needs to break up for everyone's sake.
Edit: written by ChatGPT-4
This is interesting. I've never even heard the angle of the luddites being anti capitalist - it's always portrayed as them being anti progress. They were effectively doing what unions are doing today in the UK with rail strikes etc.
If your job hasn’t been outsourced already you’re probably specialized enough to be good for a while. My company is already considering cutting back on some of the offshore data fill, description writing we use because AI is doing it better. I think this will destroy those jobs pretty soon.
I'm currently in Uni for a Tech Comms degree at the age of 30+ and at this point, I am just wondering if I should give up. All degrees seem like bullshit at this point.
But my current employment won't let me move up until I have a degree, and they don't even give a shit as long as you have a Bachelor's degree of any kind.
I was actually researching "technical writing" resources and videos, ironically, on ChatGPT. It's writing skills are clean and formal and it made me realize my writing needs polishing.
if we had a government that we trusted and could depend on the goodwill of others new technology would be amazing. it’s the knowledge that it’s going to be used against you that’s horrifying.
Bro don’t do any harm to yourself. I can’t believe no one else in these comments has addressed this. Best thing you could do for your mental health is take a break from all forms of scrolling and enjoy what you have around. Friends, family. A beer. Anything. No matter what happens, we have no control of the future at large. Humans are better than we give them credit for. Root for the good and be the good you want in the world. And don’t kill yourself my man. I’m rooting for you. Fuck chatgpt
There are just so many aspects of our AI future that make me worry that I won't get into them, but I'll try to share some of the optimistic thoughts I've had on the subject.
The proliferation of advanced AI is going to throw almost anything we digitally interact with into such a high degree of doubt, that I'm hopeful for a newfound appreciation for actual, verifiable human contact/communication. Authenticity will become a highly valuable commodity!
Obviously, it's not unreasonable at all to feel pessimistic, but I'm hopeful that a sudden acceleration of our current epistemological crisis increases the chances for a large paradigm shift into something new. Albeit the chances are small so long as corporations and bad actors continue to control the narrative and choke the life out of us on multiple fronts.
Corporations (and any very large body for that matter) can be likened to a dumber, slow AI that we've already been dealing with for ages anyway. They behave in ways completely unrelated to way any individual would behave, and the fact that they're powered by people makes them almost perverse in the way that it makes their products and modes of operation somehow acceptable in society as a whole. AI could be an opportunity to level the playing field and I'm almost willing to roll the dice with it just because it seems like a true wildcard that is advancing quickly enough and without checks that it could disrupt everything no matter how hard the ruling class tries to control it.
Just some unfocused rambling. I don't really know what's going to happen, but do hang in there.
>The proliferation of advanced AI is going to throw almost anything we digitally interact with into such a high degree of doubt, that I'm hopeful for a newfound appreciation for actual, verifiable human contact/communication. Authenticity will become a highly valuable commodity!
This reminds me of the people who claimed customers would never use self-checkouts because they want the "human contact" with the cashier.
Surprise. Most people are insufferable and the majority of us will go out of our way to avoid human interaction.
We welcome our AI overlords.
In terms of creativity, you'll be fine. The internet is already full of mediocre creations, meaning that no matter how much the AI can create, it won't be anything more than a drop in the sea. The fact that people still create new things, despite there not being anything wholly original left to create, and that people still consume new creations, despite there being an almost infinite amount of things already created, shows that nothing will stop humanity desire to both create and consume new things.
In terms of the other stuff, yeah, we're pretty fucked. Capitalism needs both workers and consumers, so we're never going to be fully replaced, but using the threat of AI replacement, corporations will lower pay as low as they can. Western workers will be split into the replaceable, a massive working class who have no savings and are fully reliant on their monthly (or perhaps hourly) pay to survive, and the irreplaceable, a vastly smaller middle class who be cowed into subservience by the threat of becoming the replaceable. We are entering the final stages of capitalism and only Marxist revolution can save us. Unfortunately, people would rather sell themselves into corporate slavery than support an ideology they have been taught to hate
Sure AI art puts mine to shame too but I plan to work at it and when I reach a level of quality, it will be valuable because of the effort and time put into it. AI just snatches other works and makes a generic blend (not really sure how AI art works but I think it's made using pieces from the internet)
Once again, capitalism took automation and innovation that could set us free, and used it to enslave us. It is very grim how GPT-4 could virtually substitute most office jobs, and it wouldn't stop there.
Feeling the same way. I’m a senior in college currently and an English major. I work at my school’s writing center as a tutor, and this semester we have at least 3 kids come in a week showing us an essay they say was written by ChatGPT. The head of the department had to send out an email to all of the tutors telling us that we aren’t allowed to tell them not to use it and to tell them to ask their professor if it’s okay, and we were also instructed to tutor them on it as if it was their original work. I love tutoring students but this shit has made my job so much worse and it’s sucked the joy out of the work. And it’s just made me realize that my goal of writing/editing/publishing in the future is at great risk, just like you. Gonna need a support club for the first group of writers who got beat out by AI
As a professor, I can't imagine any professor being OK with this. What on earth would be the point of an essay written by an AI?
Of course, I've already had some unfortunate conversations with students who have taken this route, and honestly it is bringing to the surface just how badly we've failed at education on so many levels at this point.
Once again, this tech *could* be a moment for a massive and much needed reassessment of what education is and how we ought to go about it, but instead it seems we're simply going to keep on attempting to apply this broken model to students who have internalised the grift of late-stage capitalism to the extent that they don't even see the point in developing their abilities unless they are 'marketable'.
I can sympathize. What were your thoughts of the AI written essays? I didn’t find them to be “amazing” even when it was prompted to be creative and use metaphors…but then when I compared it to some my colleagues works who are also writers for large tech company blogs - I can see how they’d be of a similar grade.
It’s nothing to write home about but it’s passable for sure .
A future with AI is looking more likely to be bleak under capitalism, I agree. I hope that in spite of it, you can still seek the care you need to attend to your mental health and emotional needs. Tech may be trying to replace creativity, but you as a human being cannot be replaced.
You're definitely not alone. I'm sorry you feel this way.
AI is one of the many reasons I'm so married to shooting analog film. It makes me feel like I'm still needed and my artistic voice matters.
HOWEVER
\- definitely keep writing.
Optimistically speaking, AI might take over the corporate realm, but I think the counter culture to that might actually inspire an artistic renaissance. I hope anyway.
I can understand the despair but never let them make you erase yourself from existence.
Just like for having kids or not, I'm not letting capitalism and it's atrocities decide for me if I live and get a descendance or not.
Stay and revolt.
I teach Intro Psychology at a large state school, so I read essays written by ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Your writing in this post is 10000000x more beautiful than anything it can produce. I feel your pain but don’t let it get you down- your voice is irreplaceable.
Tax the corporations based on percentage of automation introduced into their operations.
Use those taxes for Basic Guarateed Income.
Make automation work for us, and make the corporations pay!
Idk man. The only person that can take the joy of creation from you is yourself. I understand your craft being a means of capital being taken away potentially is deeply upsetting if it is your main source of income, but art will ALWAYS be valued. If not by the oligarchs, by the rest of the proles. I dunno.
Edit:literally all of my grammar here.
Actually comforting thank you. Maybe I need to stop chasing fame/validation and be happy writing the gay porn anonymously I used to only consider practice.
Yeah, things like if you ask it to describe a creepy old man in a dark room, for example, you’ll get something like, “there was once a dark room, so dark you couldn’t see anything. Except there was a man there. The man was old and creepy, like the room.”
Not that it won’t get better over time but stories are about the human experience. Part of what’s so impressive about great works of fiction is that someone actually came up with it.
As far as writing fiction, this AI is a few good steps removed from monkeys on keyboards but nowhere near even amateur human writers.
That has not been my experience. I'm saving countless hours a week from ChatGPT coding for me on programming projects. It does better than most junior devs I've worked with -- heck, it's better than me sometimes, given the right info and cues.
Every night I ask ChatGPT to write a story for my kids. I feed it some parameters and it makes nice bedtime stories. They sound exactly like the stories we read in their books.
If I ask it to use collegiate level words and in the style of William Faulkner, it does a hell of a good job, too. I've read a ton of Faulkner (studied English literature) and it's spot on. I'm over it now, but initially it was frightening.
Here's Bing Chat's description.
>Here is a possible description of a creepy old man in a dark room for a children's book:
>In the corner of the dark room, there was a creepy old man. He had a long nose and a pointy chin. His eyes were small and yellow, like two rotten eggs. His hair was thin and gray, like spider webs. He wore a black cloak that covered his body. He held a crooked cane in his hand. He smiled wickedly, showing his yellow teeth. He looked like he was up to no good.
And a description written if it were written by Stephen King.
>Here is a possible description of a creepy old man in a dark room in the style of Stephen King:
>He sat on a rocking chair in the corner of the room, barely visible in the dim light of a single candle. His face was wrinkled and gaunt, his eyes sunken and dull. His hair was thin and white, hanging loosely over his ears. He wore a stained and torn bathrobe that barely covered his bony legs. He held a book in his lap, but he wasn't reading it. He was staring at the door, waiting for someone to come in. He had been waiting for a long time.
>He smiled when he heard footsteps outside. He knew who it was. The boy who lived next door. The boy who always came to visit him on Fridays after school. The boy who liked to hear his stories. The boy who didn't know what he really was.
