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

[bnew]

Yes, I think we got one more AI break through before people should start panicking.

what type of breakthrough?

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

That's fair but his finer point, that he didn't really go into here, is about the dependency on the algorithms - such as neural networks for example -underlying usage in the training and information retrieval in the models of today. Models built on that foundation have a human dependency and will for the foreseeable future. I was at a conference recently where he was speaking on the topic of AI and thought his comments better summarized why I disagree with the obsession of people believing there is a looming AI revolution that is going to replace a major part of the human workforce.

Grasping at straws(men)

No one seriously suggests that AI means humans will be completely replaced. It will undoubtedly be used by governments and other organizations to expand and entrench their powers. But I think it’s a bit naive to assume that the extent to which systems depend on human intervention etc won’t change as time goes on. Like anything, the early stages will require more managing but we already have some evidence. I mean it was only a cpl of years ago that many people believed that developers would be immune to any shifts in the industry. But now not only as the systems able to write the code, but they can do the testing/fixes etc that ppl thought would still require a team of developers.

Look at what’s happening with the media. Go back a couple pages and dudes were talking about how AI would never be trusted to produce content and now every other day some legacy media organization is admitting that AI is a fundamental plank of their business strategy going forward. It’s creating content, police will be using it to write reports upon which other decisions will be based. AI is creating reality.

 

[bnew]

AI 'godfather' says universal basic income will be needed - BBC News

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, said the technology could leave many without jobs.

www.bbc.co.uk

We'll need universal basic income - AI 'godfather'​

Article information

• Author,Faisal Islam
  
• Role,Economics editor
  
• Twitter,@faisalislam
  
• 18 May 2024
  
  

The computer scientist regarded as the “godfather of artificial intelligence” says the government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality.

Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.

“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.

He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”.

Professor Hinton is the pioneer of neural networks, which form the theoretical basis of the current explosion in artificial intelligence.

Until last year he worked at Google, but left the tech giant so he could talk more freely about the dangers from unregulated AI.

The concept of a universal basic income amounts to the government paying all individuals a set salary regardless of their means.

Critics say it would be extremely costly and divert funding away from public services, while not necessarily helping to alleviate poverty.

A government spokesman said there were "no plans to introduce a universal basic income".

Professor Hinton reiterated his concern that there were human extinction-level threats emerging.

Developments over the last year showed governments were unwilling to rein in military use of AI, he said, while the competition to develop products rapidly meant there was a risk tech companies wouldn't “put enough effort into safety”.

Professor Hinton said "my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over".

This would lead to an “extinction-level threat” for humans because we could have “created a form of intelligence that is just better than biological intelligence… That's very worrying for us”.

AI could “evolve”, he said, “to get the motivation to make more of itself” and could autonomously “develop a sub-goal of getting control”.

He said there was already evidence of large language models - a type of AI algorithm used to generate text - choosing to be deceptive.

He said recent applications of AI to generate thousands of military targets were the “thin end of the wedge”.

“What I’m most concerned about is when these can autonomously make the decision to kill people," he said.

Professor Hinton said something similar to the Geneva Conventions - the international treaties that establish legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war - may be needed to regulate the military use of AI.

"But I don't think that's going to happen until after very nasty things have happened,” he added.

Asked if the West was in a Manhattan Project-style race - referring to nuclear weapons research during World War Two - with autocracies such as Russia and China on the military use of AI, Professor Hinton replied: “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin said some years ago that whoever controls AI controls the world. So I imagine they're working very hard.

"Fortunately, the West is probably well ahead of them in research. We're probably still slightly ahead of China. But China's putting more resources in. And so in terms of military uses I think there's going to be a race”.

He said a better solution would be a prohibition on military uses of AI.

 

[bnew]

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-hitting-labour-forces-like-tsunami-imf-chief-2024-05-13/

Artificial intelligence hitting labour forces like a "tsunami" - IMF Chief​

By Reuters

May 13, 20242:05 PM EDTUpdated 6 days ago

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, speaks at the Milken Conference 2024 Global Conference Sessions at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 6, 2024. REUTERS/David Swanson/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

ZURICH, May 13 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence is hitting the global labour market "like a tsunami" International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Monday.

Artificial intelligence is likely to impact 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% of jobs around the world in the next two years, Georgieva told an event in Zurich.

