I have always thought that most, if not all, people that called themselves “content creators” are not providing much value. And in aggregate they are probably net negative due to their spamminess.
Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned.
All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.
I expect this theme to continue and expand across many "jobs". There are a lot of people who are just plugging numbers into spreadsheets all day and you would think "yes but when something doesn't fit they have to be smart and use human intelligence to fix the problem" However if you see what happens in practice all they do is send an e-mail to someone else saying there is a problem. ChatGTP can do that part. You don't need many of these pencil pushers
Content creation very much follows some pareto rule where the good 80% comes from only 20% of creators, or something along those lines. It means the 80% of creators producing bad/unuseful/spammy content are in trouble because what little work they were doing can now be automated. This will lead to an explosion of the already very saturated world of bad/unuseful/spammy content.
My prediction is that this will strengthen the huge market share that the big institutional providers of content had pre-internet. In the those days, they had effectively full market share because access to smaller creators was just too difficult. Then the internet happened and small creators could reach consumers and vice versa and it was easy. Market share started to shift somewhat to smaller creators. But... with automated AI crap content it will severely distort the signal/noise ratio when looking for content -- making it again very hard to find small creators of quality content. This difficulty will lead to people sticking to the big institutional creators.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips (one of the biggest tech Youtube channels) posts vids where he upgrades his rigs, such as one where he goes through setting up a server that can store a petabyte of videos because they are spending another 100k on new cameras so that they can shoot in 8k raw.
And he isn't the only one. If you look at LGR, a nostalgia tech Youtuber, he has also upgraded his setups over the years, though less so than LTT.
I was reading an article comparing chat GPT results with the Google equivalent, and how much better the chat GPT result was.
Of course, in reality, once I reduced the search terms to make it more Google friendly (chatGPT’s conversational mode requires a lot of superfluous language, whereas a Google search does better with only keywords), Google returned the same result much faster. The difference was that Google didn’t print the entire result. It asked me to click a link to get the answer. Which I did, and clicking the link and loading the website was still significantly faster than chatGPT.
But what made it clear for me is that besides it’s conversational approach (which I don’t find beneficial), chatGPT’s biggest advantage appears to be that it’s ingestion method means that it is able to completely evade copyright, and present somebody else’s results as it’s own.
Google could have done exactly the same thing and presented the entire result on its own page, but since it’s not got “AI” which we’ve apparently decided doesn’t need to honor copyright, it doesn’t do that.
AI’s biggest advantage right now appears to be the bag of wool it is placing before our eyes that’s preventing us from questioning it’s blatant and outright copyright theft and abuse.
AI can reword something as much as needed to make it different. What are human authors going to do? Copyright all variations and paraphrases of their texts? Reinvent copyright to cover not just expression, but ideas? I think that would make copyright borrow characteristics from trademarks and patents, it would not be fair.
And LLMs are not used just to "abuse copyright", as you put it. They are also useful for task solving, thousands of different of tasks can be executed on language models. Thinking their sole purpose is copyright evasion is denying benefits to other people. Similarly artists think SD only exists to make infringing art, but it can be applied in many other fields, even other modalities like audio.
Why don't we just ban electricity to protect copyright? Without electricity there is almost no more copying, not even loading a web page. /s No AI works without electricity. Problem solved if all that matters is copyright.
> chatGPT’s conversational mode requires a lot of superfluous language, whereas a Google search does better with only keywords
I was recently travelling in another country and was able to ask ChatGPT for breakfast/lunch/dinner recommendations suiting a particular style within "walking distance" from where I was and it knocked it out of the park. All great, detailed, bulleted recommendations that I may have otherwise overlooked, as I had already done Google searches on this.
It was really an eye-opener, despite having interacted with it already in a variety of different ways.
I will note one recommendation was permanently closed, a lack of it's current knowledge, but I informed it that the recommendation was wrong, it "thanked" me and told me I was correct and that it would not recommend this location in the future.
I have no idea whether any of that is true, but it was quite interesting.
>What AI is already capable of should be celebrated. It's amazing. It can save so much time and enable so much more productivity. But we should all share in that collective productivity increase as it continues to improve. It shouldn't be the case that some people win big while many, if not most, lose.
That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen one.
I benefit from invention of a car because I can buy a car and be it's owner and only benefactor
You cannot buy and own ChatGPT as invididual, you will never even be able to inslect its source code.
A car is patent protected. Patents allow me personally to build a car for my personal use. Copyright doesn't allow that.
Patents last 20 years, copyright lasts close to 100, depending on jurisdiction.