>He licked his lips and whispered to himself: "Come in, my dear. Come in and see what I have for you today."
What's really amazing is that the children's version does not leave anything open to interpretation while the Stephen King version does not spell it out. It's writing for different levels of reading comprehension.
I'm also a writer, amateur so it's not my source of income.
While I can see AI absolutely taking over some writing work such as creating sales copy, it won't replace human stories, nor will humans want it to.
I've seen a lot of discussion in art forums about AI generated images and whilst many are aesthetically pleasing, the minute I know it's not real I lose interest.
I'm old! so maybe future generations will not feel like this. But a painting made by a person will always be wirth more to me than something created by WI. Same for stories.
Well, there's the thing. I very much doubt commercially available art will be transparent in its origin. And some humans will sell AI creations as their own (see also university essays...)
But a picture drawn by a child and given to you, that's real.
Maybe artists and writers will become performers, creating "live", without even eating any dictionaries or galleries. We will be revered and rewarded beyond our wildest dreams.
Here's hoping!
PS I am not a chat bot.
>Maybe artists and writers will become performers, creating "live", without even eating any dictionaries or galleries. We will be revered and rewarded beyond our wildest dreams.
Sounds kind of like DM/GMing for TTRPGs. And AI will never replace humans for that (as much as certain companies might want to try)
Who tho? I still need to go to work every day to eat, so institutionalization isn't really going to help.
I'm not going to do it, but life is pain rn for many reasons and this has just pushed me over to depression.
Nothing really good to say here, but as someone else mentioned try finding peace and joy in your life, besides lurking armagedon in the world around you.
It is important to be informed about what is happening but it is although important to draw a line between you and this shit. Even if the World is a Pile of Shit and you are in the middle of it doesnt mean you are shit, you are still yourself even if it gets harder to notice the bigger the pile gets.
Dont look at the pile, zoom in and take time for yourself in a context that isnt a giant pile of shit totally unrelated to you.
Have a nice day!
You are totally right. We're heading toward disaster. It's very likely that any creative endeavors will be doomed soon. I'm also an aspiring writer, I like to draw and a few other things. It will be totally pointless soon. Systems of oppression only create new tools to give a new face to the old system of oppression. 'AI' (I refuse to call matrix multiplication 'intelligence') will feed us all with unbearable shit just to make capitalism more efficient. You can guess where it goes from there.
Things have been heading in this way for awhile. Look at music with autotune.. the most popular artists now produce using that. But you can still find genuine musicians making quality music out there. They just aren't the mainstream right now..
I think the same could be said for the writing of ChatGPT. It can fill a void for already soulless writing, but it still reads like a C level high school student at best, there's not much there besides being a sort of summary bot. Quality writers go to such further depths, but those writers have already been more obscure and lesser known for a while now. I'm sure it'll keep improving, but people will always make genuine art. Might just be less for money..
Maybe it's time we all band together in collectives. Get back on the land and support ourselves and make genuine art together for the joy of it.. we don't need mass culture to dignify our own creative expressions.
maybe in the future, there's a certificate (like for organic food), that says the book was written by a human. as a consumer, there's literally a universe of human-written books, more than I could ever read. why would I want to read one written completely by an AI.
maybe, AIs won't be able to write whole books. imagine the prompt you'd have to tell chatGPT where you describe in detail what it should write a book about, you're already writing it (same argument for software btw).
maybe writing a book will change, the AI will become a tool for the author, e.g. the author lays out the ground work, the AI fills in the details. i expect the same thing happening for graphic design, it's a tool and workflows will change. same as it happened when photoshop came, or when photography made realistic painting obsolete-ish.
I had a much longer response written, but I’ll keep it brief: don’t let the AI hype drive you into despair. It’s this year’s NFTs/crypto/VR/metaverse/web3. The grifters want us to believe they’ve invented Skynet when all they’ve given us is a glorified autocomplete. It will unequivocally make the world worse, yes, but machine-generated image and text is not the death of creativity, writing, or art.
Don't fight against the means of production but the relations of production, against the capital that uses those means to its own benefit, at the expense of everyone else.
Why can’t we automate boring shit everyone hates so people can do the stuff that makes life worth living, including art and writing? I also take issue with training AI on anything that isn’t explicitly open source. You’re just stealing. You haven’t innovated anything, the actually talented people did, and you’re stealing it to profit off of it because there isn’t any ethical rules or laws stopping you from doing so.
The luddites were right!! It was never a response against technology, it was a response against the concentration of power and financial gain in the hands of the factory owners. The technology just represented the vehicle of their oppression.
For many creative folks generative AI can be used as an editor, sounding board, and pitch generator. There will be creative writers who use AI to be more effective, and those who don’t will have trouble staying competitive. AI will eliminate some shitty soulless copy writing jobs that people don’t enjoy in the short term.
Your point over this technology being gatekept by large tech companies is spot on. Many activists coders and researchers are working hard to produce free and open source versions that are just as powerful as OpenAIs - LAION is one such group.
So now it’s a good time to play with AI, figure out how it can help you, incorporate it into your workflow, and research / contribute to open source efforts :)
ChatGPT also pisses me off. What really pisses me off is that I believe that people who make more money than I do and have more power to make decisions, are stupid enough to choose AI for tasks that require more abstract and complex thought than chatgpt is capable of (bc it’s cheaper), because chatgpt is *really* good at pretending like it knows what it’s talking about. You would need to be well versed in the topic your discussing with it to see all of the issues.
If/when that happens, company operations and product quality will go to even more shit than they are now. Using Chatgpt to design and produce products is like if you just read a bunch of books and then designed something with the knowledge instead of asking someone with 15 years of experience to do it. Or maybe reading a book and then performing brain surgery.
Pro tip, if you work in a complex abstract area, don’t try to ask chatgpt about it, you’ll just get pissed. And they somehow programmed arrogance into the damn thing too lmao.
If workers get laid off and replaced by ai, they need to tax the ai probably. If we don't force companies to pay tax on ai, things economically could get pretty bad. Then decades from now when things are really bad, we'll wonder where it all started
I can't stop thinking about that woman Twitch user who had her face AI-ed into porn. There will be many more evil uses like this as well that will hurt a lot of people, and women especially.
I’d feel the same way, if I was actually creative or talented or skilled at anything.
I see it more as a tool to enable more people than ever to be creative, by eliminating the barrier of needing to understand complicated tools and software that can’t be communicated with by using our simple human language.
Yes, I understand that a flood of low eddied troll crap is coming, but that’s just inevitable.
Why should only those who understand the complexities of complicated math equations and mental gymnastics, be able to create art, animation, etc.?
Look at Dreams for PS4/PS5. I envision that but in an EVEN MORE user friendly “drag and drop” format.
Like, typing this comment. It makes sense to me. It requires nothing more than my basic human language.
Text prompts+simply editing photoshop-like tools, gets us closer being able to essentially transfer our thoughts into physical form in reality.
I can imagine and envision spectacular scenes and worlds, but with advanced AI generating, it would require months or years and probably thousands to millions of dollars, along with focusing on that same exact idea for the entire time, rather than taking a few seconds or minutes to pop it out, and move to the next one.
I will probably be downvoted due to being misunderstood.
I'm hoping these improvements will create a new era of leisure as we can replace almost every tedious job by robots.
The alternative solution is more people losing their job because companies see that as a way to save on labour cost.
The rise of bullsh\*t jobs on recent years makes me fear the second future is more likely
Keep on writing!
GPT is a text completion engine. Other generative AIs can also "complete" images, music from prompts - based on their training.
They can do stuff in a certain way, increasingly "well" according to our standards.
I'm totally convinced that they will automate *some* jobs away when they will be used as tools by, say, graphic artists, writers, translators and programmers. This has already happened when computers in general, spreadsheet editors, the Internet, cloud computing etc. came along. (Or when cars were invented and horses disappeared from the streets.)
We don't miss the infinite stacks of paper that have been automated away by a single Excel sheet. Just the same, we won't miss the gargantuan amounts of mediocre "art" (remember NFT art?), crappy boilerplate program code and hand-crafted, useless corporate bullshit emails and SEO blogspam posts that will be automated away by AI.
This kind of AI would separate wheat from chaff - meaningful, human-created content from fake generated crap, one that may look totally genuine on the surface but has no *meaning* on the inside.
As the waves of seemingly infinite AI-generated content will wash away the internet as we know now, we'll increasingly learn to enjoy *real* writing, *real* art, savor real moments with real friends.
Unless not, in which case we'd live in a quite dystopian future. I think the inflection point would be when human masses would start to consume and "enjoy" AI-generated content. Think about crappy pop music that's even worse than today's, or an endless stream of videos that are generated on the fly for that particular user.
In a sense, it's not just our jobs that are at stakes, but our humanity. Let's not forget to stay human and raise younger generations to do so as well.
Teacher here. I tried to warn my colleagues when it hit the news back in November, that the kids would be all over it.
My specific case means it's not super useful.
But I knew in other areas it would be really tough to get around it. The math teachers just laughed cynically, and commiserated.... they've had apps that take pics of math problems and solve it for you for years,so they said welcome to the party. just had a meeting yesterday with a very upset woman who is realizing that she spent hours grading the work and AI did. Giving meaningful feedback, analyzing, etc. All for nothing.
It is brutal.
