The A.I. Thread

[White Out 403]

How many godfathers of AI are we up to now? Is it 10?

It's so interesting how we've been hearing for the last two, three years how AI is gonna disrupt the job market every six months. It's almost as if there's CEOs and other shareholders looking to bilk people out of their money.

[malcolmk14]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

You can do this pretty effectively. One agent to code, one agent to PR, one agent to QA. You can prompt the latter two into being incredibly nitpicky. It's getting pretty amazing.

I ran our company trial of Copilot last year and deemed it was really only highly useful for generating boilerplate. We use Go a lot, so that's a pretty good benefit in itself for that language.

3 months ago I built a little Slack bot using a combination of Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot. It was fairly frustrating how much it screwed up and took me a few days to get it working.

This week I asked Claude to re-write the whole thing and it was utterly flawless and massively improved. It took me about 20 minutes.

I've gone from a mild skeptic to "we're maybe all seriously screwed". I think 90% of the population thought they were screwed when farming machines came out. Factory workers thought they were screwed when robots showed up. Office workers thought they were screwed when computers landed on everyone's desk. We all found new things to move onto, granted with some pain in the transitions.

What worries me here is this is happening so fast and society can't adapt quick enough. It's insane to see this happening.

I’ve been saying this for about a year in education. I think certainly within 10 years there will be far fewer teachers and students will have some version of an AI chat bot at their desk to teach them exactly what they need to know at exactly their pace. At the rate these are moving, surely there will still be a need for highly skilled teachers. But they may be facilitating the AI-centred learning of 150 students rather than teaching a class of 35.

[Fuzz]

Well it is taking jobs in the creative industry. AI slop does a great job at taking over inane music for commercials that don't require paying artists anything. Video is going that way too. I'd not be surprised if in 5 years virtually every commercial is done by AI, because nobody cares about the integrity of advertising. Video games will go that way too.

Soon movies and shows will be subject to AI creep, and the majority of society will just kinda accept it, because no one pays attention to anything anymore anyway. Why do remote B-roll footage in Canada with an expensive helicopter and production team, waiting for the right weather, lighting etc, when you can just have AI pump it out? "Good enough" is going to take a load of jobs.

[troutman]

AI is a powerful tool for legal research, but you have to be careful to check accuracy. Provides great value to clients, but it will surely result in loss of jobs for lawyers and paralegals.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Well it is taking jobs in the creative industry. AI slop does a great job at taking over inane music for commercials that don't require paying artists anything. Video is going that way too. I'd not be surprised if in 5 years virtually every commercial is done by AI, because nobody cares about the integrity of advertising. Video games will go that way too.

Soon movies and shows will be subject to AI creep, and the majority of society will just kinda accept it, because no one pays attention to anything anymore anyway. Why do remote B-roll footage in Canada with an expensive helicopter and production team, waiting for the right weather, lighting etc, when you can just have AI pump it out? "Good enough" is going to take a load of jobs.

All of these are just symptoms, though.

Capitalism run amok is the cause. Everyone wants things cheaper, faster, and better, so naturally things will be invented and utilized that accomplish that.

AI isn’t the first thing and won’t be the last thing to accomplish this. I find the whole conversation around AI kind of silly because it’s really never addressing the actual problem.

AI has a lot of good or extremely promising uses. It has the potential to make society a whole lot better. But it’s also going to make it a whole lot worse so long as this current stage of capitalism has rich people demanding vendors deliver the same or better quality for 1/2 the price and the choice is to use AI or go out of business to people who will.

[Fuzz]

Absolutely agree.