The only reason corporations can make insane profits from this tech is because we granted this category of IP insane priviliges and government is spending tax dollars to protect their IP.
Make code like patents - it must be published in a register accessibke by anyone, and loses protections after 20 years.
If you don't register it, then the government will not be prosecuting anyone for using it.
Whenever there are large paradigm shifts in culture, business, or technology, there is a shift in winners and losers, so I agree this is wishful thinking.
This is exactly what Karl Marx predicted 200 years ago, except he saw things in the context of industrialization and mechanical automation as opposed to AI and digital automation.
This is actually the primary message I got from the recent Bing announcement and demos. When the new Bing makes a suggestion for a TV, Microsoft wants to have sold those suggestion spots to the highest bidder.
>Because ChatGPT is so hugely popular and experiencing truly massive demand already, you may not have been able to actually personally use it yet, but suffice to say, it's kind of like magic. And it's still early day
Hypefluff. Could have replaced ChatGPT with crypto, penny stocks, or Juicero.
Show me the money. I mean actually show me. No more theorycrafting, hypotheticals, or bullshitting. Show me a company using ChatGPT and how its use is reflected on the bottom line of their financial statement.
ChatGPT was released less than 3 months ago, maybe give it a minute? The ecosystem around LLMs has been flourishing and is accelerating, look at langchain, look at all the open models out there. And in comparison to crypto, there is hard, actual usefulness to it, today.
Maybe there could be services like Patreon where you subscribe to support them, but the content made by creators is used to either train the AI or the embeddings are put in a vector database. Then when the user does a semantic search, it puts the results from creators or whatever type of curation first.
This could provide better search results for the user, at least some degree of attribution or citation for some searches, and a way to support creators at least a little bit.
It seems quite possible someone is already building such a system. I mean the alternative seems just to not even try to credit/support creators with these generative systems.
I wonder if there is a way to embed a token that is unique and 100% identifiable so it will always be recoverable somehow. Although that might not really make sense. But if it was possible maybe it could be used for attribution.
If training models becomes the next big business venture, which it seems is likely, then companies doing so might pay for exclusivity rights to content that can be accurately labeled by its author. The specialist authors could also be employed during the reinforcement learning phase to evaluate the response to various prompts within a domain. AI Trainer could easily become a new profession of its own.
In software development, it probably increases earning potential, because you can outsource all the tedious coding to the AI and have more time to manage the big picture of how your software interacts with other components, is optimized for certain tasks, etc. So you can deliver more value in the same time frame.
What tedious for you is essential for me. I take great care writing every line of my code. I'm actually paying for Copilot and use for repeating blocks of code. But that's a miniscule amount of time saved, like IDE autocomplete, just increases quality of life.
So far no AI written any substantial amount of not-completely-trivial code that I'd accept. And amount of time tweaking its output exceeds amount of time I'd spend writing that code.
My career now spans nearly 40 years. If I had a nickel for every technology that was going to reduce the need for developers and put us all out of work...
What has happened instead is we now have more developers than ever and I would argue the productivity of the average developer is 10x-100x what it was when I first started, thanks to all these tools and technologies. That's how software is eating the world: more people than ever are creating an order of magnitude or more than ever and yet the global backlog of software needing to be written is increasing!
I'm looking forward to using ChatGPT to assist with my own projects. There are so many projects in my backlog and many projects that just never get done because we don't have enough manpower to get the work done and not enough money to hire (and manage) any more developers. In other words, we weren't going to be hiring anyway, yet we're going to be able to get more needed work done.
I realize the software we create will put a lot of people out of work, but at my company a full 40% of the employees are eligible for retirement within the next five years. Right now there's no way we can create enough software to eliminate those positions and there simply isn't enough people in the labor force to replace them. This technology might be the silver bullet we need to solve this problem.
This is how I view it. The actual servers and computers run machine code. And we're now at a point where we can describe intent to a machine and have an ok bit of code come out of the AI process.
Now the trick will be making sure that we don't over train the bots and end up having a really complex refined description language that the AI interprets to make code, that itself just get boiled down by interpreters and compilers a few times until the CPU finally get's the instructions it actually needs. Hopefully we'll find balance.
I like to describe AI's impact on coding like the invention of the nailgun for carpenters. No ones job is going away, things are going to get more complex and done faster.
I'm wondering if this perspective is true at scale? If everyone is saving ~25% of their time then on the whole there is a 25% increase in workforce efficiency, no?
The flip side of efficiency if the workforce headcount remains constant is over capacity, which is a downward force on earning potential.
I sort of think you just proved the author's point - you are using the AI to increase your productivity. People who cannot adjust in that way will be less productive and loose out.