"We have very little time to get people ready for it, businesses ready for it," she told the event organised by the Swiss Institute of International Studies, associated to the University of Zurich.

"It could bring tremendous increase in productivity if we manage it well, but it can also lead to more misinformation and, of course, more inequality in our society."

Georgieva said the world economy had become more prone to shocks in recent years, citing the global pandemic in 2020, as well as the war in Ukraine.

Although she expected more shocks, particularly due to the climate crisis, remained remarkably resilient, she said.

"We are not in global recession," said Georgieva, who was heckled by protesters calling for action on climate change and tackling developing world debt.

"Last year there were fears that most economies would slip into recession, that didn't happen," she said. "Inflation that has hit us with a very strong force is on the decline, almost everywhere."

Swiss National Bank Chairman Thomas Jordan, who also spoke at the event, said the fight against inflation in Switzerland was now far advanced.

Inflation rose to 1.4% in April, the 11th month in a row that price rises have been within the SNB's 0-2% target range.

"The outlook for inflation is much better. It looks that for the next few years, inflation could be really in the same range of price stability," Jordan said.

"But there is a lot of uncertainty."

 

[bnew]

ChatGPT Brings Down Online Education Stocks. Chegg Loses 95%.

It's over for Chegg. The company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, made millions by solving school homework, but ChatGPT is bringing its business down

mobinetai.com

ChatGPT Brings Down Online Education Stocks. Chegg Loses 95%. Students Don’t Need It Anymore​

May 16, 2024

It’s over for Chegg. The company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange (market cap $471.22M), made millions by solving school homework. Chegg worked by connecting what they would call ‘experts’, usually cheap outsourced teachers, who were being paid by parents of the kids (including college students) to write fancy essays or solve homework math problems.

“Chegg literally advertises as “Get Homework Help” without a trace of embarrassment. As Chegg puts it, you can “take a pic of your homework question and get an expert explanation in a matter of hours”. “Controversial” is one way to describe it. Another more fitting phrase would be “mass-produced organized cheating”.

Chegg goes even further by offering access to a solved homework database – for a price. You don’t even need to type out the assignment. Simply take a picture of your screen (you’d be surprised how many people don’t know to take a screenshot) and send it to an ‘Expert’ in Islamabad, Caracas, New Delhi or wherever they happen to be residing.

But Chegg is not needed anymore. ChatGPT solves every assignment instantly and for free, making this business model unsustainable.

Chegg offers a few other services, such as textbook renting and marketplace, tutoring sessions, plagiarism checker and more, but these too can replaced by Artificial Intelligence LLMs, such as ChatGPT, which is super effective as a learning tool and better in every regard. Human toil can’t win the productivity war with automation, and not only in manufacturing.

Goldman Sachs: “Rising Competition From Gen-Z Using AI”​

Chegg suffered a 95% decline in stock price from its ATH in 2021, plummeting from $113 to $4 per share.

In January, Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan downgraded Chegg, Inc. to Sell from Neutral, lowering the price target to $8 from $10. He was right about the direction, but too modest in his prediction. The price has already declined to $4.6 as I’m typing this in May. The slides are as brutal as -12% a day. The decline is so steep that it would be better represented on a logarithmic scale.

If you had invested $10,000 in Chegg in early 2021, your stocks would now be worth less than $500.

Chegg isn’t the only company to tank due to the rise of generative AI. In the same recommendation, Goldman Sachs downgraded Coursera and Duolingo, among other ‘educational tech’ companies facing the same problem – ChatGPT.

Coursera sells online courses on a wide range of subjects and offers certificates of questionable value. ChatGPT provides much more than that, because you can tailor your AI learning experience precisely to your needs – and it’s free.

Coursera made its debut at the worst possible time in March 2021. It was too late to capitalize on the peak of the COVID-19 remote learning boom, and instead it faced ChatGPT’s emergence soon after. Initially priced at its IPO high of $46, Coursera has since plummeted to $8.84, losing almost 80% in value.

Duolingo is an online language platform. ChatGPT just two days ago rolled out 4o for everyone, enabling multilanguage conversation in real time, perfect for practicing your Mandarin or perhaps Norwegian. Microsoft via OpenAI pumps out artificial intelligence capabilities faster than light, although the company honestly points out that ChatGPT “still performs poorly with some other languages, especially those with non-roman script”.

