Greatest Irony of the AI Age: Humans Hired to Clean AI Slop

I assume you missed the whole part where 75% of people use LLMs for porn, AI bf/gf roleplaying, spam, ads, scams, &c.

It's like youtube, in theory: unlimited free educational content to raise the bar world wide, in practice: 3/4th of videos are braindead garbage, and probably 99% of views are on concentrated this.

This is not how AI has ever gone. Every approach so far has either been a total dead end, or the underlying concept got pivoted into a simplified, not-AI tech.

This new approach of machine learning content generation will either keep developing, or it will join everything else in the history of AI by hitting a point of diminishing to zero returns.

And most SOTA models (Imagen, Qwen 20b, etc) at this point can actually already handle a fair amount of text in a single T2I generation. Flux Dev provided your willing to roll a couple gens can do it as well.

[1] https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus

The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago.

(I don't think LLMs are like that, tho).

Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships.

But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

Just as gun powder enabled greater things. I agree with you just humans have shown, time after time, an ability to first use innovation to make lives miserable for their fellow humans.

In reality most devs can cleanup after themselves.

In my country, we also have a class (they have achieved the status of social class IMO) that expects to keep their jobs and get ever increasing privileges while not having to upgrade their competences or even having to learn anything new during all their life: our public workers.

Except I still doubt whether AI is the new Spinning Jenny. Because the quality is so bad and because it can’t replace human’s in most things or doesn’t necessarily even speed the prodiction in a sognificant way, we might just be facing another IT-bubble and financial meltdown, since US seems to have but all of the eggs in a one basket.

It doesnt do this.

If you compare datacenter energy usage to the rest, it amounts to 5%. Making great economies on LLMs won't save the planet.

And just how many people manage to 1shot the image?

There are maybe 5 to 20 images generated before the user is happy.

Their napkin math went like, human artists take $50 or so per art, which is let's say $200/hr skill, which means each art cannot take longer than 10 minutes, therefore the values used for AI must add up to less than 10 workstation minutes, or something like that.

And that math is equally broken for both sides: SDXL users easily spend hours rolling dice a hundred times without usable images, and likewise, artists just easily spend a day or two for an interesting request that may or may not come with free chocolates.

So those estimates are not only biased, but basically entirely useless.

The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics.

What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda.

Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.

Now the automation of that arbitrariness, trained not for specificity, does definitely degrade that leading edge and puts specificity further out of reach - particularly that humans mistake output as valid or specific.

It's an act of insanity made tech-normal.

I wouldn't hold your breath for accurate numbers, given the way Trump has treated that bureau since they gave a jobs report he didn't like.

LLMs are a particular application of machine learning, and as such LLMs both benefit by and contribute to general machine learning techniques.

I agree that LLMs are not the AI we all imagine, but the fact that it broke a huge milestone is a big deal - natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI!

I believe it is only a matter of time until we get to a multi-sensory self-modifying large models which can both understand and learn from all five of human senses, and maybe even some of the senses we have no access to.

(from Ocean's Eleven)

(Of course, you have to actually be using these signals, and not just cargo culting throwing LLM outputs everywhere.)

Conclusion: we are not in the age of AI.

In the AI case, you’re not making the same thing over and over, so it’s more difficult to spot problems and when they happen you have to manually find and fix them, likely throwing everything away and starting from scratch. So in the end all the time and effort put into the machine was wasted and you would’ve been better going with the artisan (which you still need) in the first place.

But according to this Indian service provider's website, the workers (Indians?) are hired to "clean up" not "fish out" the "faulty items"

Imagine a factory where the majority of items produced are faulty and are easily "fished out". But instead of discarding them,^1 workers have to fix each one

1. The energy costs of production are substantial

I like the idea that mediocre sci-fi show Upload came up with: maybe they can get self-driving to the point where it doesn't require a human in the loop and a squirrel will work.

I got shudders just re-reading it when I came across:

'“It’s too late to vid your wife,” the fasrad said. “There are three emergency-rockets in the stern; if you want, I’ll fire them off in the hope of attracting a passing military transport.”'

...which sounds exactly like ChatGPT5.