2024 UPDATE!! Altman: prepare for AI to be "uncomfortable" 33% US jobs gone..SKYNET, AI medical advances? BASIC INCOME? 1st AI MOVIE! AI MAYOR!!

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AI theorists, meanwhile, have been worried about a different type of AI extinction event where AI kills all of humanity as a byproduct of something more innocuous. This theory is called the “paperclip maximizer,” where an AI programmed to create paperclips eventually becomes so consumed with doing so that it utilizes all of the resources on Earth, causing a mass extinction event. There are versions of this where humans become enslaved by robots to create paperclips, where human beings are ground up into dust so that the trace amounts of iron in our bodies can be used for paperclips, etc.

:ohhh: :lupe:
 

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<a href="Insider Lays Off 10 Percent of Staff After Announcing Pivot to AI

TURNING TIDES
THURSDAY by MAGGIE HARRISON

Insider Lays Off 10 Percent of Staff After Announcing Pivot to AI​

Not loving this pattern.​

/ Artificial Intelligence/ Ai/ Journalism/ Media
Getty Images


Image by Getty Images

Just a week after urging its writers to incorporate AI tools like ChatGPT into their workflow, Insider has laid off 10 percent of its staff.
"As you know, our industry has been under significant pressure for more than a year. The economic headwinds that have hurt many of our clients and partners are also affecting us," Insider president Barbara Peng wrote in an email to staff sent this morning.
"Unfortunately, to keep our company healthy and competitive, we need to reduce the size of our team," Peng continued, adding that "the reduction would affect about 10 percent" of the publication's workforce.




It's been a bruising year for the media industry, with numerous publishers laying off swaths of employees. And Insider's layoffs, while perhaps not directly related to the incorporation of AI, speak to a troubling new pattern of media layoffs and AI announcements going hand-in-hand — if only, perhaps, as a way of softening the bad news to investors.

In Insider's case, it's not hard to zoom out and see connections.

Just last month, the CEO of the site's owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döepfner, noted in an internal letter to employees — in the midst of a round of Axel Springer layoffs, no less — that "artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was — or simply replace it."

"Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house's future viability," Döepfner wrote in the letter, which was obtained last month by The Guardian. "Only those who create the best original content will survive."

Per the Guardian, Döepfner wrote elsewhere in the memo that AI tech like OpenAI's ChatGPT will cause a "revolution" in how people deal with information, and could even become better at some tasks than human reporters.

This same ride-the-AI-wave-or-don't enthusiasm was echoed by Insider editor-in-chief Nich Carlson earlier this month, who in an email greenlighting Insider staffers to use tools like ChatGPT in their writing said that AI would make Insider "faster and better."

"I've spent many hours working with ChatGPT, and I can already tell having access to it is going to make me a better global editor-in-chief for Insider," Carlson wrote. "My takeaway after a fair amount of experimentation with ChatGPT is that generative AI can make all of you better editors, reporters, and producers, too."

Whether AI is actually mature enough to start stamping out human writing jobs is as hazy as ever, but the concept is clearly catnip for executives and investors.

A major chunk of Axel Springer's cash, for instance, comes from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the global investment management arm of Canada's Pension Plan Investments (CPPI), with CPPI's managing director Andrej Babache sitting on Axel Springer's supervisory board. As listed on its website, CPPI additionally has a massive private equity stake in Red Ventures, the publisher behind CNET and Bankrate.

Sound familiar? Both sites quietly started running AI-generated content this year — but were widely criticized when it turned out the content was riddled with factual errors and plagiarism.

None of this is to say that there's some broader conspiracy to replace human journalists with AI. But there certainly seems to be a pattern, and investors have made it clear that they love AI. And if that's where a publication's funding bodies are leaning? Shifting towards AI in the midst of industry turmoil and layoffs might just keep them happy.

It sucks, but it sadly might be inevitable.

Case in point, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced today that the award-winning Buzzfeed News is shutting down after more than a decade of work. BuzzFeed, of course, has also been in the news for using AI to churn out SEO bait (a spokesperson was quick to say that no jobs were being replaced by AI.)

