Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.
What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.
Why do you assume that?
> What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.
I know the assumption is always that Big Greedy Co™ is hiring the worst possible employees to save money, but I think it's far more likely that the scale of work required far exceeds the labour required to provide it.
For company policies, an AI would be rigidly trained and limited to always minimize loses to the company, since you can game the AI if it's too lax by saying the exact prompts or keywords.
For companies that do not even provide basic training except for a FAQ sheet, I do not think replacing the human with an AI is going to improve customer experience, because, a human(IC or manager) might be driven by motivation of compensation or job security, to learn more than what is provided, to do their job well.
Big greed co will hire the cheapest employees, and will do exactly the minimum amount of customer service they can get away with, so long as their profits are sustained.
I asked it to forward my email to their devs, human or not ;)
Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.
In the same sense that the revolution that occurred in the digital distribution of games and general improvements in the accessibility of tooling meant the market for games expanded into more niches rather than producing more AAA games from smaller developers.
There is only so much you can do with shoestring budgets that our directors have.
The latter is nothing to do with CGI or production budget: it's about marketing budget, in which AI has less to offer.
The former, in my view, will not be aided by AI. The "glorified stage plays" are (not always but on aggregate) of significantly higher quality than quite a lot of Hollywood output. AI won't change that in any positive way.
I’m imagining world where companies like Netflix and Spotify introduce dirt-cheap subscription tiers that are populate with AI generated content, while they raise the prices on their existing offerings that have stuff made by humans.
If you’re poor you watch shitty, AI-generated movies on Netflix for $1.50/mo.
I suspect even worse scenario. If you're poor you watch shitty, ai-generated content for the current price. If you're persuaded to belive that you're middle class you cough up twice more to watch shitty, ai-generated content called premium becuase it will be "artisanely curated by humans (tm)". If you're really rich you will go to the theatre or opera.
Mm, Shakespeare.
'tis easy mimic'd in style and verse; and the many devices used, familiar. When anachronism strikes, few yet notice, and fewer yet call out, for the Bard is older to us than he to Chaucer.
What folly, that the rich dress and peacock themselves so, sitting quiet and polite; gathered at great expense to what was, in days yore, the entertainment of yeoman and serf who cheered and jeered as saint and villains pranced before?
Hark, though; I say not that Avon brought no talent, rather that the talent of The Globe was to his time as the talent of The Disk to ours, as the easy-read and prolific prose of Pratchett is the closer cousin, despite the esteem of the powerful going to those hardest to follow in modern vernacular — Ulysses, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and yea, also the Bard and King James.
'tis almost as if the difficulty is the point.
(Exits, pursued by a peacock)
I'm seeing a world where kids are put in a room with an AI that "educates" them, setting the lowest possible bar for personal development for your average kid and as quickly as possible expelling kids who are deemed to be a problem.
Having real teachers will be a luxury.
* https://coconuts.co/bangkok/features/primitive-technology-an...
* https://coconuts.co/bangkok/features/primitive-technology-yo...
People just make content that get views and optimize what gets eyeballs. Take people out of the equation and add gradient descent and who knows what insanity will be unleashed.
Because, why not? It's called segmentation.
> Copying human generated context costs basically nothing, so the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.
How do you explain why more recent movies are more expensive to buy or rent on streaming services, then?
Artificial price inflation and recouping costs combined. Fueled by FOMO, people tend to pay more to be able to access it and be up-to-date (TM) in their social circles.
They'll probably recoup the costs without inflated prices, but if they can exploit that title for more money, they'll do it.
That’s why all kinds of products today with nearly zero marginal cost are free?
I'm old enough to remember when operating systems cost money[0].
And compliers. And encyclopaedias. And maps.
I've got too much good zero-cost audio and video content to get through, even at double speed.
[0] MacOS 8, I don't remember what I spent on it (UK), but wikipedia says it cost $99 in the US when it came out in 1997. Inflation adjusted, $188.56 today.
All good movies/shows are elsewhere and usually “for rent”. Anything IMDB top 100 is for rent, not included in any subscription.
Also, a machine cannot create equally complex or more complex than itself, so AI is always capped at human capacity, at most, asymptotically.
