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Really? You think people who write for a living might be biased towards confirming that the thing already replacing many people who write for a living is a fad that's going to blow over soon?

My favorite part with crap predicting doom is the sheer unawareness of the rate of change of the rate of change.

If you had asked me 18 months ago how long after GPT-3 until something existed with the capabilities of GPT-4, I'd probably have guessed about 5 years.

If you asked me 5 years ago how long until an AI could explain why a joke was funny, I'd have maybe guessed at least a decade or two, if it was even possible.

If you asked me 10 years ago if I'd see AI replacing artists or copywriters in my lifetime, I'd have guessed maybe when I was in a retirement home (I'm still a fair ways away from that).

No one thought what exists today was even possible within our lifetimes a decade back.

I'm reminded of the Louis C.K. routine about everything being amazing and no one is happy.

Unthinkable AI has already become so normalized that people are predicting its doom based on shortcomings that are less than two years old because AI doing fucking IMPOSSIBLE things (or so everyone thought) is only that old.

The rate is outrageous, and while I do think there's currently a significant setback with obsolete alignment approaches being carried forward to models that probably need new techniques, that's going to be a temporary step back in parallel to significant strides forward in the underlying technology from hardware to model design to improved knowledge in how to squeeze the most water from the rock.

I just hope when all these folks turn out to have been dead wrong that we don't collectively forget. Futurists should live and die by their record, but too many have goldfish memory and continue to listen to false futurists well after they've shown their own snake oil hand.




> already replacing many people who write for a living

Is this actually the case? Are there examples of professional writers/academics/etc who have lost their jobs to LLMs?


Yes, mostly low quality newspapers though. It remains to be seen if those companies regret their decision.


> I'm reminded of the Louis C.K. routine about everything being amazing and no one is happy.

If AI meant the human was now free, I'd be happy, but ATM AI seems to mean the human will be jobless and soon homeless and starving.




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