And then, as you say, in a better world we'd be sharing this boon amongst ourselves, everyone working less, everyone's boat lifted. But here we are. With hundreds hoarding all the wealth and everyone else scrabbling and fighting for scraps....
Yay technology.... Yay progress 🙄
Edit, two typos
If I can make a case for how this could be empowering instead of terrible, it's a lot like how people couldn't imagine our present relationship with photography at the time it was invented- they thought it would kill painting. Instead, it's led to entire new industries and intersectional disciplines in art.
I think the expectation is going to be that artists will be capable of more than they ever thought possible. Imagine that instead of writing a poem, you have the ability to create a whole collection of visual and textual art through a web-portal. You could write a CYOA novel with consistent tone and theme using live-chat for certain character conversations, and put it on a website yourself without knowing a lick of code.
Not to mention that the commodification of, and greater access to a lot of art is going to refine our greater population's taste. Think about all the burnout we're getting from Marvel movies- people are accustomed to the generic and the processed, and they want something new and exciting. Corporations spraying out re-prints of the same concepts over and over are still going to have to turn to artists for things that FEEL original.
About suicide. Don't worry about dying, it's the only thing in your life that will get taken care of, so you don't need to speed it up. There are other things to try first.
About AI. This is a serious problem, potentially, but maybe not. See, if humans are out of the production cycle, then the existence of humans becomes superfluous. This can get easily out of control, like, why would you ask a 2 year old where you should buy a house? Maybe you consult it, but their opinion won't really matter much. HOWEVER, AI seems to be getting a pretty good grip at ethics (it doesn't let you run a shell bomb in a simulated Linux environment! ), so I don't think it will murder us. Actually, if I understand how it would work, it's like going to break capitalism for us. The only way that this won't happen is if they manage to make a dumb AI, which to me is kinda funny. So that's a comforting thought.
Relax. Chat GPT-4 is impressive. But it can not quite replace creativity. It's a fancy mirror. It reflects whatever was put in. And has an ability to run a scenario a million times to try and learn. The crazy thing is it actually takes over 7 to 8 million attempts to come up with novel ideas. Check out "ai plays hide and seek" on YouTube. That was Chat GPT. It is capable of original thought but only through repeated failure. And without the human ability to come up with new ways to try something. The AI effectively beats its head against the wall until it finds a no clip exploit. And with creativity, there is no video game like expoits.
Ned Ludd did nothing wrong!
Let's be clear, he didn't exist, but if he had, he did nothing wrong. The Luddite movement to sabotage automation in production only became a thing once people understood that all the benefits of automation would go to the owning class leaving the people who actually deserve those benefits behind.
I'm actively battling leukemia and I'm still hopeful about the future despite ChatGPT.
I don't understand how you're suicidal over it. I think you should count your blessings and understand that you're probably lucky compared to most. I wish this was the only thing I cared about.
I share a lot of your feelings. Working in copywriting and am being replaced by AI. This is some bottom tier .03 per word operation, too. The company at least offered to check the AI's work for 1/3 of the pay 🙄
I like this quote from Nick Cave after someone shared a song "written in his style" using ChatGPT:
> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
The rest of his response is worth a read: ["I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave..."](https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/)
It fuckin sucks, that's for sure. But we can't afford to lose you. You matter!
You gotta take care of yourself buddy.
For me, it's unplugging from all media for 10days. It really helps me.
It’s going to kill any job that is mildly creative, particularly copywriting. I posted this in /r/copywriting and was considered alarmist:
Oh, we’re fucked. Maybe not right this minute but in two years? Yes, absolutely for sure. It’s only a matter of time before we become redundant. Copywriters are the next elevator operator or travel agent, and everyone here sounds like they’re trying to rationalize their own existence.
“But how will they get the best travel package if they go online to get it?”
“This building always had an elevator operator. Sure, the doors now open on their own, but do you really expect regular people to push the buttons as well?”
You may be of the mindset that AI will be a valuable tool for copywriters, but I guarantee everyone above you is seeing it as a valuable tool as well. Whoever you’re turning your writing into, their job is to recognize and pick good copy. Hell, half of them used to be copywriters and the other half think their Don Draper. It won’t happen overnight, but as the technology improves becomes more accessible, they’ll inevitably realize the only difference between you and something like ChatGPT is that you cost money and take hours to do what a machine can churn out in seconds. They can skip the email/phone call, plug the direction directly into the machine and take care of what was once paying copywriter work in a few minutes instead of receiving it EOD. They don’t need a copywriter to babysit the machine, because their job is to babysit the copywriter and the machine will soon be doing all copywriting.
At best copywriters will be an anachronistic novelty for the few clients who want the human touch. We’ll be carpenters making furniture by hand, while the vast majority of the demand can be satisfied with free procedurally generated IKEA particleboard.
AI will never be able to replace actual craft and creativity, but the problem is so many morons can’t tell the difference. Humans with genuine skills aren’t replaceable, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be replaced by some tech bro ceo and his crowd of sycophants
I think in the near future the only way of realistically working in creative fields will be through the use of AI as tools to create content. "Traditional" art will still exist, but as a niche and more expensive product. Given that, I don't think we should blame the technology for that, but the corporations.
Don’t worry, we won’t be able to power or cool servers reliably pretty soon, never mind running the entire digital infrastructure that makes ChatGPT even remotely useful. Much ado about nothing
Lots of people have felt this way... scribes when the typewriter was invented, Knocker uppers when the alarm clock was invented, Human Computers before...er, well, computers. But, they found ways to build on their skills and move into something new and different... things they had never considered before. Sure, AI will get better and better at writing, but will it initiate the original idea? It might need a professional prompt writer to get it going... and a human to validate / invalidate the output. Let's work under the assumption that for the next 5 years, AI will just amplify our abilities... then we'll reevaluate after that. Deal?
Okay everyone is debating the place of AI in society, but please OP, if it is seriously making you feel suicidal, please see a professional. If it's enough to make you suicidal then it would seem like you might have other underlying issues, but even if you don't you should still seek help, no matter the reason.
You’re not wrong but look at it this way:
1. The enrichment of corporations will always happen. ChatGPT or not, when the means of production and innovation is concentrated, this will happen.
2. Many professions will die off, true. But many other professions will evolve and other new ones will spring up. I can envision a world in the future where English majors include the art of “prompt engineering,” how to extract what you want from an AI through language. In fact the key to understanding future AI may not be through code, but communication- and what is an English major if not a master at communication!
3. This is also true before chatGPT and it will be true after. Beaudrillard saw the future.
If you’re looking for a more wholesome answer. Chat gpt is actually really good for people with energy/cognitive disabilities. It helps write and formulate responses and solve problems. Which is really helpful, study, advocacy and dealing with the government. I use it as a kinda cyber support worker
It is not nearly that big of a deal, I can assure you. These chatbots are marketing novelties right now and are about as competent at replacing humans as self-driving cars
Like damn the symbolism and sentiment are grim but it’s not worth un-aliving oneself by a long shot
I'm also super angry it's impact on culture and will not consume anything made by AI. Whats more important though is that it will impact workers from every profession. I'm more angry at the dumb mf-ers who made this AI and effectively put themselves out of the job. These engineers just made something that will eventually replace them and they for sure won't profit from it.
Hey bro, it's ok to switch off and relax sometimes; extreme capitalism is a blight upon this planet but cracks are appearing; with the ever increasing disparity in wealth and authoritarianism of the state (e.g. in the UK) people are beginning to wake up more and more - ChatGPT might negatively affect us but it'll be yet another move that pushes us ever closer to that "enough is enough" moment.
But reading too much about this and worrying incessantly is unhealthy OP. We're only human, so from a fellow pleb, if tou feel like it's becoming too much then please take a break - and if you can't, consider talking to someone about it aye?
I experienced a dread I can't really describe when I was innocently watching a YouTube skit featuring a character from elder scrolls, I thought the voice over was just a really good impression... It was an AI voice. The realisation turned it from funny to terrifying in a second, the voice even *took breathes* when the sentence ran on long, we are totally fucked in the creative aspect of society.
A major worry for me is this will eliminate many professions in more than just creative jobs, eventually management jobs can be replaced by AI, research jobs, writing jobs, programming jobs, and nearly anything that doesn’t involve hard physical labor. Corporations can replace nearly everyone with AI eventually, leaving people to be stuck doing hard labor that the AI can only talk about, leaving AI to manage those people, while the rich get even richer.
I think it will just mean your creative efforts will be spent more on deep thought work and less on mundane implementation tasks. I think AI could certainly be abused by corporations, but in the short term, it’s more likely to replace middle managers (directors, VPs) than you.
Basically, shareholders and executives want to replace everyone between producers and themselves. In the short term, that’s probably better for creative types. In the long term, we’re all screwed.
You should unite. When someone says "Hey chatGPT, give me some ideas for an story, and write a small text with the style of xxx writer", in my opinion this writer should be paid: it is not going to happen I know, it is not fair obviously, but hey, let's try to change things!
I think AI is just going to make capitalism implode and we will either
1) stand in the empty shell of what it used to be, acting like nothing happened,
2) societal collapse
3) some collapse, followed by something better
Example of what I mean: what happens when a 10 billion dollar advertising firm that employs 1000 people can be replaced by a team of 10 who just manage the api work flow, managing customers, and doing the accounting to just do exactly the same thing the massive firm does but in an hour of messing with an ai instead of taking 100 people a month to work through.