But Peretti, strikingly, made sure to mention AI in his layoff memo to staffers.

"We will empower our editorial teams at all of our brands to do the very best creative work and build an interface where that work can be packaged and brought to advertisers more effectively," Peretti wrote in the sorry letter. "And we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI, and cultural moments that can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast.""></a>
 

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‘I’ve Never Hired A Writer Better Than ChatGPT’: How AI Is Upending The Freelance World​

0x0.jpg

ILLUSTRATION BY ANGELICA ALZONA FOR FORBES

Rashi Shrivastava
Forbes Staff
I write about consumer tech companies for Forbes.

Apr 20, 2023,06:30am EDT

While some freelancers are losing their gigs to ChatGPT, clients are being spammed with AI-written content on freelancing platforms. The result: increasing mistrust between clients and freelancers and mounting trouble for the platforms themselves.​


Melissa Shea hires freelancers to take on most of the basic tasks for her fashion-focused tech startup, paying $22 per hour on average for them to develop websites, transcribe audio and write marketing copy. In January 2023, she welcomed a new member to her team: ChatGPT. At $0 an hour, the chatbot can crank out more content much faster than freelancers and has replaced three content writers she would have otherwise hired through freelancing platform Upwork.



“I'm really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”


Shea has not posted a job on Upwork since she discovered ChatGPT (though she still has five freelancers working for her). After it was released in November 2022, ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users, sparked an AI arms race at companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has given rise to a flurry of AI startups. And for small businesses looking to trim costs, the free tool can automate swaths of their operations, providing a cheaper alternative to freelance workers. Built on recent advances in generative AI, ChatGPT and its image-based sibling DALL-E 2 can carry out work that spans most of the freelancing spectrum, from writing articles and compiling research to designing graphics, coding and decrypting financial documents.


Now, freelancers who are less experienced and don’t offer specialized skills stand to lose their gigs, according to five clients Forbes interviewed. But rather than steering clear of the AI tool that could make them obsolete, more and more freelancers are relying on ChatGPT to do some if not all their work for them. Clients on job marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr are being flooded with nearly identical project proposals written by ChatGPT. A bitter side effect: it’s making clients dubious of the authenticity of work turned in by freelancers and causing transactional disputes and mistrust in the freelancing community.


Upwork, which booked roughly $620 million in revenue in 2022, disclosed in its SEC filings that increased use of AI would be a threat to its business. “Any use of generative artificial intelligence by users of our work marketplace may lead to additional claims of intellectual property infringement,” Upwork’s annual report reads. The company declined to comment on how ChatGPT has affected the rate of transactional disputes or its bottom line during a Forbes interview.

“We want our clients and our talent to be doing all of their diligence to make sure that their work is secure and that things are trusted,” says Margaret Lilani, vice president of talent solutions at Upwork.


Buried in ChatGPT proposals

In early April, business consultant Sean O’Dowd uploaded two job postings on Upwork and within 24 hours he received close to 300 applications from freelancers explaining why they should be hired. Of the 300 proposals, he suspects more than 200 were done by ChatGPT, he says. Upwork doesn’t have an AI detection tool embedded into the platform and so he used enterprise-focused AI startup Writer’s detection software to evaluate proposals.

O’Dowd, who says that over the past decade he’s hired “close to 100 people who do work that ChatGPT could replace,” says he won’t hire freelancers who pass off ChatGPT’s work as their own because he wouldn’t be able to trust them, and it would indicate a lack of effort. “If I just wanted the basic ChatGPT-level answer, I would have just done that myself. When I’m hiring somebody, I’m looking for more detail, more depth and more thinking than ChatGPT.”

Evan Fisher, who is both a client and a freelancer on Upwork, ran into the same issue: low quality content written by ChatGPT. “The real problem on Upwork is the sheer volume of proposals. We're talking pre-contracts where a client is just inundated with kind of generic, bland, no-thought-involved proposals,” Fisher, who has hired 80 freelancers on Upwork, tells Forbes.