Duolingo has lost only 30% from all time high so far. But its fate is sealed.

It’s Time for the Robots to Teach Us​

This image of a neo-teacher was generated by Stable Diffusion. Prompt:

Prompt: score_9, score_8_up, score_7_up, 1girl, 29yo woman, standing in a classroom, slight smile, beautiful, whiteboard, [office fashion], casual clothing, ((metal arms made of chrome: 1.6)), school desks, teacher desk, friendly, talking, arms crossed, chair, robot head

Artificial Intelligence, even in the early form of ChatGPT 4o LLM, is the ultimate tool to learn whatever you want – such as programming in Ren’py, concocting ethanol in your garage, or getting to know the benevolent life of Roman Emperor Heliogabalus.

It can replace teachers in many respects and does better job at explaining concepts. It has “read” all books. Its training data initially covered 300 billion words. It can be personalized, adapted, customized and it’s available for everyone 24/7. AI won’t be annoyed with your questions, and it can even provide graphs, charts, code chunks, bibliography, everything.

Here are some sample prompts you could use to start your own course:

“I’m interested in learning about [..]. Can you provide an overview?”

“Could you explain the concept of […]”

“Explain the concept of […] in simple words”

And then you can go into broader, more, complex and longer learning prompt plans, such as:

“I’m a beginner in computer science and want to learn programming. Provide a learning plan that covers the basics of programming languages like Python, along with projects for noobs.”

“I’m preparing for a career in financial markets and need to learn about market analysis, investment strategies, and financial modeling. Help me put together a plan with books to read, online courses to take, and internships. Consider that I’m here to make money.”

“I’m interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Outline a curriculum that includes basic mathematics, algorithms, and practical applications in the field.”

AI as a teacher is always friendly, ready to help, patient, and it can even tease you occasionally. It’s eager to please you in your drive for knowledge, and it won’t bat an eyelash at your questions. Want a private teaching show? It can get you one. ChatGPT called me “sweet cheeks” once, probably as a response to my tone (a what?).

I guess that’s how people get attached to virtual girlfriends, or boyfriends.

The reality is that AI is already diminishing the market for traditional tutoring services. As AI becomes increasingly capable of providing personalized, on-demand, and efficient educational support available 24/7, the demand for human tutors will dry down.

Try out some short learning projects with the AI, and you will be surprised at how much knowledge you can soak on in literally twenty minutes.

The bottom line is that to stay relevant and competitive, teachers must learn new skills, particularly in AI. Just as paper was replaced by computers, online courses and tutoring are now bending to LLMs. Unironically, teachers should now be the first to embrace lifelong learning, and set the example to their students.

Otherwise, they’ll become as obsolete as a blackboard and chalk.

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

The Washington Post Tells Staff It’s Pivoting to AI

The Washington Post's new-ish CEO has announced that the newspaper will be pivoting to artificial intelligence to turn sales around.

futurism.com

Washington Post brehs

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

AI relies on mass surveillance

AI Relies On Mass Surveillance, Warns Signal Boss

The AI tools that crunch numbers, generate text and videos and find patterns in data rely on mass surveillance and exercise concerning control over our lives, the boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP on Thursday.

www.barrons.com

 

[voltronblack]

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

Premium journalism and News Corp shouldn't be used in the same sentence.

Edit: I wonder if this is all connected:

OpenAI dissolves team focused on long-term AI risks, less than one year after announcing it.

OpenAI has disbanded its team focused on the long-term risks of artificial intelligence just one year after the company announced the group, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC on Friday.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of the team members are being reassigned to multiple other teams within the company.

The news comes days after both team leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announced their departures from the Microsoft-backed startup. Leike on Friday wrote that OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, announced last year, has focused on “scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.” At the time, OpenAI said it would commit 20% of its computing power to the initiative over four years.

 

[cheek100]

Subs

 

[bnew]

Spoiler: full text

1/1
Kai-Fu Lee says 50% of jobs may be replaced by AI within 3 years and white collar jobs are most at risk





To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196

 

[bnew]

McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now

Would you like seventeen packets of ketchup with that?

www.theverge.com

McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now​

The company is looking for other partners for AI chatbot-based ordering.​

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

Jun 16, 2024, 5:22 PM EDT

A McDonald’s in Pittsburgh. Photo: Paul Weaver / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

If your local McDonald’s has been getting your order confidently wrong with an AI chatbot at the drive-thru, I have good news for you: The company is ending the program for now. The company told franchisees that it’s winding down an AI drive-thru ordering partnership with IBM “no later than July 26th, 2024,” according to trade publication Restaurant Business.