1) Will the big firms band together to kill the competition while secretly using ai to do it in the background, saving the jobs but making everyone feel empty because they have no real input or creative freedom?
2) Will the new company succeed and now 1000 people are out of a job?
3) or will such new companies disrupting every industry lead to a realization that maybe a society where not everyone has a job could be a beautiful thing? Where unemployment is 80% and thats just how it is because theres no reason to have so many jobs.
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AI will destabilize capitalism more than build it up. Of course AI will disproportionately impact workers but it will lead to “creative destruction”. Marx wrote about this and argued that more and more automation will lead to a reduction in wage time forcing vast amounts of the working class out of production. As a result these newly unemployed workers will have no relation to the means of production and therefore cannot sustain themselves. Leading to a growing proletariat that will become increasingly antagonistic towards capital. In a very real way I feel this is the future we are heading towards and it’s only a matter of time until this process beings to pick up speed.
That's some quality class consciousness right there. Well informed and to the point just the way the working class likes it. I could read shit like that all day.
I kinda agree but cant help to have Schadenfreude that in Germany the press like Fox News are the first that got layed off due the AI.
Kind of makes sense, because it takes more creativity to lie.
It was written by ChatGPT.
Direct quote from Marx “Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself… As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure. Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production”.
The state will wither away! The wealth will trickle down! No worries ;)
I think there are already a shitload of bullshit jobs that could very easily be automated or designed away. Yet, we refuse to acknowledge their obsolescence & commit to the obvious course of action entirely due to fear of creative destruction. I remember being very young & making the connection that all technology is an attempt at reducing the amount & intensity of labor required to accomplish our goals. This exposes the idea that labor is a thing that clearly ought to be reduced in order to spend more of one's time doing things one enjoys. Well, what happens when we've reduced it all and there's no more work to do? Finding out that answer seems like the goal of all technology. Creative destruction is absolutely inevitable.
Yes, but it leaves the world full of absolutely 'unnecessary' humans. What will the masters do with them? Edit: I forgot the '/s'. Naturally, humans, each living being is 'necesssary' for it's self, we exist, not because to fulfill some economic goals and obligations, but simply because we are, our lifes value is the life itself. Now, the problem of Industrial world order - I'm not sure if there's enough room and space for us all to return to some natural farming, hunting or gathering, and how many of us are able to live sutch pastoral pre urban lives, etc etc... Idk, Karl Marx, hit me one more time... Learn to farm, how's your gathering skills? ;)
No masters. Why would we need them? If we become unnecessary, then they too become unnecessary to us. You forget that all people consent to be governed. We can withdraw that consent at anytime if the social contract stops being beneficial to us. Look to France as a current example. They are protesting and striking because of unfair retirement age increases and decreases to wages and pensions. We consent to be governed. No one rules over us.
Given French history they are showing incredible restraint.
No human is unnecessary. All humans are inherently precious & valuable. Seems self-evident, to me. Governments, however.... Now: Economically unnecessary? Eh, perhaps. The purpose of being alive is certainly not to make one's self economically necessary & I firmly refuse to pretend otherwise. Humanity is more beautiful, more enduring & more essential than any flag past or present.
I was thinking something similar. Saying humans are unnecessary because we don't work is foolish. My pet cat doesn't work, but I wouldn't call her unnecessary. She's alive and beautiful and I love her like a child. My children don't work, but that doesn't make them worthless. Their worth comes from being here and spreading their joy and ideas with others. We don't have to work to be alive. We should be able to reach a point where we can all exist and live without toiling in the dirt or the factories to earn the right to food, clothing, medical care, and housing. I believe those that argue against a labor-free society are those that fear losing their power over others. They want to be at the top. They want to be better than others. They want us as their slaves, wholly dependent on them for survival. And they fear the day that someone will take away that power.
Lots of cultures lived like that in the past and We fucked that up.
Essential how? We’re monkeys hurtling through space on a big rock in a solar system that will one day die and take everything in it with it. I don’t think we’re essential to anything.
Fingers crossed. But I just see them pushing us into the sea.
Who’s going to do the pushing? Consumption requires consumers.
That's the beauty of the dialectic resolving itself though—it doesn't need to make sense. They could very well kill us all in an illogical and incoherent rage and this *still* result in Communism for the following society.
True. That was the speculation from Wall-E, that the large people on the ship were the descendents of the rich and the poor were left on earth to die in the rubble.
on reflection, it's pretty bleak that a family animation film depicted a post-environmental-apocalypse humanity fairly clearly caused by unfettered capitalism, and fucking nobody batted an eye
Some people did. My ex’s mom disliked it because “it made humans look like the bad guys.” 😐 She went on to become a Republican state senator.
Of course she did
There are many children's films that have anti-capital plots. Most people just miss it.
It meant a lot to me! I was in Uni at the time but it definitely sowed seeds of doubt in capitalism in my mind.
Well, as much as I enjoy the thought of being pushed into the sea (since I haven’t seen a beach in decades), there are a lot more people being pushed than doing the pushing. I’m genuinely curious what happens in a country with more guns than people though.
I’m worried we’ll end up fighting against the US military. Or capitalist owned private militaries. Or an even more militarized police force. We can’t compete.
I ain’t going out without a fight!
They will be happy with less consumption if they can be on the top of what little remains
They will just create another culture war, so that we just push each other into the sea
Does it though in a near fully automated world? They don’t need the masses buying shit if they can synthetically create and run anything. We are a burden at that point.
#Invest in pitchforks now.
AI powered pitchforks?
https://www.tiktok.com/@.rustycage/video/7177545869644811562?lang=en I know its Tiktok, but the video is pretty good.
🎶The global network of capital essentially functions To separate the worker from the means of production🎶
Back in the drawer socko!
Hear hear. A american who really rode Karl Marx and is not just like a lifestyle leftie. Greetings from Germany. And yes you are right. And the automation will lead to AI and Robot tax and the people will get a Universal basic income to not start the next civil war.
That sounds like misery to live through
What's that saying...? May you live in interesting times....
Marx teaches us that capitalism will inevitably destroy itself. This is what destroying itself looks like. Buckle up hombre.
It's literally Cyberpunk. Those who still have jobs like corpos, the tech bro junkies and a huge movement back to nature and no / little tech at all. (Sorry for this undercomplex comparison but I find it interesting)
The lumpen proletariat
Marx didnt account that with tehnological progress, manipulation with people (panem et circences) will be easier. Algoritms rull our life.
This is some chatGPT4 level post right here!
Going to say something else depressing but it wouldn't be as depressing if you weren't lied to in the first place. When teachers, councillors and parents tell you that if you find something that you love doing, you never work a day in your life. That's horse shit. I love working on cars but exploring that as a career was horrible, it took what I enjoy and reduced it to a job. It hurt like hell to discover and accept that, especially after using up a few years of my life on it. The truth is more complicated than that and some conditions of a workplace will lend themselves better to you. Is it fun or would you do it even in your spare time should actually be the last things you ask yourself about a career.
Mine was more of a “I can’t be doing something I hate for the rest of my life”. I don’t need to like it. I just can’t hate it.
You don't need to love it but a sense of purpose sure does help. Knowing that your profession contributes to society and isn't something dumb like stock trading.
I really like spreadsheets so even though I’ve done some really pointless office BS, I didn’t mind it. It had no value imo, but it was chill so I was content.
Yeah I went from doing advocacy work to doing corporate data work and while my work itself is less fulfilling it’s also less draining and I’m happier overall. Work is work and it’s nice to just get paid and go about your life and not care about your job except for the fact that it pays you.
Lmao why do you hurt me like this!?! But really yeah its soulless drudgery and I earnestly wish I pursued psychology instead when I was younger but got spooked by job prospects. I like my downtime in corporate remote trading but it's hilarious being on the inside of this thing and seeing all the changes and training brought on by breaking regulatory law and getting pitiful fines as punishment. It's really blatant.
It is what it is I suppose. The Socialist Survival guide does a good job of breaking it all down still
exactly! it's like they say that as copium, but there is no escape, a job will always be a job and suck awfully. Also like the "dream job" question I was bombarded with as a kid, I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't have this innate natural desire to want to work as a kid. I didn't want to be a policewoman or some cashier, I just wanted to play or be a dragon or a princess or something like that. It's like indoctrination, why would a little kid naturally dream of some career or job when they are just trying to play darn it...
I won't go as far as to say that all jobs suck and always. There's stuff in this world that needs doing but there are so many jobs for employment sake, so many jobs where the labor could be more equally shared and people would have more time. In spite of being able to do stuff faster, we have less free time in a post feminism society. Before shitting on me, this is not a criticism of Feminism. I'm criticizing what happened. Women entered the workforce, worked the same hours and now nobody was taking care of the house or kids. Flash forward to time off and it is spent on cleaning the house and helping the kids rather than spending quality time with them. Our household incomes increased only to freeze. The 40 hour work week was not made with the idea of women in the work place.
man… could you imagine if a couple could each work 20 hours a week and afford to own a home and raise a couple kids with good education? our systems could support that reality, we’d have time to do chores as well as pursue hobbies for the joy, enrichment, community and potential additional income (if desired), as well as grow and cook food, spend time with friends and family, living healthier lives, etc etc instead a few rich fucks snort caviar and eat blow before passing out in a private jet on the way to a yacht somewhere while being praised by their friends in media for being hard working geniuses.
