ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself

coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 132 points –
ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself
techradar.com
56

You are viewing a single comment

AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.

It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I'm not even that old and it's super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It's not that we're doing more with less, it's a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

Yep. Life does just seem... permanently enshittified now. I honestly don't see it ever getting better, either. AI will just ensure it carries on.

It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.

But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.

No amount of "we can train AIs on AI-generated content" is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI's don't have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.

“we can train AIs on AI-generated content”

and 20yrs from now polydactylism will be the new human beauty standard

But humans also need input as well.

The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can't steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.