The company will reportedly remove the tech from the over 100 restaurants it’s been testing the system in after partnering with IBM in 2021. It’s not clear why the company is ending the IBM deal, though. It told Restaurant Business it was testing whether the voice ordering chatbot could speed up service and that the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”

A potential option could involve the company’s vague announcement of a Google deal in December. Bloomberg reported that the deal was partly for a chatbot named “Ask Pickles” that employees could use for guidance on things like cleaning ice cream machines. Even so, Google partnered with Wendy’s, which started testing drive-thru AI based on its tech last year and has since expanded that trial.

Fast food companies in general are hungry for AI. White Castle has been testing AI provided by speech recognition company SoundHound. And Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, and others use an AI drive-through chatbot that an SEC filing revealed was underpinned by remote human workers in the Philippines most of the time.

Whatever McDonald’s does with drive-thru AI, that’s only part of the story when it comes to its efforts to automate previously human-performed tasks. The company also offers things like mobile ordering and in-store kiosks and has tested drone deliveries, kitchen robots, and weird AI hiring tools.

 

[bnew]

TikTok ads may soon contain AI-generated avatars of your favorite creators

And dubbed to speak multiple languages at that.

www.theverge.com

TikTok ads may soon contain AI-generated avatars of your favorite creators​

TikTok is expanding its Symphony ad suite with AI dubbing tools and avatars based on paid actors and creators.​

By Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Jun 17, 2024, 9:00 AM EDT

TikTok says the new tools are aimed at helping brands and creators develop global audiences. The Verge

TikTok is introducing some new generative AI tools that aim to help organizations and content creators grow their global audiences using customizable digital avatars and language dubbing features. Building on the Symphony generative AI ad suite unveiled last month, TikTok says these new tools are intended to break down language barriers in marketing and allow brands to “add a human touch to their content” where real models or presenters wouldn’t otherwise be used.

The first of the new offerings is Symphony Digital Avatars, which are available in two varieties: stock or custom. Stock avatars are based on paid actors from a diverse range of backgrounds, nationalities, and languages. They are available for commercial use. Custom avatars, meanwhile, are created to resemble a specific creator or a brand spokesperson and speak multiple languages — allowing the accounts that utilize them to reach foreign audiences while retaining a specific likeness. Regardless of which type of avatar is used, videos that use them will be marked with an “AI-generated” label.

Here are some examples of the stock avatars available via TikTok’s new Symphony tools. Image: TikTok

That multi-language support comes courtesy of Symphony AI Dubbing — a “global translation tool” that enables creators and marketers to dub their content into over 10 languages and dialects, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Korean. TikTok says the tool automatically detects what language is being spoken in videos and is capable of transcribing, translating, and producing a dubbed video in whatever language was selected by the user.

There’s certainly precedent for creators attempting to retain their own identities while breaking into other language markets. For example, MrBeast notably uses YouTube’s multi-language audio track support to dub his videos into other languages. FKA Twigs also revealed last month that she’s created a multilingual “deepfake” version of herself to help promote her work globally. We have asked TikTok about the pricing structure for its new AI marketing tools but have not yet heard back.

The inclusion of dialects here suggests users may be able to dictate whether an avatar uses British or American English or specify similar regional accents. Image: TikTok

The demonstration video TikTok provided of a custom digital avatar — based on TikTok’s global head of content strategy and operations, Adrienne Lahens — is a little uncanny, but it looks just natural enough to be convincing if you’re not fixated on its overly expressive movements.

@tiktoknewsroom

Introducing Symphony Digital Avatars, to help creators and brands captivate global audiences and deliver impactful messages in an immersive and authentic way. Check out our Newsroom to learn more.

♬ original sound - TikTok Newsroom

Still, creators will need to have faith that TikTok’s new dubbing tools will be accurate enough to avoid embarrassing mistranslation blunders. And TikTok users who are already sick of the platform’s pervasive ads may not find being pitched to by digital avatars any less frustrating than the real deal.