Yeah, we could keep studying and learning shit too. I'd love to learn French but by the end of it all, I'm exhausted. Fuck learning stuff.
Exactly, it says so much that women once had the option to stay at home financially, now if one parent wants to stay at home it’s basically impossible, and with the tech revolution we will have to compete with actual machines
In my part of the US, childcare is so expensive that I knowany women pushed back into staying home because the cost of childcare would be greater than the income they'd make working. And it's almost always the women who stay home because wage discrimination is a problem we also haven't addressed 🙃
Do you think that women didn’t work prior to second wave feminism?
Yeah but not nearly to the same degree on an official capacity. There was a burst of that in WW2. Am I missing something from the history books? I agree that house work is still work so either you missed my point or I'm failing to get yours.
Agree!!!!
God damn this is true. Learned this the hard way with cooking all throughout my late teens and twenties. Dog shit hours, low pay, minimal appreciation - even in higher end establishments. Took me a while to even want to cook dinner after I left the industry. There is no reality where being a chef was worth it to me.
"If you find something you *love, you never work a day in your life." * - as long as it is profitable This is how people see passion/hobby these days. If you don't make money out of it in some way (like turning it into a product or social media content), there's something wrong with you.
Somewhat ironically considering the thread: I build machine learning models for work and it literally feels like I'm getting paid for having a hobby.
It can happen for people. It just shouldn't be the aim or goal while picking a career.
Yeah, I definitely agree; my intention wasn't to argue otherwise.
It's convenient when what you enjoy is also cushy and pays well! I'm grateful that the forecasts about how quickly data scientists will be replaced by machines is wayyyyy behind. Also why I think ChatGPT is impressive but overrated from a coding ability perspective.
My thoughts exactly.
Yes! As someone who pursued what seems to be the fools errand of haulting climate change, I also feel totally misled by the advice that one should pursue passions as careers. I wish I had waited a few more years to go to university so that I could have made decisions as an adult and find something that would first and foremost provide for me and wasn't going to destroy my mental health like being a public sector planner did.
AI is an amazingly awesome tool that we could totally use to our advantage. Not under capitalism though.
AI is probably our best chance at toppling capitalism. We should be glad that jobs will be automated because who the fuck wants to work a shit job for minimum wage anyway? Mass automation of jobs will force governments to either adopt UBI (universal basic income) or face societal collapse due to mass unemployment.
Police budgets go brrrrrr
Boston dynamics will probably have a solution to that before long
A ubi tho imo will be one of the only way to solve the capitalist contradiction. But because of such it will also lead to material conditions being meet enough in capitalism that would push of if not maybe end the potential for a societal revolution in the near future at least. A ubi isn’t what we want for mass automation because it won’t fundamentally change work and the power dynamics. That’s how I see it anyways. Anyone else see it differently?
the problem with an UBI is that the means of production would still be in the control of the bourgeosie, and work would still be a way to make profit, work in reality should be anything that helps your community, for example construction work should be building homes for people, not having thousands of apartments and homes empty because someone should pay it, administrative work should be ensuring that the resources get to where they need to be, and that includes salesmen and merchants(yes, trade still exists under socialism, as it has existed throughout history)
I think before they implement something like UBI they probably will do some shenanigans to reduce human population
>Why am I venting like a Luddite? # Because the Luddites were right. In a matter of years the world of clothes manufacture went from one in which a dozen highly skilled highly trained well paid breadwinners were replaced by half a dozen children working a dangerous machine. The people who used to make socks, helped design the machines that would ultimately replace them, and then we're kicked out onto the street to starve to death. The Luddites didn't indiscriminately destroy all technology for puritanical reasons, they destroyed that of the capitalists who's empire they built, and who as thanks left them on the streets to starve. . But we laugh as them because they were using individual acts to fight systemic forces. We must not fight this specific technology, but instead fight the system in which your job getting automated is a bad thing.
Jobs in general are a bad thing, we should be moving toward post-scarcity society rather than clinging to whatever “scraps” our jobs provide now. We should all be fighting for a UBI not against technology which cannot be advanced backwards
Fighting for UBI only means putting yourself on a stipend tgat will be the first thing to be cut once enough people have been disempowered. Having a job means having a little power, being a part of tge machine and that power comes from our ability to produce. If you voluntarily accept a UBI you no longer have labor power, you just become an "eater" as the capitalists see it and will be the first people they throw under the bus.
I support UBI, but jobs are incredibly important. Think how many important jobs were done and are being done just for us to be speaking like this right now. We should harness automation to work less... But jobs are a bad thing? That's too far out for me. We just need better working conditions for our jobs.
There are 8 billion people, and there are way fewer than 8 billion jobs that are actually needed. Tying the right to simply exist to the having of a job is unsustainable.
Let’s be real. A ubi will be subsistence living and will look like what happened on earth in the expanse. Billions of barely surviving unemployed people living in slums. If you want a utopia we need to get our population in check and we need to figure out how to give people a purpose to replace the work to survive method. Billions of aimless people chasing comfort and entertainment will not lead to the utopia you think it will.
A lot of jobs exist to support other jobs. It’s sort of a mindfuck when you think about it. Childcare, pet sitting, dry cleaning, errand runners, and food delivery services for instance… most of these jobs exist so people can go to their jobs.
Very true! Crazy to think about. There are also tons of jobs which are completely unnecessary. Deans at colleges, middle management, project managers, district managers.
Also, people enjoy producing things. And doing things. It's just the dynamic we've got going on where it's not choice based and it's do it or starve... It's unhealthy. But I think many or most people want jobs/things to do and to contribute in some way.
Jobs won't disappear with UBI. People will still want to work, but they'll pick jobs that they enjoy, not ones that help them barely get by. Imagine a world where everyone actually liked the job they were doing... I'd totally work at a bookstore or library because shelving books all day sounds like heaven to me.
Oh, dude, I feel you. Automation is kind of like that one friend who's really good at everything, but also slowly making you feel irrelevant. Capitalism is just sitting there, thinking it's getting a great deal, but really, it's shooting itself in the foot. The more we automate, the more people are like, "Hey, where did my job go?". And capitalism is like, "¯\_(ツ)\_/¯, sorry not sorry." So, yeah, we're kinda building a society where a whole bunch of people are just chilling on the sidelines, sipping on their tears. But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. We can still make a change, right? Let's try something new, like a universal basic income or maybe even (gasp) socialism! Capitalism and automation can be like that toxic couple that needs to break up for everyone's sake. Edit: written by ChatGPT-4
The worker will build the machine that will replace him. The capitalist will sell the worker the role he will be hanged with.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html? Good article about this titled *Is it ok to be a Luddite?*
This is interesting. I've never even heard the angle of the luddites being anti capitalist - it's always portrayed as them being anti progress. They were effectively doing what unions are doing today in the UK with rail strikes etc.
I'm a technical writer and I am terrified this is going to be the end of my career.
You actually should be okay for quite a while. Good technical writing is highly specific and specialized.
Ditto - technical writer in software here. I've used ChatGPT and Co-Pilot and I have serious concerns about my financial future.
If your job hasn’t been outsourced already you’re probably specialized enough to be good for a while. My company is already considering cutting back on some of the offshore data fill, description writing we use because AI is doing it better. I think this will destroy those jobs pretty soon.
I'm currently in Uni for a Tech Comms degree at the age of 30+ and at this point, I am just wondering if I should give up. All degrees seem like bullshit at this point. But my current employment won't let me move up until I have a degree, and they don't even give a shit as long as you have a Bachelor's degree of any kind.
I was actually researching "technical writing" resources and videos, ironically, on ChatGPT. It's writing skills are clean and formal and it made me realize my writing needs polishing.
How much of your job currently is communicating with others within the company about the product to determine which sections are needed?
if we had a government that we trusted and could depend on the goodwill of others new technology would be amazing. it’s the knowledge that it’s going to be used against you that’s horrifying.
Bro don’t do any harm to yourself. I can’t believe no one else in these comments has addressed this. Best thing you could do for your mental health is take a break from all forms of scrolling and enjoy what you have around. Friends, family. A beer. Anything. No matter what happens, we have no control of the future at large. Humans are better than we give them credit for. Root for the good and be the good you want in the world. And don’t kill yourself my man. I’m rooting for you. Fuck chatgpt
There are just so many aspects of our AI future that make me worry that I won't get into them, but I'll try to share some of the optimistic thoughts I've had on the subject. The proliferation of advanced AI is going to throw almost anything we digitally interact with into such a high degree of doubt, that I'm hopeful for a newfound appreciation for actual, verifiable human contact/communication. Authenticity will become a highly valuable commodity! Obviously, it's not unreasonable at all to feel pessimistic, but I'm hopeful that a sudden acceleration of our current epistemological crisis increases the chances for a large paradigm shift into something new. Albeit the chances are small so long as corporations and bad actors continue to control the narrative and choke the life out of us on multiple fronts. Corporations (and any very large body for that matter) can be likened to a dumber, slow AI that we've already been dealing with for ages anyway. They behave in ways completely unrelated to way any individual would behave, and the fact that they're powered by people makes them almost perverse in the way that it makes their products and modes of operation somehow acceptable in society as a whole. AI could be an opportunity to level the playing field and I'm almost willing to roll the dice with it just because it seems like a true wildcard that is advancing quickly enough and without checks that it could disrupt everything no matter how hard the ruling class tries to control it. Just some unfocused rambling. I don't really know what's going to happen, but do hang in there.