This is part of progress (be it good or bad progress).
It used to be that the majority of the US population worked in agriculture and today thanks to automation - it’s around 1% of the population. Same goes for numerous roles (secretaries, switchboard operators etc.)
As far as ChatGPT goes - I have a lot of concerns around it, but I am still not convinced it will replace search. I think it might compliment search. Either way I think it’s a good thing if how we search changes. Search is broken, it no longer brings me the best results, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between ads and legit links (this is of course intentional because of revenue and KPIs) and I know longer trust the results. I am not sure if chatGPT is the answer, but maybe it’s part of the answer.
Important lesson - teach your kids to have a self development mindset. They need to be prepared to have multiple career changes and that their current skill set might be made obsolete at any moment. It sucks, but it’s reality and when things change, they change fast.
"Content creators" are doomed, of course. It is no longer a sustainable income source; now, you have to be a niche artist, like people who try their luck in modern art: only a few of them will invent something original enough and be lucky enough to be successful, the rest will get nothing.
Or, you can switch to be an AI operator and run mass production content pipelines. There will be less of those compared to individual content creators, but still sustainable enough. Like, only 3% of people are now professionally involved in food farming, and that's a good thing.
I think it does a great job of synthesizing certain things like recipes, book summaries, etc but as soon as there’s anything important involved it’s just wasting time. It spits out a lot of things that seem correct but on closer inspection is not and that ends up costing a lot of time down the road. If it’s not right 100% of the time, or at least tells you when it’s not that confident, it can’t really be trusted. At the very least hopefully it’ll help get rid of all the SEO junk sites littering the internet.
I'm more worried about the internet itself, as soon as this technology is accessible to bots, we would no longer be able to distinguish if we're chatting or reading an article by a real human or an AI.
Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT..
Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT.
I asked ChatGPT to write a rebuttal to your statement. It seems to have pretty strong opinions on the matter:
While it's true that advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have made it possible for machines like ChatGPT to produce human-like responses, the idea that we would no longer be able to distinguish between a real human and an AI-generated response is not entirely accurate.
Firstly, it's important to note that AI-generated responses are typically generated with a specific purpose or objective in mind. ChatGPT, for example, is designed to generate responses to questions and prompts in a way that mimics human conversation. However, it's unlikely that an AI-generated response would be able to replicate the nuances and complexities of human conversation in a completely convincing way.
Secondly, there are various methods that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by an AI or a human. For instance, machine-generated responses tend to be more formulaic and less spontaneous than human responses. Additionally, there are techniques such as the Turing Test that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine.
It's also worth noting that the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits. For instance, it can help to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and enhance our understanding of complex problems.
In summary, while it's true that advances in AI and natural language processing have the potential to generate responses that are difficult to distinguish from those generated by humans, there are still ways to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. Moreover, the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits, and we should not be overly worried about the potential negative effects of this technology.
AI will most likely just increase the speed of development/content production etc.
It makes no sense for companies to fire anyone. It makes sense to make everyone use AI so they get even more value from each employee, maximizing their profits and market position.
I think ChatGPT's programming prowess might be a bit overblown. A majority development efforts are spent in adding functionality to existing code , fixing bugs and reducing technical debt. I am not sure ChatGPT can do this.
I always thought about writing this insightful blog about whay Ayn Rand would think of surveillance capitalism. She's a very strong proponent of the right to privacy, but at the same time she is a proponent of an unregulated market, that market produced surveillance capitalism. Or did it? Maybe it was produced by companies manipulating the rules behind the scenes, Ayn would hate that! Perhaps she would feel the need to take matters into her own hands: self-host all the things! I bet she'd have her own server, even though it runs that socialist, shared OS called Linux ;) ...
So I ask ChatGPT what would Ayn think? And it writes a very nice, balanced text. Exactly in line with my thoughts, just written more concisely and in much better English. I really enjoyed that conversation with ChatGPT. I did loose the interest to write the assay. Or perhaps I can copy paste it to my blog... Makes me feel like a CheatGPT though.
[+] [-] NhanH|3 years ago|reply
Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned.
All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.
[+] [-] gitfan86|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|3 years ago|reply
My prediction is that this will strengthen the huge market share that the big institutional providers of content had pre-internet. In the those days, they had effectively full market share because access to smaller creators was just too difficult. Then the internet happened and small creators could reach consumers and vice versa and it was easy. Market share started to shift somewhat to smaller creators. But... with automated AI crap content it will severely distort the signal/noise ratio when looking for content -- making it again very hard to find small creators of quality content. This difficulty will lead to people sticking to the big institutional creators.