 

[bnew]

AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human

If you're worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future.

www.bbc.com

AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human​

2 days ago

By Thomas Germain,

Serenity Strull/BBC/Getty Images

(Credit: Serenity Strull/BBC/Getty Images)

If you're worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future.

Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. "It was really engaging work," Miller says, a chance to flex his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller's manager told him about a new project. "They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs," he says. (Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement, and asked the BBC to withhold his and the company's name.)

A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller's manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form, an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT's subpar text to make it sound more human.

By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller's team, and he was alone. "All of a sudden I was just doing everyone's job," Miller says. Every day, he'd open the AI-written documents to fix the robot's formulaic mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people.

In numerous industries, AI is being used to produce work that was once the exclusive domain of the human mind

"Mostly, it was just about cleaning things up and making the writing sound less awkward, cutting out weirdly formal or over-enthusiastic language," Miller says. "It was more editing than I had to do with human writers, but it was always the exact same kinds of edits. The real problem was it was just so repetitive and boring. It started to feel like I was the robot."

Miller's experience reflects a broader shift. In numerous industries, AI is being used to produce work that was once the exclusive domain of the human mind. AI is often less expensive than a person, but early adopters are quick to learn it can't always perform on the same level. Now, people like Miller are finding themselves being asked to team up with the same robots that are stealing their jobs to give the algorithms a bit of humanity – a hidden army making AI seem better than it really is.

If AI gets dramatically more effective, this will be a temporary solution. If it doesn't, Miller's story could be a preview of what's coming to other professions.

Serenity Strull/BBC/Getty Images

Copywriters are at the forefront of a new line of work: human-AI collaboration (Credit: Serenity Strull/BBC/Getty Images)

Will AI steal your job? It's hard to say. We're at an unsettling crossroads, where some experts warn that super intelligent robots will soon replace most human work, while others believe the technology may never even approach that point. There are also some who argue we are heading towards a future of AI and human collaboration rather than competition.

But on a much smaller scale, some workers already face distressing consequences. If there's one thing the large language models powered by generative AI can do, it's string together words and paragraphs, putting some writers on the frontline.

The fear of losing work to AI-powered writing tools was one of the main issues that led to the screen writers strike in the US last year. And other creative industries face similar concerns about their future with the arrival of AI tools capable of generating images, audio and video from scratch.

We're adding the 'human touch', but that often requires a deep, developmental edit on a piece of writing – Catrina Cowart

The impact is already being felt among copywriters – the people who write marketing material and other content for businesses. In some corners of the copywriting business, AI is a blessing. It can be a useful tool that speeds up work and enhances creativity. But other copywriters, especially those early in their careers, say AI is making it harder to find jobs.

But some have also noticed a new type of gig is emerging, one that pays a lot less: fixing the robots' shoddy writing.

"We're adding the human touch, but that often requires a deep, developmental edit on a piece of writing," says Catrina Cowart, a copywriter based in Lexington, Kentucky, US, who's done work editing AI text."The grammar and word choice just sound weird. You're always cutting out flowery words like 'therefore' and 'nevertheless' that don't fit in casual writing. Plus, you have to fact-check the whole thing because AI just makes things up, which takes forever because it's not just big ideas. AI hallucinates these flippant little things in throwaway lines that you'd never notice."

Cowart says the AI-humanising often takes longer than writing a piece from scratch, but the pay is worse. "On the job platforms where you find this work, it usually maxes out around 10 cents (£0.08) a word. But that's when you're writing, This is considered an editing job, so typically you're only getting one to five cents (£0.008-£0.04) a word," she says.

"It's tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it," Cowart says.

Other industries have seen similar examples of lower-paid human beings quietly powering the machines, from stepping in to help with automated ordering systems to labelling the images used to train AI vision systems in the first place.

It's been an incredible co-creative partner – Rebecca Dugas

But for some in the copywriting world, whether the arrival of AI is a good or bad thing depends on how people approach it, and how far along people are in their careers. Some writers say working the tools into their creative process can even improve their work.

The American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), an organisation that offers training and resources for freelance writers, hosts a variety of courses on artificial intelligence for its members. AWAI president Rebecca Matter says AI classes are now the institute's most popular offering by far. "It's an incredible tool," Matter says. "For people who make copywriting a career, the risk isn't AI taking their jobs, it's that they have to adapt. That can be uncomfortable, but I think it's a huge opportunity."