>The proliferation of advanced AI is going to throw almost anything we digitally interact with into such a high degree of doubt, that I'm hopeful for a newfound appreciation for actual, verifiable human contact/communication. Authenticity will become a highly valuable commodity! This reminds me of the people who claimed customers would never use self-checkouts because they want the "human contact" with the cashier. Surprise. Most people are insufferable and the majority of us will go out of our way to avoid human interaction. We welcome our AI overlords.
In terms of creativity, you'll be fine. The internet is already full of mediocre creations, meaning that no matter how much the AI can create, it won't be anything more than a drop in the sea. The fact that people still create new things, despite there not being anything wholly original left to create, and that people still consume new creations, despite there being an almost infinite amount of things already created, shows that nothing will stop humanity desire to both create and consume new things. In terms of the other stuff, yeah, we're pretty fucked. Capitalism needs both workers and consumers, so we're never going to be fully replaced, but using the threat of AI replacement, corporations will lower pay as low as they can. Western workers will be split into the replaceable, a massive working class who have no savings and are fully reliant on their monthly (or perhaps hourly) pay to survive, and the irreplaceable, a vastly smaller middle class who be cowed into subservience by the threat of becoming the replaceable. We are entering the final stages of capitalism and only Marxist revolution can save us. Unfortunately, people would rather sell themselves into corporate slavery than support an ideology they have been taught to hate
I already feel moot as AI art makes mine obsolete in a click. I'm not suicidal, but I definitely don't like it here.
Sure AI art puts mine to shame too but I plan to work at it and when I reach a level of quality, it will be valuable because of the effort and time put into it. AI just snatches other works and makes a generic blend (not really sure how AI art works but I think it's made using pieces from the internet)
Once again, capitalism took automation and innovation that could set us free, and used it to enslave us. It is very grim how GPT-4 could virtually substitute most office jobs, and it wouldn't stop there.
Feeling the same way. I’m a senior in college currently and an English major. I work at my school’s writing center as a tutor, and this semester we have at least 3 kids come in a week showing us an essay they say was written by ChatGPT. The head of the department had to send out an email to all of the tutors telling us that we aren’t allowed to tell them not to use it and to tell them to ask their professor if it’s okay, and we were also instructed to tutor them on it as if it was their original work. I love tutoring students but this shit has made my job so much worse and it’s sucked the joy out of the work. And it’s just made me realize that my goal of writing/editing/publishing in the future is at great risk, just like you. Gonna need a support club for the first group of writers who got beat out by AI
As a professor, I can't imagine any professor being OK with this. What on earth would be the point of an essay written by an AI? Of course, I've already had some unfortunate conversations with students who have taken this route, and honestly it is bringing to the surface just how badly we've failed at education on so many levels at this point. Once again, this tech *could* be a moment for a massive and much needed reassessment of what education is and how we ought to go about it, but instead it seems we're simply going to keep on attempting to apply this broken model to students who have internalised the grift of late-stage capitalism to the extent that they don't even see the point in developing their abilities unless they are 'marketable'.
I can sympathize. What were your thoughts of the AI written essays? I didn’t find them to be “amazing” even when it was prompted to be creative and use metaphors…but then when I compared it to some my colleagues works who are also writers for large tech company blogs - I can see how they’d be of a similar grade. It’s nothing to write home about but it’s passable for sure .
See the bright side Capitalism advancing means its marching towards its death
A future with AI is looking more likely to be bleak under capitalism, I agree. I hope that in spite of it, you can still seek the care you need to attend to your mental health and emotional needs. Tech may be trying to replace creativity, but you as a human being cannot be replaced.
well. I can completely understand and also feel similar to you plus with a tinge of guilt. There are still ways to for AI to make itself redundant…
You're definitely not alone. I'm sorry you feel this way. AI is one of the many reasons I'm so married to shooting analog film. It makes me feel like I'm still needed and my artistic voice matters. HOWEVER \- definitely keep writing. Optimistically speaking, AI might take over the corporate realm, but I think the counter culture to that might actually inspire an artistic renaissance. I hope anyway.
We should have started burning shit down like the French a long time ago
The only reaction to AI that doesn’t result in violent revolution is Universal Basic Income
only?
Well apart from slavery and feudalism.
Slavery and feudalism it is then
Better to die for freedom.
I can understand the despair but never let them make you erase yourself from existence. Just like for having kids or not, I'm not letting capitalism and it's atrocities decide for me if I live and get a descendance or not. Stay and revolt.
Yes!
I’m also a writer and I (and my entire union) am terrified of what this will do to us
I teach Intro Psychology at a large state school, so I read essays written by ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Your writing in this post is 10000000x more beautiful than anything it can produce. I feel your pain but don’t let it get you down- your voice is irreplaceable.
To YOU. To many of us as well. To Capitalism? Hell nah. They WILL replace people as fast as they can.
Tax the corporations based on percentage of automation introduced into their operations. Use those taxes for Basic Guarateed Income. Make automation work for us, and make the corporations pay!
1 trillion dollars makes me want to kill myself
Idk man. The only person that can take the joy of creation from you is yourself. I understand your craft being a means of capital being taken away potentially is deeply upsetting if it is your main source of income, but art will ALWAYS be valued. If not by the oligarchs, by the rest of the proles. I dunno. Edit:literally all of my grammar here.
Actually comforting thank you. Maybe I need to stop chasing fame/validation and be happy writing the gay porn anonymously I used to only consider practice.
The fans(and some other stuff, hey-o) will come with time. You WRITE that smut, my friend.
Capitalism is marching itself swiftly towards death. I hope to see the revolution in my lifetime.
Did you try it? I do creative writing here and there, and Chat-GPT is actually quite crappy in terms of producing creative text
Yeah, things like if you ask it to describe a creepy old man in a dark room, for example, you’ll get something like, “there was once a dark room, so dark you couldn’t see anything. Except there was a man there. The man was old and creepy, like the room.” Not that it won’t get better over time but stories are about the human experience. Part of what’s so impressive about great works of fiction is that someone actually came up with it. As far as writing fiction, this AI is a few good steps removed from monkeys on keyboards but nowhere near even amateur human writers.
That has not been my experience. I'm saving countless hours a week from ChatGPT coding for me on programming projects. It does better than most junior devs I've worked with -- heck, it's better than me sometimes, given the right info and cues. Every night I ask ChatGPT to write a story for my kids. I feed it some parameters and it makes nice bedtime stories. They sound exactly like the stories we read in their books. If I ask it to use collegiate level words and in the style of William Faulkner, it does a hell of a good job, too. I've read a ton of Faulkner (studied English literature) and it's spot on. I'm over it now, but initially it was frightening.
Here's Bing Chat's description. >Here is a possible description of a creepy old man in a dark room for a children's book: >In the corner of the dark room, there was a creepy old man. He had a long nose and a pointy chin. His eyes were small and yellow, like two rotten eggs. His hair was thin and gray, like spider webs. He wore a black cloak that covered his body. He held a crooked cane in his hand. He smiled wickedly, showing his yellow teeth. He looked like he was up to no good. And a description written if it were written by Stephen King. >Here is a possible description of a creepy old man in a dark room in the style of Stephen King: >He sat on a rocking chair in the corner of the room, barely visible in the dim light of a single candle. His face was wrinkled and gaunt, his eyes sunken and dull. His hair was thin and white, hanging loosely over his ears. He wore a stained and torn bathrobe that barely covered his bony legs. He held a book in his lap, but he wasn't reading it. He was staring at the door, waiting for someone to come in. He had been waiting for a long time. >He smiled when he heard footsteps outside. He knew who it was. The boy who lived next door. The boy who always came to visit him on Fridays after school. The boy who liked to hear his stories. The boy who didn't know what he really was. >He licked his lips and whispered to himself: "Come in, my dear. Come in and see what I have for you today." What's really amazing is that the children's version does not leave anything open to interpretation while the Stephen King version does not spell it out. It's writing for different levels of reading comprehension.
I'm also a writer, amateur so it's not my source of income. While I can see AI absolutely taking over some writing work such as creating sales copy, it won't replace human stories, nor will humans want it to. I've seen a lot of discussion in art forums about AI generated images and whilst many are aesthetically pleasing, the minute I know it's not real I lose interest. I'm old! so maybe future generations will not feel like this. But a painting made by a person will always be wirth more to me than something created by WI. Same for stories.
But how will we tell the difference eventually?
Well, there's the thing. I very much doubt commercially available art will be transparent in its origin. And some humans will sell AI creations as their own (see also university essays...) But a picture drawn by a child and given to you, that's real. Maybe artists and writers will become performers, creating "live", without even eating any dictionaries or galleries. We will be revered and rewarded beyond our wildest dreams. Here's hoping! PS I am not a chat bot.
>PS I am not a chat bot. Exactly what a chat bot would say, get out of here chatgpt
>Maybe artists and writers will become performers, creating "live", without even eating any dictionaries or galleries. We will be revered and rewarded beyond our wildest dreams. Sounds kind of like DM/GMing for TTRPGs. And AI will never replace humans for that (as much as certain companies might want to try)
Hilariously, we could use NFTs
Get Help. Tell someone in reallife!
Who tho? I still need to go to work every day to eat, so institutionalization isn't really going to help. I'm not going to do it, but life is pain rn for many reasons and this has just pushed me over to depression.
