Don't forget deepfake harassment and spreading misinformation.

  > One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.

  > The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs ... bosses can't tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage.

I'm familiar with a firm that does government required safety inspections for clients - big factories and the like. There is a huge push inside the company to use AI to write the reports. I don't want to tell you how many times the LLM fills in the report with the most common string "everything is fine" even though the specific future report checkbox has been left unchecked. Only a single engineer is fighting this within the company, and fears for her job because of it.

This. As an artist I wouldnt have an issue with AI if it wouldnt be just generative generating full, fleshed out pieces. If AI is used allowing actual artists to use a brush or pen again and actually allows them expressing themselves through their own work, it would be great.

People seem to think generating art from stolen pieces by typing 4 sentences in a prompt window is equal to this. It isn't. It is not true expression as it takes humanity out of the piece.

This reads like an avocado toast critique. Businesses which respect their staff, particularly junior staff, are few and far in between. Why should anyone not “silently quit” when the attitude of their employer is to extract as much value for the lowest cost before a round of layoffs?

>> "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage"

This is .. not quiet, but extremely noisy, quitting of the bargain by the management/authority class.

This is how we get the low trust dystopia where all the remaining human workers have to put up with a camera watching them at all times (backed by AI, of course) doing Taylorism on their eye movements.

I believe that most people naturally want to work, to contribute and build in groups. They want to do it and should expect to do it with reasonable boundaries and benefits for their labor. Silent quitting is a response to ever increasingly extractive work relationships for fewer and fewer benefits and increasingly irrationally low levels of compensation.

Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?

OTOOOH its very naive to think that "quitting social media" is the solution.

The earth is rotting from us leeching from it, there is no future for these juniors, and we're on the verge of more war and destruction, fascism, et cetera.

There is nothing for them to build towards, other than the typical House, wife and kids, which will be in the same boat.

Knowing this, if someone comes up to you and says "yeah, well, you should just accept it", obviously people are not going to support this

I think Silent Quitting is some chattering class concoction feels-wrapping the observation that most workers have the incentive to work as little as possible.[1] Just like employers have the incentive squeeze as much productivity from their commodities (labor).

What was the first instinct of the venerable business leaders (spoken a bit too publicly)? Great, we can get rid of labor. Do they need any excuse or reason beyond maximizing profit? They don’t. It’s just incentives.

[1] And some workers can genuinely benefit from doing more than that, even as wage workers. “Some people have jobs; others have careers” as Chris Rock paraphrasedly said.

I agree - but it's too easy to just 'call Luddism', and use the insult to not engage with all of the shared issues that make the comparison apt. Issues like:

- no serious plan for mass unemployment

- the risk of an underemployed middle class leading to violent outcomes as it has in the past

- (many) humans wanting to be useful, to have purpose in life through that

- concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of people, from a couple of countries making up 20% of the world population

Luddism came from a place of genuine suffering and fear, which was not misplaced - the industrial revolution lead to amazing new jobs, but not for the Luddites themselves. With AI it's not even clear if those new jobs will come - it seems like the goal is a world where humans will not need to worry about thinking anymore.

So is wanting this to slow down really such a ridiculous notion?

Also, don't forget what he said about "arrogant programmers". His plan is to make the (in his view inferior) human workers redundant, and I do not see why anyone who still has some idealism in them and is just about to enter the work force would applaud him for his tone-deaf speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZuTlm00X2E&t=121s

Amazon books are now heavily infected with AI slop, I've yet to read a book which is detectably AI generated which is not garbage. When that stops being the case, perhaps people will stop objecting to it.

This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.

Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.

What if you're a poet and use a rhyming dictionary now and then?

I mean, I undersand that. I have two "on writing" on my bookshelf next to each other... but Werner Herzog's has the exact same topic and premise, plus is from a person that is immensely more famous than you, which means your book will be invisible with that title to any search.