The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
You must log in or # to comment.
The author states that she’s been a tech writer for 10 years and that she thinks AI is going to ruin journalism because it gives too much power to AI providers.
But, have you seen the state of journalism? AI killing it would just be an act of mercy at this point. How much SEO optimized, grammatically correct, appropriately filtered, but ultimately useless “content” do I really need to sift through to get even something as simple as a recipe?
The author can bemoan AI until she’s blue in the face, but she’s willfully ignoring that the information that most people get today is already controlled by a handful of people and organizations.
Man I hate to tell you this but a good chunk of the content you’re describing is already written by AI. Thats a huge driver behind how shit it’s all gotten.
I wonder how much support this will get - it’s not the tool that’s the problem, but how it gets used.
- as a tech person, generative AI is already a useful tool, similar to how search engines are. However I’m not afraid of it taking my job because someone still needs to tell it what to do, plus it’s still pretty limited. I liken it to previous attempts to outsource software to the lowest bidder in the cheapest country. In general that was a failure and companies are looking for ability even in cheap labor markets, not just cheapness
- as someone who reads news and opinions online, I see the enshittification overtaking that industry over the last decade. Most content is clearly no longer written by journalists nor adhering to any standards for informing the user, but written by formula and template for SEO, and invoking outrage or other emotion. As someone watching videos, I see more choices than ever, but mostly poorly written and produced. It feels like these industries are racing for the bottom and not stopping. Generative AI can actually do a better job than most of the crap, and the most important skill of an online citizen is how to wade through the oceans of crap to find those morsels of journalism. How do we bring back journalism as a whole, regardless of what tools the hacks use to fill our attention and sell ads?
It was actually the same thing with the original luddites. They didn’t oppose the new tool but the way it was used.
From the article :
The first Luddites were artisans and cloth workers in England who, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, protested the way factory owners used machinery to undercut their status and wages. Contrary to popular belief, they did not dislike technology; most were skilled technicians.
However I’m not afraid of it taking my job because someone still needs to tell it what to do
Why couldn’t it do that part too? - purely based on a simple high-level objective that anyone can formulate. Which part exactly do you think is AI-resistant?
I’m not talking about today’s models, but more like 5-10 years into the future.
That’s what I’ve been arguing with a fellow programmer recently. Right now you have to tell these programmer LLMs what to do on a function-by-function basis, because it doesn’t have enough capacity to think on a project level. However, that’s exactly what can be improved by scaling the neural network up. Right now the LLMs are limited by hardware, but they’re still using off-the-shelf GPUs that were designed for a completely different use case. The accelerators designed for AI are currently in the preproduction phase, very close to getting used in the AI data centers.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of weird takes on AI. It all seems to come down to ego guarding: But it can’t take my job, it just regurgitates combinations of what it was taught unlike me, only humans can be creative, who wants coffee made by a machine, well you still need a person to do things in the physical world, etc… Really highlights how difficult it is for people to think about change. Especially a change that might not end with a place for them.
The creativity argument I don’t get at all. Being creative these days means taking a bunch of known ideas and mashing them up, and that’s exactly what an LLM does. Very few people can really think outside the box.
I’ve had a few things where it was actually the other way around. I’m running a lot of TTRPGs, and my storylines are always pretty bland because I’m not that creative. I’ve started to use ChatGPT4 to give me a few ideas for stories, and it helps me break out of that box by suggesting completely different things than what I’d have thought of.
I’ll argue it’s always been that way. It’s Just that the pool of data that people are pulling from these days is more homogeneous. It used to be that people had a lot more unique and personal experiences that weren’t known to the world. But today everything is shared and given a label by our culture. So if you come up with an idea it’s much more likely that someone that has had similar experiences to you, thought of it already. People say there’s no more new ideas. Maybe that’s true in a sense, but I’d argue nothing’s changed except that people know about all the ideas.
It is a little strange to me that people say it won’t change things because the AI will need someone to tell it what to do. It’s like saying robots won’t change the automotive industry because someone will need to fix them. Well it turns out, if you only need one person to fix all the machines or tell the AI what to do, then the companies will fire everyone else, especially if that was their main skill set and where their experience was. They can get a different job but it will be entry level and they might not be able to live the same quality of life, support a family, fill their retirement or pay debts they may have accrued with the expectation of a certain salary.
There are manufacturing center towns that are basically graveyards now because of that (yes, also globalist and international capitalism, too, but it’s both. Jon Oliver had an episode about it with sources). The same thing happened to call centers and operators before. Things sucked for certain people during that time, and from an abstract POV society was okay, but imagine if the person it sucked for is you. Then you can understand why lots of people are freaking out.
Maybe the worry for the next 20 years is that we will only get jobs fixing the robots but the economy used to be 90% farmers that’s not actually worrying to me.
The scary part is that eventually the robots can fix themselves better than we can and there will be literally no reason for most humans to work. We really have to get working on a plan for that. Our only plan so far as automation has made us more productive is to continue working the same amount but on different things, and AGI is where that really breaks down.
Full source?
This is what futile looks like.
"New Luddites helping regulatory capture ensuring their poverty for generations to come. "
Wat
Yeah cool, don’t explain or anything
I can’t answer for them, but I can say that I found the article irritatingly egotistical.
Over the last several decades, the US has seen a “hollowing of the middle class”. This is largely connected to the disappearance of the traditional blue collar jobs, esp. in manufacturing. Technical progress is not the only thing behind this. Over the same period, the welfare state was scaled back and the tax system restructured to favor the winners.
Now it seems that some writing tasks will be automated and suddenly it’s time to “reevaluate” how tech serves us. They don’t want a stronger welfare state; no help or compensation for those negatively affected. They don’t want to share the gains of progress fairly. Instead of the old fuck you, I got mine, it’s fuck you, I keep mine.
Because that would require explaining how exactly most people (and not just a handful of lucky few) would get to outcompete AI-powered established corporations without having even a fraction of their marketing power. They can’t because that’s a complete fantasy, and also because most of them don’t actually care about those people.
So vague big bad government fearmongering it is.
Are you an AI?
