AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt

Andy Reid@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 933 points –
The rise and fall of robots.txt
theverge.com
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Ah, AI doesn't pose as danger in that way. It's danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.

Those are dangers of capitalism, not AI.

Fair point, but AI is part of it, I mean it exists in capitalist system. This AI Singularity apocalypse is like not gonna happen in 99%, AI within capitalism will affect us badly.

All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It's just natural.

But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It's a great tool to add to professionals' arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they'd have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)

It replaced content writers, replacing digital artists, replacing programmers. In a sense they fire unexeprieced ones because ai speeds up those with more experience.

Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you're putting raw AI output out there directly then you don't care enough about the quality of your product.

For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there's also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

Your worry at least has possible solutions, such as a global VAT funding UBI.

Yeah I'm not for UBI that much, and don't see anyone working towards global VAT. I was comparing that worry about AI that is gonna destroy humanity is not possible, it's just scifi.

Seven years ago I would have told you that GPT-4 was sci fi, and I expect you would have said the same, as would have most every AI researcher. The deep learning revolution came as a shock to most. We don’t know when the next breakthrough will be towards agentification, but given the funding now, we should expect soon. Anyways, if you’re ever interested to learn more about unsolved fundamental AI safety problems, the book “Human Compatible” by Stewart Russell is excellent. Also “Uncontrollable” by Darren McKee just came out (I haven’t read it yet) and is said to be a great introduction to the bigger fundamental risks. A lot to think about; just saying I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Cheers.