Posted on 08/03/2024 6:09:03 AM PDT by Twotone
“I have terrible news, Josh. And I wanted you to know first,” said my friend and boss Jack Buckby on July 25.
Lancashire Hudson, the content creation agency he'd founded, had finally lost its battle with the bots.
Our cash-strapped clients had been increasingly turning to AI for the daily news, marketing, and other copy they needed for their ad-supported websites and newsletters. This writing wasn't nearly as effective, but it was far cheaper.
Overnight, Jack and I lost our jobs and our ability to pay our bills. Thirty talented, hard-working writers and editors in our company lost theirs, too. The coming disruption
We often think of AI as a threat to manual labor or low-level service jobs, but the truth is it's got creatives like us squarely in its sights as well.
It's not as if we hadn't seen it coming. The immediate benefits of automating are all too clear, especially if a company is struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible, and easy," Jack tells me. "[Even if] it's not necessarily good."
That said, this quick fix could end up damaging the brand in the long run.
“it’s not the answer for businesses who want to maintain a good relationship with their audience and customers," says Jack.
"Ask yourself, when you pick up the phone to call a company and you’re greeted by a robot, how do you feel? If you were told that an article you read in a newspaper was generated by AI, would you feel compelled to read it still? No. The honest answer is 'no,' and if your audience and customers are humans, your content should be, too.”
It's this vision that kept Jack fighting — until the economic reality could no longer be denied. A monster of their own making
While the whole media industry is feeling the pinch, companies out of step with dominant progressive views are particularly hard hit, many Lancashire Hudson clients among them.
“I’ve had clients’ websites completely destroyed by Google shutting off traffic from their news search engines for mildly criticizing the vaccine roll out. They didn’t post anything in opposition to the vaccine, but instead, opposition to the mandates — and it wasn’t even a view shared by most of the staff. It was a single op-ed. And the site was destroyed," says Jack.
This kind of Big Tech censorship is what finally did Lancashire Hudson in.
Jack has been through this before. If you’ve heard of him, it is probably because he was once the enfant terrible of the English far right.
As a young man from a working-class Northern English town, Jack fell in with an extreme crowd of angry, disaffected young men. They had reasons to be angry. What good-paying jobs were left had to be competed over with foreigners and “asylum seekers.” These young English men were told they were moral scum for being white, English, and blue collar.
That’s when Jack discovered the actual racism, anti-Semitism, and violence bubbling under the surface of his new “community.” As he grew up, he grew alarmed, and he pulled back into a more traditional conservative position.
This experience led him to a realization: It is the relentless social and economic punishment the left dishes out to conservatives and working people that is creating the “extremist far right” the left loves to hate. He tells the story in his book "Monster of Their Own Making." Hiring the un-hirable
Jack built Lancashire Hudson specifically to offer work to people who have a hard time getting it.
His employees included Claire, a retired schoolteacher who lives in the Midwest and supplemented her small income with daily writing as she cares for her husband and disabled sister. And Denise, disabled and homebound but a quick and talented writer who can turn out perfect copy in 15 minutes. Her job with Jack was the first time in years that she made her own way instead of relying on benefits.
Jack has also reached out to those shut out from the job market for ideological reasons. Anton, for example, has a journalism degree but can’t find work in media because he’s been seen having conservative opinions in public. Patricia is a married mother with a new baby who relied on work at Lancashire Hudson after her English university pushed her out of a 10-year administrative role because she was not sufficiently woke-compliant.
Then there's me. At the end of 2022, I was pushed out of my 20-year career heading a consumer protection nonprofit when an internal coup branded me a racist, bigoted, misogynist transphobe for my personal, off-work political views. My job as editor with Lancashire Hudson kept me afloat. The left's digital golem
In a way, losing these jobs is a second, indirect cancellation. There is no keeping your head down and working quietly as a conservative in media anymore. The left and its ever-more-powerful digital golem will find you and finish you. Take it from us.
We’re watching an entire industry eat itself alive. The problem is not only that humans are being pushed out of the field. If we think news is biased to the left now, how much worse will it get when we remember that AI models are being trained on the biased, leftist, partisan content that comes from traditional and legacy media?
As Jack puts it:
“When Google and Big Tech companies restrict visibility and traffic to businesses with which they do not agree, they destroy livelihoods. When they restrict advertising income, they say it’s OK to have one opinion but not OK to hold another. Ultimately, many businesses are being forced to make huge financial cuts just to stay alive, and in some instances, that means replacing workers with AI. The companies that toe the line might not have to. That’s not good for unifying the country, and it’s not good for our political discourse.”
We’re trying to retool and figure out a way to work again, but everyone is feeling blindly through this new world of increasing digital control and digitally created “content.”
I can’t tell you how to navigate this world because I’m learning as I go. But I hope you hear my warning: Your job, your career, is not safe, including all of you fellow “creatives." If you’re a conservative, your number is going to come up for cancellation quicker than others. Prepare yourself.
In the meantime, Jack and I are looking for those companies that want quality content produced, overseen, and quality-checked by real humans with real principles. All of us who care about excellence, truth, and accountability that works for a world of humans had better find each other soon.
I think AI is coming fast.
I think a lot of people are in denial or else they just don’t understand it.
I think a heck of a lot of jobs are going to disappear and not come back.