As a response, clients on Upwork have started including disclaimers from the get-go. One job post begins with, “If you use AI for this job, you will not get paid.” Another reads: “I do not want ChatGPT or AI spun content. I will validate and make sure, so anyone who wants to use AI, please do not even apply.” Despite these efforts, some freelancers use AI tools without disclosing it. O’Dowd says he once received work he suspected was done by ChatGPT because the work only included information up till 2021 (ChatGPT’s cut off point) and missed some newer details that would have been easy for a human to find through a simple search. He never hired that freelancer again.

“When I’m hiring somebody, I’m looking for more detail, more depth and more thinking than ChatGPT.”
Sean O’Dowd, business consultant and Upwork client
Georgia Austin, who made $2 million in two years copywriting for brands like Nike on freelancing platform Fiverr, says the overuse and over-dependency on the tool by some freelancers has given “a bad name to all freelancers,” even those who may not secretly use AI. In late February a freelancer posted on Upwork’s community forum that a client was accusing him of using ChatGPT to do the job and was demanding their money back. The contention resulted in a transactional dispute filed with Upwork. Upwork declined to comment on the dispute.

“Our platform is based on trusted relationships between freelancers, our independent talent, and our clients,” Lilani from Upwork says. “AI cannot replace these meaningful and personable connections.”

Freelancers say otherwise.

“Clients are much more wary than before. It creates an advantage for people with big accounts on Upwork as opposed to the newbies because they (newbies) will be suspected of using AI for their work,” says Orezi Mena, a Nigerian graphic design freelancer who uses ChatGPT to help him ideate.



All eyes on Google

For companies that are using freelancers to create content and increase traffic on their websites, it all comes down to how Google ranks ChatGPT-written content. In February, Google announced that it will prioritize high-quality original content in its search results even if it is written by AI and demote spam content. “Google has many years of experience dealing with automation being used in an attempt to game search results,” a blog post reads.

“If Google is somehow detecting that the AI-written piece is like less valuable and is de-ranking it then it defeats the point of what you're paying for,” says Adelle Archer, a client on Upwork who hires 20 freelancers for various tasks of her memorial diamond startup Eterneva.

That’s why some freelancers aren’t worried AI could put them out of work.

“At the end of the day, 95% of my buyers who are buying blogs and articles from me, they're using that for SEO on their website. They're aware that a ChatGPT generated blog isn't going to necessarily do them any favors with ranking on Google,” says Alex Fasulo, who has been freelancing for the past nine years on Fiverr and claims to be making a six-figure salary each year. “So they're still happy to pay me and work with me to get a human generated one.”

“If you use AI for this job, you will not get paid.”
Job description on Upwork
 

wire28

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What do you study to work in these fields. I'm trying to be on the right side of history when these things take over
When the robots take over it won’t matter that you can code.


<a href="Insider Lays Off 10 Percent of Staff After Announcing Pivot to AI

TURNING TIDES
THURSDAY by MAGGIE HARRISON

Insider Lays Off 10 Percent of Staff After Announcing Pivot to AI​

Not loving this pattern.​

/ Artificial Intelligence/ Ai/ Journalism/ Media
Getty Images


Image by Getty Images

Just a week after urging its writers to incorporate AI tools like ChatGPT into their workflow, Insider has laid off 10 percent of its staff.
"As you know, our industry has been under significant pressure for more than a year. The economic headwinds that have hurt many of our clients and partners are also affecting us," Insider president Barbara Peng wrote in an email to staff sent this morning.
"Unfortunately, to keep our company healthy and competitive, we need to reduce the size of our team," Peng continued, adding that "the reduction would affect about 10 percent" of the publication's workforce.




It's been a bruising year for the media industry, with numerous publishers laying off swaths of employees. And Insider's layoffs, while perhaps not directly related to the incorporation of AI, speak to a troubling new pattern of media layoffs and AI announcements going hand-in-hand — if only, perhaps, as a way of softening the bad news to investors.

In Insider's case, it's not hard to zoom out and see connections.

Just last month, the CEO of the site's owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döepfner, noted in an internal letter to employees — in the midst of a round of Axel Springer layoffs, no less — that "artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was — or simply replace it."

"Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house's future viability," Döepfner wrote in the letter, which was obtained last month by The Guardian. "Only those who create the best original content will survive."

Per the Guardian, Döepfner wrote elsewhere in the memo that AI tech like OpenAI's ChatGPT will cause a "revolution" in how people deal with information, and could even become better at some tasks than human reporters.

This same ride-the-AI-wave-or-don't enthusiasm was echoed by Insider editor-in-chief Nich Carlson earlier this month, who in an email greenlighting Insider staffers to use tools like ChatGPT in their writing said that AI would make Insider "faster and better."

"I've spent many hours working with ChatGPT, and I can already tell having access to it is going to make me a better global editor-in-chief for Insider," Carlson wrote. "My takeaway after a fair amount of experimentation with ChatGPT is that generative AI can make all of you better editors, reporters, and producers, too."

Whether AI is actually mature enough to start stamping out human writing jobs is as hazy as ever, but the concept is clearly catnip for executives and investors.

A major chunk of Axel Springer's cash, for instance, comes from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the global investment management arm of Canada's Pension Plan Investments (CPPI), with CPPI's managing director Andrej Babache sitting on Axel Springer's supervisory board. As listed on its website, CPPI additionally has a massive private equity stake in Red Ventures, the publisher behind CNET and Bankrate.

Sound familiar? Both sites quietly started running AI-generated content this year — but were widely criticized when it turned out the content was riddled with factual errors and plagiarism.

None of this is to say that there's some broader conspiracy to replace human journalists with AI. But there certainly seems to be a pattern, and investors have made it clear that they love AI. And if that's where a publication's funding bodies are leaning? Shifting towards AI in the midst of industry turmoil and layoffs might just keep them happy.

It sucks, but it sadly might be inevitable.

Case in point, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced today that the award-winning Buzzfeed News is shutting down after more than a decade of work. BuzzFeed, of course, has also been in the news for using AI tochurn out SEO bait (a spokesperson was quick to say that no jobs were being replaced by AI.)

But Peretti, strikingly, made sure to mention AI in his layoff memo to staffers.

"We will empower our editorial teams at all of our brands to do the very best creative work and build an interface where that work can be packaged and brought to advertisers more effectively," Peretti wrote in the sorry letter. "And we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI, and cultural moments that can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast.""></a>

Chat GPT :blessed:!
 

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I agree that ChatGPT will be used to replace shytty web/influencer content and bad office copy. I'm only responding to the parts I disagree with.


How does this fit with the fact that ChatGPT can't produce new information and is inaccurate as hell on old information unless you feed it the exact thing you already know? It's not like local news is bloated with too many employees, they've all slashed already and part of the reason the writing is mediocre is because the same people are doing everything now. ChatGPT might improve their writing but it can't do their investigative reporting.


I haven't seen any evidence that it's trustworthy outside of topics that are either opinion-based or very general and bland. When forced to get into specifics of any particular niche it starts making things up.


You're hyping the technology but then saying to co-sign this particular brand. Don't several corporations have the same tech already? So how do you know this is the one that will last and not just, say, the equivalent of Commodore or Myspace?

So we're flooded with letters containing made-up statutes.

Just over a month ago. It almost doesn’t even make sense to respond bc the tech moves so quickly the answers will be in your face within days.

AI will end up replacing local news. The only part that will remain dominated by people will be “human interest” stories. Johnnie the 7 yr old tee ball star that beat cancer.

Everything else will be an amalgamation of data from multiple sources. Social media posts by the guy stuck in traffic who happens to see the accident at the intersection. Publicly available cameras/livestreams. Google data. Pod cameras. Ring camera networks. Publicly available government documents, databases, meetings. Every document at your local courthouse, every pleading, recorded documents. Everything that is being reported by legacy media institutions. There will be portals for people to “communicate” with the AI that is curating the “news.”

Did you happen to see XYZ incident? Tell it what happened, send pics/vids. You’ll have to accept some level of disclosure to the system so using your phones GPS it can tell if you’re lying about your whereabouts etc. It won’t “publish” the incident unless it’s received multiple reports and details are similar.

shyt is going to be crazzzzyyyyy
 
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