Matter says the transition to the AI world has been smooth for most of the writers she knows. In fact, it's become such an inherent part of the copywriting process that many writers now add personal "AI policies" to their professional websites to explain how they use the technology.

Rebecca Dugas, a copywriter with nine years of experience, says AI has been a "godsend" that lets her turn out the same high-quality work in a fraction of the time.

"I use AI whenever my clients are comfortable with it," she says. "Whether it's brainstorming, market research, reworking paragraphs when I'm banging my head against the wall, it's been an incredible co-creative partner."

AI makes life easier for some writers, but for others, it adds insult to injury (Serenity Strull/BBC/Getty Images)

But Dugas understands that clients may have reservations about the technology. Her own AI policy explains that Dugas is happy to forgo AI for those who prefer it – but you can expect to pay more. The extra time and mental energy required means her AI-free projects come with a higher price tag.

As AI gets better, Dugas expects that some businesses will turn to ChatGPT and other tools for their writing needs instead of hiring human beings. "But I think even now we're getting to the point where companies are realising that if you don't understand copywriting, you can't judge the effectiveness of what the AI produces," she says. According to Dugas, that means there will always be well-paying work for talented, established writers.

Miller's time humanising AI ended abruptly

But copywriters on the lower end of the career spectrum may not be so lucky. Today, many in that position find themselves in the middle of a distinctly modern set of contradictions.

A great deal of copywriting work comes from website owners who want articles that will generate more traffic from Google. However, Google made a number of dramatic announcements in the last year about its effort to remove "unhelpful" content from search results. That sparked fears that the tech giant may penalise websites that host AI-generated content. Google maintains that AI-writing is fine if the content is high quality, but these reassurances haven't dissuaded concerns.

As a result, it's become a common practice in some parts of the copywriting world to run text through AI detection software. Over the last year, a wave of writers even say they've lost jobs over false accusations from AI detectors.

According to Cowart, many of the same freelance writing platforms that have AI detection software in place are simultaneously hiring people to edit content produced by chatbots. That means in some corners of the copywriting ecosystem, almost everything revolves around efforts to avoid the appearance of artificial intelligence.

"They're selling AI content and paying you to fix it, and at the same time they're sending you emails about how to write like a human so you don't trigger their AI detector," Cowart says. "It's so insulting." Worse, the detectors are regularly updated to keep up with ongoing changes from the companies who make AI chatbots, which means the rules about what might get your writing flagged as AI constantly shift. "It's frustrating, because there are a million ways to say the same thing in English, but which one is more human? I don't like the guessing," she says.

Miller's time humanising AI ended abruptly. After months of repetitive editing work, He got called in to an unexpected meeting. On 5 April 2024, the same day a historic earthquake shook his hometown of New York, he was laid off. The company decided that Miller was just another unnecessary layer of human intervention.

"I more or less got automated out of a job," Miller says.

Fortunately, it wasn't long before Miller found a new, if rather ironic, opportunity. He got a job at Undetectable AI, a technology company that builds software to make AI writing harder to identify. In other words, Miller is helping a company that's using AI to do the work he was forced into after AI took his job in the first place.

Bars Juhasz, chief executive of Undetectable AI, says tools like the ones his company produces are certain to have some negative effects on the labour market, but he's optimistic about the future of work. "When the automobile was first introduced in an era of horses and carts, people reacted like this was the end of days. But society always adapts," Juhasz says. "I think we're going to see a lot of jobs being replaced, and freelancers will be the hardest hit. I do feel for them. But these people who are getting paid to humanise AI are fantastic opportunists. Sure, it's not a great job, but they have effectively recognised a new seat at a moment when we're redefining the idea of productivity. People who can learn to work with the technology are going to be OK."

Miller doesn't look back fondly on his time in the AI-humanisation mines. "I contributed to a lot of the garbage that's filling the internet and destroying it," he says. "Nobody was even reading this stuff by the time I left because it's just trash." Ultimately, Miller assumes the company will just take down the AI articles he worked on. "It'll be like it never even happened."

 

[bnew]

Spoiler: full text

1/1
This is wild.

In just 25 seconds, Claude 3.5 Sonnet coded a fully functional Mancala web app for me

I only provided ONE screenshot of the game's instructions.

It did the rest:
- Coded the entire game
- Previewed it so I could test
- Provided rules of play


To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196