I think society is very unprepared for a world in which many, many people have no way to contribute to society.
The more I do so the less convinced I am that they will EVER approximate true human intelligence, creativity, and judgment.
Computers will forever offer a crude simulacrum of imagination and intuitiveness. Nothing more. They will always lack the HUMAN FACTOR that signifies the soul.
There is going to be a tremendous and deleterious long term cost to jumping on the AI bandwagon as we are.
A lot of people hear “AI” and assume that the central point is that machines are going to “wake up” and have a personality, and start “making plans” and maybe “plot to take over” or something.
The key thing is logic processing with a bit more sophistication than we have now. Doesn’t have to be fancy. Most human jobs today are pretty much BS jobs. Putting little numbers in little boxes on little spreadsheets. Collecting “metrics”. Working as a paralegal, or in an insurance office, or banking, or accounting. All of that can be done through logic processing. Just about everyone who worked remotely during the pandemic can be replaced by logic processing.
It’s a huge mistake to say that we are decades away from AI and that we may never really get there.
It’s here today. And it is already transformative.
And this is AI in its current sorry state.
But, I'm an optimist. What doesn't kill us ...
I seem to be able to spot AI speech and text, and immediately leave it. Just has a different ring to it.
The limitations of technology built on Big Data were captured perfectly by a client of mine a few years ago: “We have too much data and not enough information here.”
AI is for the elites to control the world and police the people. Agenda 2030. As the WEF prophet likes to say, “the age of humanity is over”.
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I agree. I have been a professional software developer for nearly 40 years. A very many problems are solved - completely or partially - by human intuition. How much human intuition do computers have? None. Zilch. Yes they can do extremely large amounts of grunt work - really fast. Creativity? Only by accident… And need a human to recognize it….
And how many YT videos use an AI for the voice over?
This allows many (Chinese, Indian, others) programmers to steal others IP and put it together in a new way, use AI for the English and then abscond with YT monies from the original creators.
Fight it out in court? Against whom?
And if Google/YT is making money (getting the views), you have a very small chance of succeeding in court.
Ask the singers who are on Spotify how much they make for their original music.
The end is coming, when only AI chat bots will be listening to AI chat bots.
One half of financial news copy and one half of sports news copy was actually being written by computer software five years ago - before anyone even heard of AI.
The Hard Left choke hold on advertising dollars is much more concerning.
The Hard Left Main Stream news media is giving Kamala $100 million a day in free front page propaganda.
There is no way the Political Right news media can compete against that.
There aren't words to describe how I feel. But I feel even worse when "Angie" in tech support in the Philippines finally answers the phone.
I feel worse when my call is answered by D'Shawn, in the USA.
I know what you mean, but some of the best support I’ve gotten was from D’Shawn’s mom, especially if she’s in the South. Cheerful, kind, patient and professional.
You can stop right there.
No, AI cannot generate big pieces of working computer code quickly. It can pull skeleton code embellished with bits and pieces obtained from The Code Project, Stack Overflow, or other similar public websites. It does not give attributions to the sources. Good thing most of them are not copyrighted.
That code looks cool until you try to run it. Then you find that all sorts of components are missing or simply do not exist. And AI-generated algorithms typically reproduce the flaws that were present in the original source code from which they were generated. You had better really know what you are doing if you try to use that stuff.
What AI is good for is justifying layoffs and taking the heat away from the executives who order them. That still will not save the companies who go down that path.
If rules are inaplicable or there is too much data then it is not information because it does not enable efficient choice, efficient being a measure that balances risks, costs, gains and losses.
You are correct. AI is a significant new technology, but orders of magnitude less utility than the hype. The current tech layoffs are at least in part a realization that AI is not delivering the profits that it promised.
Reads like it was written by AI.
>The more I do so the less convinced I am that they will EVER approximate true human intelligence, creativity, and judgment.
Correct. They take a lot of smart people ‘training’ them to get to a desired result, and then you can get a whole lot of that desired result.
e.g. drawn from the above - summary articles. I have no interest, but one could easily crawl FR daily and get a summary of events, or compile a list of people who have X or Y (or Z or P) opinion on Russia. Almost any article in a print newspaper could be replaced today and be at least marginally better — moreso if trained not to insert leftist talking points as the live ‘journalists’ do now.
Of course as we’ve seen from recent examples in the news (Google bots denying Trump was shot, etc.), “the desired result” may have nothing to do with reality. This *is* a desired result for the neo-feudalists but is terrible for actually getting things done.
Behind the scenes, isolated genAI instances are doing content creation and summary OK, but ... well, if you didn’t like the quality coming from your H1B or Indian team, and found the overhead of monitoring quality to be trouble, you really won’t like genAI results.
Looking forward, things could theoretically get much better (or much much worse in terms of gaslighting people) with much more horsepower, but we neither have the capacity nor the grid to handle it.
Now this is a scary article. I have been faulting woke DEI companies, but now I’m wondering whether their approach is driven not by a voluntary embrace of woke principle but rather by caving under woke intimidation by a liberal AI driven matrix of digital warfare. If AI driven Google and others can wreck a company through digital warfare, perhaps they can terrorize a company to turn against itself and its conservative customer base. However, CEO’s need to understand that this Leftist intimidation will not end well and they need to resist such Fascistic action rather than embrace it.
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