[+] [-] tomjen3|3 years ago|reply
And he isn't the only one. If you look at LGR, a nostalgia tech Youtuber, he has also upgraded his setups over the years, though less so than LTT.
[+] [-] ThrowawayTestr|3 years ago|reply
Depends on the value you put on entertainment.
[+] [-] rhaway84773|3 years ago|reply
Of course, in reality, once I reduced the search terms to make it more Google friendly (chatGPT’s conversational mode requires a lot of superfluous language, whereas a Google search does better with only keywords), Google returned the same result much faster. The difference was that Google didn’t print the entire result. It asked me to click a link to get the answer. Which I did, and clicking the link and loading the website was still significantly faster than chatGPT.
But what made it clear for me is that besides it’s conversational approach (which I don’t find beneficial), chatGPT’s biggest advantage appears to be that it’s ingestion method means that it is able to completely evade copyright, and present somebody else’s results as it’s own.
Google could have done exactly the same thing and presented the entire result on its own page, but since it’s not got “AI” which we’ve apparently decided doesn’t need to honor copyright, it doesn’t do that.
AI’s biggest advantage right now appears to be the bag of wool it is placing before our eyes that’s preventing us from questioning it’s blatant and outright copyright theft and abuse.
[+] [-] visarga|3 years ago|reply
And LLMs are not used just to "abuse copyright", as you put it. They are also useful for task solving, thousands of different of tasks can be executed on language models. Thinking their sole purpose is copyright evasion is denying benefits to other people. Similarly artists think SD only exists to make infringing art, but it can be applied in many other fields, even other modalities like audio.
Why don't we just ban electricity to protect copyright? Without electricity there is almost no more copying, not even loading a web page. /s No AI works without electricity. Problem solved if all that matters is copyright.
[+] [-] EMM_386|3 years ago|reply
I was recently travelling in another country and was able to ask ChatGPT for breakfast/lunch/dinner recommendations suiting a particular style within "walking distance" from where I was and it knocked it out of the park. All great, detailed, bulleted recommendations that I may have otherwise overlooked, as I had already done Google searches on this.
It was really an eye-opener, despite having interacted with it already in a variety of different ways.
I will note one recommendation was permanently closed, a lack of it's current knowledge, but I informed it that the recommendation was wrong, it "thanked" me and told me I was correct and that it would not recommend this location in the future.
I have no idea whether any of that is true, but it was quite interesting.
[+] [-] Karunamon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkerside|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XzAeRosho|3 years ago|reply
That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen one.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
Like yes in a perfect world time saved would go back to workers, it doesn't though.
A machine could do in a minute what a knitter would do in a day, it doesn't mean knitters got a 7 minute work week
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|3 years ago|reply
I benefit from invention of a car because I can buy a car and be it's owner and only benefactor
You cannot buy and own ChatGPT as invididual, you will never even be able to inslect its source code.
A car is patent protected. Patents allow me personally to build a car for my personal use. Copyright doesn't allow that.
Patents last 20 years, copyright lasts close to 100, depending on jurisdiction.
The only reason corporations can make insane profits from this tech is because we granted this category of IP insane priviliges and government is spending tax dollars to protect their IP.
Make code like patents - it must be published in a register accessibke by anyone, and loses protections after 20 years.
If you don't register it, then the government will not be prosecuting anyone for using it.
Suddenly the benefits will be shared
[+] [-] eggy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Calavar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pydry|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxfordmale|3 years ago|reply
ChatGPT is good at the moment, as it has not yet included advertising or has been gamed by SEO. This will change.
[+] [-] TheUndead96|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobody0|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-...
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|3 years ago|reply
Hypefluff. Could have replaced ChatGPT with crypto, penny stocks, or Juicero.
Show me the money. I mean actually show me. No more theorycrafting, hypotheticals, or bullshitting. Show me a company using ChatGPT and how its use is reflected on the bottom line of their financial statement.
[+] [-] danielbln|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RupertEisenhart|3 years ago|reply
You think that was a one-off?
[+] [-] newsletterthrow|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ilaksh|3 years ago|reply
This could provide better search results for the user, at least some degree of attribution or citation for some searches, and a way to support creators at least a little bit.
It seems quite possible someone is already building such a system. I mean the alternative seems just to not even try to credit/support creators with these generative systems.
I wonder if there is a way to embed a token that is unique and 100% identifiable so it will always be recoverable somehow. Although that might not really make sense. But if it was possible maybe it could be used for attribution.
[+] [-] throwaway4aday|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4aday|3 years ago|reply
A more appropriate comparison would be that information is about to experience a paradigm shift as big as reading blogs instead of books.