It can be faster. It can batch process, but it can't process "like a human".
Laws about thermodynamics, and entropy still hold. Also, as far as I can see, no living creature, incl The Nature itself succeeded to create something more complex and sophisticated than itself.
So, I'll be sticking to my arguments, for now.
Hatred of phone calls aside, I heard an interesting take from Alex Hormozi (paraphrased): "You're on the phone and you say, are you human? No? Oh thank God, because you know the AI has a thousand times more experience than all the humans combined."
Because that's crazy to me. Humans can be reasoned with. AI can't. My experience with the likes of ChatGPT tells me that if the AI is wrong about something (which it very very often is), there's no point trying to explain to it that it's wrong or how it's wrong, it will say something like "You are right, sorry for the confusion." and follow up with the same or a similar error again.
AI might eventually become an alright first line, but losing the option to speak with a human -- an intelligent entity which can actually be reasoned with -- seems dystopic.
Even as the top tier tech support for a complex product, 99% of my calls could have been dealt with well by chat gpt in its current form. And my customers would have a more concise outcome, without the variability of my mood, hold times, judgement of their tone etc to effect my advice.
I can’t wait for more ai cs so I can stop talking to a fuckwhit, and talk to an ai that’s almost certainly far more equipped to handle my query.
With humans you have a chance to escalate. With a chatbot, you might as well take your business somewhere else.
It's usually well hidden though, to save money.
No. We're talking about the future. ChatGPT doesn't have millions of hours of customer service experience. It has zero!
(Well, unless you count the RLHF stuff, but my point is it isn't actually learning from human feedback, although we don't actually know what they're doing with those thumbs up / down buttons...)
> losing the option to speak with a human
Already the case at many companies, sadly. (In those cases, if not elsewhere, it's going to be a significant improvement.)
We're just too impatient to wait for GPT-7 aren't we?
Due to the economics of information, this is unlikely for contents. The cost to watch Avatar is often quite close to a local film with <1% its budget. The most interesting clips made by content creators (Ted Talks, Veritasium, MrBeast, etc.) are accessible to everyone with internet access. There will be some price differences based on access points (theater vs TV vs phone) or resolution but not necessarily the content itself.
I also suspect the best contents in the future will be co-created by humans and AI.
The way I was thinking about it was, for example, newspapers going online behind paywalls, YouTubers/Podcasters creating paid content on Patreon in order to fund their activities.
On the other side you get Buzzfeed creating AI generated quizzes (rather than news), and YouTube/TikTok content farms with AI generated scripts. Both of these are ad supported, so free to the end consumer, and therefore more accessible than a Patreon/NYT/etc subscription.
While it's true that, even with advancements in AI, top-tier content uniquely shaped by the individuals or teams behind it will still be more costly to produce, these are likely to get cheaper over time as AI improves. As a result, high-quality content will probably become more accessible.
Training these is still out of reach, but fine tuning is getting close (LoRA) and running them is almost easy at this point.
The products we've built so far are power-centralized, but augmentative. Where we go from there is up to people, not the nature of the technology. My hope is decentralized and augmentative, but the worst case scenario is indeed centralized and substitutive.
But also, a model running on your phone generating AI content is likely to be cheaper and not as good as human curated content in whatever form that is.
I think compute can be decentralised, while the power is still centralised, or at least those at the low end lose out on quality.
There was a time where computers took up the space of whole rooms and had much much MUCH less processing power than the phone I am currently writing this comment on...
The same thing will happen with ai.
1 in Italy booking a train ride without providing your phone number, email and tessera sanitaria, proved a challenge last month
2 civid required us to carry our green pass everywhere (I'm not anti vaxx)
3 get stopped on some countries (like US) at a border and unable to present a phone for search might deny you entry.
The whole affair was predicted already 50-70 years ago. Jacques Ellul's La Technique is a great comprehensive read on this idiocy
My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone for customer support (already something companies try to win customers on), or even winning customers on well-paid humans cooking their food for them (something that seems to be increasing).
Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on. This may even get worse over time if, say, AI hits education and provides a worse quality education, but that's probably no different to what we already have with public school funding issues in the US/UK and many other countries.