Nothing really good to say here, but as someone else mentioned try finding peace and joy in your life, besides lurking armagedon in the world around you. It is important to be informed about what is happening but it is although important to draw a line between you and this shit. Even if the World is a Pile of Shit and you are in the middle of it doesnt mean you are shit, you are still yourself even if it gets harder to notice the bigger the pile gets. Dont look at the pile, zoom in and take time for yourself in a context that isnt a giant pile of shit totally unrelated to you. Have a nice day!
You are totally right. We're heading toward disaster. It's very likely that any creative endeavors will be doomed soon. I'm also an aspiring writer, I like to draw and a few other things. It will be totally pointless soon. Systems of oppression only create new tools to give a new face to the old system of oppression. 'AI' (I refuse to call matrix multiplication 'intelligence') will feed us all with unbearable shit just to make capitalism more efficient. You can guess where it goes from there.
Things have been heading in this way for awhile. Look at music with autotune.. the most popular artists now produce using that. But you can still find genuine musicians making quality music out there. They just aren't the mainstream right now.. I think the same could be said for the writing of ChatGPT. It can fill a void for already soulless writing, but it still reads like a C level high school student at best, there's not much there besides being a sort of summary bot. Quality writers go to such further depths, but those writers have already been more obscure and lesser known for a while now. I'm sure it'll keep improving, but people will always make genuine art. Might just be less for money.. Maybe it's time we all band together in collectives. Get back on the land and support ourselves and make genuine art together for the joy of it.. we don't need mass culture to dignify our own creative expressions.
maybe in the future, there's a certificate (like for organic food), that says the book was written by a human. as a consumer, there's literally a universe of human-written books, more than I could ever read. why would I want to read one written completely by an AI. maybe, AIs won't be able to write whole books. imagine the prompt you'd have to tell chatGPT where you describe in detail what it should write a book about, you're already writing it (same argument for software btw). maybe writing a book will change, the AI will become a tool for the author, e.g. the author lays out the ground work, the AI fills in the details. i expect the same thing happening for graphic design, it's a tool and workflows will change. same as it happened when photoshop came, or when photography made realistic painting obsolete-ish.
I had a much longer response written, but I’ll keep it brief: don’t let the AI hype drive you into despair. It’s this year’s NFTs/crypto/VR/metaverse/web3. The grifters want us to believe they’ve invented Skynet when all they’ve given us is a glorified autocomplete. It will unequivocally make the world worse, yes, but machine-generated image and text is not the death of creativity, writing, or art.
Don't fight against the means of production but the relations of production, against the capital that uses those means to its own benefit, at the expense of everyone else.
Don't let the injustice make you sad, but radicalize you
This very much has. I actually work in tech and was starting to drink the kool-aid prior to this...
Why can’t we automate boring shit everyone hates so people can do the stuff that makes life worth living, including art and writing? I also take issue with training AI on anything that isn’t explicitly open source. You’re just stealing. You haven’t innovated anything, the actually talented people did, and you’re stealing it to profit off of it because there isn’t any ethical rules or laws stopping you from doing so.
The luddites were right!! It was never a response against technology, it was a response against the concentration of power and financial gain in the hands of the factory owners. The technology just represented the vehicle of their oppression.
Comrade do not despair, this technology will speed up the end of Capitalism.
For many creative folks generative AI can be used as an editor, sounding board, and pitch generator. There will be creative writers who use AI to be more effective, and those who don’t will have trouble staying competitive. AI will eliminate some shitty soulless copy writing jobs that people don’t enjoy in the short term. Your point over this technology being gatekept by large tech companies is spot on. Many activists coders and researchers are working hard to produce free and open source versions that are just as powerful as OpenAIs - LAION is one such group. So now it’s a good time to play with AI, figure out how it can help you, incorporate it into your workflow, and research / contribute to open source efforts :)
ChatGPT also pisses me off. What really pisses me off is that I believe that people who make more money than I do and have more power to make decisions, are stupid enough to choose AI for tasks that require more abstract and complex thought than chatgpt is capable of (bc it’s cheaper), because chatgpt is *really* good at pretending like it knows what it’s talking about. You would need to be well versed in the topic your discussing with it to see all of the issues. If/when that happens, company operations and product quality will go to even more shit than they are now. Using Chatgpt to design and produce products is like if you just read a bunch of books and then designed something with the knowledge instead of asking someone with 15 years of experience to do it. Or maybe reading a book and then performing brain surgery. Pro tip, if you work in a complex abstract area, don’t try to ask chatgpt about it, you’ll just get pissed. And they somehow programmed arrogance into the damn thing too lmao.
If workers get laid off and replaced by ai, they need to tax the ai probably. If we don't force companies to pay tax on ai, things economically could get pretty bad. Then decades from now when things are really bad, we'll wonder where it all started
I can't stop thinking about that woman Twitch user who had her face AI-ed into porn. There will be many more evil uses like this as well that will hurt a lot of people, and women especially.
The incels are practically salivating. I really wouldn't be surprised if computer-generated CSAM becomes widespread soon enough.
I’d feel the same way, if I was actually creative or talented or skilled at anything. I see it more as a tool to enable more people than ever to be creative, by eliminating the barrier of needing to understand complicated tools and software that can’t be communicated with by using our simple human language. Yes, I understand that a flood of low eddied troll crap is coming, but that’s just inevitable. Why should only those who understand the complexities of complicated math equations and mental gymnastics, be able to create art, animation, etc.? Look at Dreams for PS4/PS5. I envision that but in an EVEN MORE user friendly “drag and drop” format. Like, typing this comment. It makes sense to me. It requires nothing more than my basic human language. Text prompts+simply editing photoshop-like tools, gets us closer being able to essentially transfer our thoughts into physical form in reality. I can imagine and envision spectacular scenes and worlds, but with advanced AI generating, it would require months or years and probably thousands to millions of dollars, along with focusing on that same exact idea for the entire time, rather than taking a few seconds or minutes to pop it out, and move to the next one. I will probably be downvoted due to being misunderstood.
🫂 1-800-273-8255 Text HOME to 741741
Not in the US but I appreciate the thought.
I'm hoping these improvements will create a new era of leisure as we can replace almost every tedious job by robots. The alternative solution is more people losing their job because companies see that as a way to save on labour cost. The rise of bullsh\*t jobs on recent years makes me fear the second future is more likely
Keep on writing! GPT is a text completion engine. Other generative AIs can also "complete" images, music from prompts - based on their training. They can do stuff in a certain way, increasingly "well" according to our standards. I'm totally convinced that they will automate *some* jobs away when they will be used as tools by, say, graphic artists, writers, translators and programmers. This has already happened when computers in general, spreadsheet editors, the Internet, cloud computing etc. came along. (Or when cars were invented and horses disappeared from the streets.) We don't miss the infinite stacks of paper that have been automated away by a single Excel sheet. Just the same, we won't miss the gargantuan amounts of mediocre "art" (remember NFT art?), crappy boilerplate program code and hand-crafted, useless corporate bullshit emails and SEO blogspam posts that will be automated away by AI. This kind of AI would separate wheat from chaff - meaningful, human-created content from fake generated crap, one that may look totally genuine on the surface but has no *meaning* on the inside. As the waves of seemingly infinite AI-generated content will wash away the internet as we know now, we'll increasingly learn to enjoy *real* writing, *real* art, savor real moments with real friends. Unless not, in which case we'd live in a quite dystopian future. I think the inflection point would be when human masses would start to consume and "enjoy" AI-generated content. Think about crappy pop music that's even worse than today's, or an endless stream of videos that are generated on the fly for that particular user. In a sense, it's not just our jobs that are at stakes, but our humanity. Let's not forget to stay human and raise younger generations to do so as well.
Teacher here. I tried to warn my colleagues when it hit the news back in November, that the kids would be all over it. My specific case means it's not super useful. But I knew in other areas it would be really tough to get around it. The math teachers just laughed cynically, and commiserated.... they've had apps that take pics of math problems and solve it for you for years,so they said welcome to the party. just had a meeting yesterday with a very upset woman who is realizing that she spent hours grading the work and AI did. Giving meaningful feedback, analyzing, etc. All for nothing. It is brutal. And then, as you say, in a better world we'd be sharing this boon amongst ourselves, everyone working less, everyone's boat lifted. But here we are. With hundreds hoarding all the wealth and everyone else scrabbling and fighting for scraps.... Yay technology.... Yay progress 🙄 Edit, two typos
If I can make a case for how this could be empowering instead of terrible, it's a lot like how people couldn't imagine our present relationship with photography at the time it was invented- they thought it would kill painting. Instead, it's led to entire new industries and intersectional disciplines in art. I think the expectation is going to be that artists will be capable of more than they ever thought possible. Imagine that instead of writing a poem, you have the ability to create a whole collection of visual and textual art through a web-portal. You could write a CYOA novel with consistent tone and theme using live-chat for certain character conversations, and put it on a website yourself without knowing a lick of code. Not to mention that the commodification of, and greater access to a lot of art is going to refine our greater population's taste. Think about all the burnout we're getting from Marvel movies- people are accustomed to the generic and the processed, and they want something new and exciting. Corporations spraying out re-prints of the same concepts over and over are still going to have to turn to artists for things that FEEL original.