[+] [-] coffeeblack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbezhenar|3 years ago|reply
So far no AI written any substantial amount of not-completely-trivial code that I'd accept. And amount of time tweaking its output exceeds amount of time I'd spend writing that code.
[+] [-] taylodl|3 years ago|reply
What has happened instead is we now have more developers than ever and I would argue the productivity of the average developer is 10x-100x what it was when I first started, thanks to all these tools and technologies. That's how software is eating the world: more people than ever are creating an order of magnitude or more than ever and yet the global backlog of software needing to be written is increasing!
I'm looking forward to using ChatGPT to assist with my own projects. There are so many projects in my backlog and many projects that just never get done because we don't have enough manpower to get the work done and not enough money to hire (and manage) any more developers. In other words, we weren't going to be hiring anyway, yet we're going to be able to get more needed work done.
I realize the software we create will put a lot of people out of work, but at my company a full 40% of the employees are eligible for retirement within the next five years. Right now there's no way we can create enough software to eliminate those positions and there simply isn't enough people in the labor force to replace them. This technology might be the silver bullet we need to solve this problem.
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
Now the trick will be making sure that we don't over train the bots and end up having a really complex refined description language that the AI interprets to make code, that itself just get boiled down by interpreters and compilers a few times until the CPU finally get's the instructions it actually needs. Hopefully we'll find balance.
I like to describe AI's impact on coding like the invention of the nailgun for carpenters. No ones job is going away, things are going to get more complex and done faster.
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radiorental|3 years ago|reply
The flip side of efficiency if the workforce headcount remains constant is over capacity, which is a downward force on earning potential.
[+] [-] nixlim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benja123|3 years ago|reply
It used to be that the majority of the US population worked in agriculture and today thanks to automation - it’s around 1% of the population. Same goes for numerous roles (secretaries, switchboard operators etc.)
As far as ChatGPT goes - I have a lot of concerns around it, but I am still not convinced it will replace search. I think it might compliment search. Either way I think it’s a good thing if how we search changes. Search is broken, it no longer brings me the best results, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between ads and legit links (this is of course intentional because of revenue and KPIs) and I know longer trust the results. I am not sure if chatGPT is the answer, but maybe it’s part of the answer.
Important lesson - teach your kids to have a self development mindset. They need to be prepared to have multiple career changes and that their current skill set might be made obsolete at any moment. It sucks, but it’s reality and when things change, they change fast.
[+] [-] atemerev|3 years ago|reply
Or, you can switch to be an AI operator and run mass production content pipelines. There will be less of those compared to individual content creators, but still sustainable enough. Like, only 3% of people are now professionally involved in food farming, and that's a good thing.
There is no other way.
[+] [-] jliptzin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] visarga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmikaeld|3 years ago|reply
Same goes for comments here on HN, any one of which could be generated by ChatGPT..
[+] [-] dagw|3 years ago|reply
I asked ChatGPT to write a rebuttal to your statement. It seems to have pretty strong opinions on the matter:
While it's true that advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have made it possible for machines like ChatGPT to produce human-like responses, the idea that we would no longer be able to distinguish between a real human and an AI-generated response is not entirely accurate.
Firstly, it's important to note that AI-generated responses are typically generated with a specific purpose or objective in mind. ChatGPT, for example, is designed to generate responses to questions and prompts in a way that mimics human conversation. However, it's unlikely that an AI-generated response would be able to replicate the nuances and complexities of human conversation in a completely convincing way.
Secondly, there are various methods that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by an AI or a human. For instance, machine-generated responses tend to be more formulaic and less spontaneous than human responses. Additionally, there are techniques such as the Turing Test that can be used to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine.
It's also worth noting that the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits. For instance, it can help to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and enhance our understanding of complex problems.
In summary, while it's true that advances in AI and natural language processing have the potential to generate responses that are difficult to distinguish from those generated by humans, there are still ways to determine whether a response has been generated by a machine. Moreover, the development of AI and natural language processing technology has many potential benefits, and we should not be overly worried about the potential negative effects of this technology.
[+] [-] risyachka|3 years ago|reply
It makes no sense for companies to fire anyone. It makes sense to make everyone use AI so they get even more value from each employee, maximizing their profits and market position.
[+] [-] manishsharan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hardware2win|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
So I ask ChatGPT what would Ayn think? And it writes a very nice, balanced text. Exactly in line with my thoughts, just written more concisely and in much better English. I really enjoyed that conversation with ChatGPT. I did loose the interest to write the assay. Or perhaps I can copy paste it to my blog... Makes me feel like a CheatGPT though.