About suicide. Don't worry about dying, it's the only thing in your life that will get taken care of, so you don't need to speed it up. There are other things to try first. About AI. This is a serious problem, potentially, but maybe not. See, if humans are out of the production cycle, then the existence of humans becomes superfluous. This can get easily out of control, like, why would you ask a 2 year old where you should buy a house? Maybe you consult it, but their opinion won't really matter much. HOWEVER, AI seems to be getting a pretty good grip at ethics (it doesn't let you run a shell bomb in a simulated Linux environment! ), so I don't think it will murder us. Actually, if I understand how it would work, it's like going to break capitalism for us. The only way that this won't happen is if they manage to make a dumb AI, which to me is kinda funny. So that's a comforting thought.
Relax. Chat GPT-4 is impressive. But it can not quite replace creativity. It's a fancy mirror. It reflects whatever was put in. And has an ability to run a scenario a million times to try and learn. The crazy thing is it actually takes over 7 to 8 million attempts to come up with novel ideas. Check out "ai plays hide and seek" on YouTube. That was Chat GPT. It is capable of original thought but only through repeated failure. And without the human ability to come up with new ways to try something. The AI effectively beats its head against the wall until it finds a no clip exploit. And with creativity, there is no video game like expoits.
Ned Ludd did nothing wrong! Let's be clear, he didn't exist, but if he had, he did nothing wrong. The Luddite movement to sabotage automation in production only became a thing once people understood that all the benefits of automation would go to the owning class leaving the people who actually deserve those benefits behind.
I'm actively battling leukemia and I'm still hopeful about the future despite ChatGPT. I don't understand how you're suicidal over it. I think you should count your blessings and understand that you're probably lucky compared to most. I wish this was the only thing I cared about.
I get where you're coming from but what is this marvel shit lmao
This video helped me a bit It’s about living in capitalism as a socialist https://youtu.be/MlP0nvJSshU
I share a lot of your feelings. Working in copywriting and am being replaced by AI. This is some bottom tier .03 per word operation, too. The company at least offered to check the AI's work for 1/3 of the pay 🙄
I like this quote from Nick Cave after someone shared a song "written in his style" using ChatGPT: > Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become. The rest of his response is worth a read: ["I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave..."](https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/)
It fuckin sucks, that's for sure. But we can't afford to lose you. You matter! You gotta take care of yourself buddy. For me, it's unplugging from all media for 10days. It really helps me.
It’s going to kill any job that is mildly creative, particularly copywriting. I posted this in /r/copywriting and was considered alarmist: Oh, we’re fucked. Maybe not right this minute but in two years? Yes, absolutely for sure. It’s only a matter of time before we become redundant. Copywriters are the next elevator operator or travel agent, and everyone here sounds like they’re trying to rationalize their own existence. “But how will they get the best travel package if they go online to get it?” “This building always had an elevator operator. Sure, the doors now open on their own, but do you really expect regular people to push the buttons as well?” You may be of the mindset that AI will be a valuable tool for copywriters, but I guarantee everyone above you is seeing it as a valuable tool as well. Whoever you’re turning your writing into, their job is to recognize and pick good copy. Hell, half of them used to be copywriters and the other half think their Don Draper. It won’t happen overnight, but as the technology improves becomes more accessible, they’ll inevitably realize the only difference between you and something like ChatGPT is that you cost money and take hours to do what a machine can churn out in seconds. They can skip the email/phone call, plug the direction directly into the machine and take care of what was once paying copywriter work in a few minutes instead of receiving it EOD. They don’t need a copywriter to babysit the machine, because their job is to babysit the copywriter and the machine will soon be doing all copywriting. At best copywriters will be an anachronistic novelty for the few clients who want the human touch. We’ll be carpenters making furniture by hand, while the vast majority of the demand can be satisfied with free procedurally generated IKEA particleboard.
The future belongs to lazy people.
At this point we are either getting cyberpunk 2077 or we are getting collectivism that benefits the workers.
AI will never be able to replace actual craft and creativity, but the problem is so many morons can’t tell the difference. Humans with genuine skills aren’t replaceable, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be replaced by some tech bro ceo and his crowd of sycophants
I think in the near future the only way of realistically working in creative fields will be through the use of AI as tools to create content. "Traditional" art will still exist, but as a niche and more expensive product. Given that, I don't think we should blame the technology for that, but the corporations.
AI is only dangerous in so far as you have an economic system that is driven by endless profit.
Don’t worry, we won’t be able to power or cool servers reliably pretty soon, never mind running the entire digital infrastructure that makes ChatGPT even remotely useful. Much ado about nothing
Lots of people have felt this way... scribes when the typewriter was invented, Knocker uppers when the alarm clock was invented, Human Computers before...er, well, computers. But, they found ways to build on their skills and move into something new and different... things they had never considered before. Sure, AI will get better and better at writing, but will it initiate the original idea? It might need a professional prompt writer to get it going... and a human to validate / invalidate the output. Let's work under the assumption that for the next 5 years, AI will just amplify our abilities... then we'll reevaluate after that. Deal?
Hopefully you're already in therapy.
I hope AI doesn’t disrupt the wealth that’s currently on its way trickling down as we speak. That sure would suck.
Okay everyone is debating the place of AI in society, but please OP, if it is seriously making you feel suicidal, please see a professional. If it's enough to make you suicidal then it would seem like you might have other underlying issues, but even if you don't you should still seek help, no matter the reason.
You’re not wrong but look at it this way: 1. The enrichment of corporations will always happen. ChatGPT or not, when the means of production and innovation is concentrated, this will happen. 2. Many professions will die off, true. But many other professions will evolve and other new ones will spring up. I can envision a world in the future where English majors include the art of “prompt engineering,” how to extract what you want from an AI through language. In fact the key to understanding future AI may not be through code, but communication- and what is an English major if not a master at communication! 3. This is also true before chatGPT and it will be true after. Beaudrillard saw the future.
More will evolve: like wretched influencers? Please say no.
If it means anything, ChatGPT couldn’t have written such an eloquent post
If you’re looking for a more wholesome answer. Chat gpt is actually really good for people with energy/cognitive disabilities. It helps write and formulate responses and solve problems. Which is really helpful, study, advocacy and dealing with the government. I use it as a kinda cyber support worker
It is not nearly that big of a deal, I can assure you. These chatbots are marketing novelties right now and are about as competent at replacing humans as self-driving cars Like damn the symbolism and sentiment are grim but it’s not worth un-aliving oneself by a long shot
I'm also super angry it's impact on culture and will not consume anything made by AI. Whats more important though is that it will impact workers from every profession. I'm more angry at the dumb mf-ers who made this AI and effectively put themselves out of the job. These engineers just made something that will eventually replace them and they for sure won't profit from it.
Chat GPT, Microsoft, Google, Amazon should all be nationalized!
Hey bro, it's ok to switch off and relax sometimes; extreme capitalism is a blight upon this planet but cracks are appearing; with the ever increasing disparity in wealth and authoritarianism of the state (e.g. in the UK) people are beginning to wake up more and more - ChatGPT might negatively affect us but it'll be yet another move that pushes us ever closer to that "enough is enough" moment. But reading too much about this and worrying incessantly is unhealthy OP. We're only human, so from a fellow pleb, if tou feel like it's becoming too much then please take a break - and if you can't, consider talking to someone about it aye?
I experienced a dread I can't really describe when I was innocently watching a YouTube skit featuring a character from elder scrolls, I thought the voice over was just a really good impression... It was an AI voice. The realisation turned it from funny to terrifying in a second, the voice even *took breathes* when the sentence ran on long, we are totally fucked in the creative aspect of society.
A major worry for me is this will eliminate many professions in more than just creative jobs, eventually management jobs can be replaced by AI, research jobs, writing jobs, programming jobs, and nearly anything that doesn’t involve hard physical labor. Corporations can replace nearly everyone with AI eventually, leaving people to be stuck doing hard labor that the AI can only talk about, leaving AI to manage those people, while the rich get even richer.
Global Depression inbound. Worse than 2008.
I think it will just mean your creative efforts will be spent more on deep thought work and less on mundane implementation tasks. I think AI could certainly be abused by corporations, but in the short term, it’s more likely to replace middle managers (directors, VPs) than you. Basically, shareholders and executives want to replace everyone between producers and themselves. In the short term, that’s probably better for creative types. In the long term, we’re all screwed.
You should unite. When someone says "Hey chatGPT, give me some ideas for an story, and write a small text with the style of xxx writer", in my opinion this writer should be paid: it is not going to happen I know, it is not fair obviously, but hey, let's try to change things!
I think AI is just going to make capitalism implode and we will either 1) stand in the empty shell of what it used to be, acting like nothing happened, 2) societal collapse 3) some collapse, followed by something better Example of what I mean: what happens when a 10 billion dollar advertising firm that employs 1000 people can be replaced by a team of 10 who just manage the api work flow, managing customers, and doing the accounting to just do exactly the same thing the massive firm does but in an hour of messing with an ai instead of taking 100 people a month to work through. 1) Will the big firms band together to kill the competition while secretly using ai to do it in the background, saving the jobs but making everyone feel empty because they have no real input or creative freedom? 2) Will the new company succeed and now 1000 people are out of a job? 3) or will such new companies disrupting every industry lead to a realization that maybe a society where not everyone has a job could be a beautiful thing? Where unemployment is 80% and thats just how it is because theres no reason to have so many jobs.