I've got 2 decades of experience in media, advertising & the creative industry as a whole. And I don't mean bush league wedding video's, B2B flyers or 'content': I work for major brands & institutions on a senior level. If you do not see the danger or potential in this, then you are not expert enough or too naïve. I have used this, in practice, already for clients. It has saved me countless hours in 1 week. That is @ $100 / hour. All people I know how 'doth protest too much' are under the illusion that creativity is some magical skill. It isn't.
This is a boon for people without skill or budget, a force multiplier for unicorns. Anyone in between needs to adjust or become jobless.
I can create in one day what used to take weeks. For a lot of use case, these tools create cheap starting points without needing to look for funding.
That is massive.
This allows me to pursue business idea's I didn't have the time or energy for. This will massively change prototyping in a year.
1. This is going to be great for entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur is difficult in part because of the need to "wear different hats", which denies aspiring entrepreneur´s the benefits of specialization. Now, that is a hurdle that will be much easier to pass.
2. This is going to make many business services jobs more like professional athletes: Some workers are going to get all of the money and all of the works, working for the big companies, and the rest are going to be struggling and failing.
From your example, I can see this with:
- Marketing.
- Front-end web development.
- Community managers.
Jobs that right now are competitive, but in the future will be hypercompetitive.
I don’t see how this doesn’t lead to large job losses, and in demographics that are totally unused to losses of that scale. It will no longer be blue collar people in flyover states affected, but college educated white collar workers who think they made all the right decisions in life. This will have huge downstream effects on politics and a lot besides.
When there have been large productivity gains in the somewhat recent past, they have never led to declining work hours and increasing leisure hours. They have always led to fewer workers working similar hours.
Maybe my imagination is not strong enough, but this technology seems perfect for replacing workers rather than creating new jobs.
On a side note, I think people are putting too much hope in learning to prompt as some sort of secret skill that can lead to making a lot of money or building a career. Writing good prompts is *much easier* than learning to code proficiently, learning the myriad little skills that go into most white collar jobs, etc. And the fact that it is much easier will result in it being not very valuable a skill at all. Unskilled or semiskilled work in other words.
"When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens?"
you should see that you've already answered your question a sentence or two earlier:
"I am sure humans could have done better, but they could not have been as fast."
I've been reading your blog for a couple months now (which is, like, ten thousand years in AI time?), and I really appreciate that you by and large take an agnostic stance towards the tech. It's scary, but simultaneously AMAZING! The problem for me here is that you (and most other nominally critical observers) still conflate terms like "better" and "superhuman" with terms clearly linked to efficiency and productivity (like "faster" and "amounts of work").
You're continuing to promote a worldview (a very fucked-up one, from my perspective) that thinks of efficiency, quantification of human labor, maximization of profit, and similar bullshit with superlatives like "better" and "superhuman." If what you're after is just getting shit done faster and "better" (where "better" means "more efficiently"), then I hope you've purchased your ticket on the Singularity Express, because it's leaving the station soon.
I hear Friedman has a few tickets he's hawking outside the Skynet tent, but the price is dear. Still, I understand you'll get your money back--guaranteed--at this train's terminus.
.....Hopefully, we will be in a future where we do less boring work, offloading the annoying and unfulfilling tasks, so that we can focus on the more creative and generative work we like to do.....
The above statement is great if you as an individual have a creative flair, but let's not forget the millions of people around the world for whom this is not in their DNA, and excel best in doing standard functional tasks well.
We are moving to a world where the focus is moving from producing to curating
If I were a potential customer for this game I would skip over all this and probably not look at the product itself because it is so painfully generic. I get excited by communications and products that show some creativity, style and quality. None of this qualifies. The internet is drowning in stuff like this already. Better to put some investment in standing out with a real human touch.
Tried to use GPT4 but still it tells me that it s based on GPT3 - even after joining the waitlist...anything I may have done wrong :-/? Any recommendations plss??
Thanks for sharing Ethan. This paints a vivid picture of just how disruptive AI tools will be (and, in fact, already are). It’s nearly impossible to keep up with how quickly this space is moving. You could probably repeat this experiment on a near-weekly basis, incorporating the latest advances in AI tools each time. What would this experiment look like 3 months from now? In 6 months. How will your inputs/prompts and the results differ?
Thank you so much Ethan, this article is very helpful and interesting, actually we are already in a world of superhumans, we just have to wait for the implications.
Great experiment, but it appears that all the content derives from web-based material you provided at the outset. Bing just repackaged your content into the forms you requested. That's impressive, but rests heavily on the effort of the human(s) who created the original copy.
I've got 2 decades of experience in media, advertising & the creative industry as a whole. And I don't mean bush league wedding video's, B2B flyers or 'content': I work for major brands & institutions on a senior level. If you do not see the danger or potential in this, then you are not expert enough or too naïve. I have used this, in practice, already for clients. It has saved me countless hours in 1 week. That is @ $100 / hour. All people I know how 'doth protest too much' are under the illusion that creativity is some magical skill. It isn't.
This is a boon for people without skill or budget, a force multiplier for unicorns. Anyone in between needs to adjust or become jobless.
I can create in one day what used to take weeks. For a lot of use case, these tools create cheap starting points without needing to look for funding.
That is massive.
This allows me to pursue business idea's I didn't have the time or energy for. This will massively change prototyping in a year.
This is the steam engine for pro magnon.
Remember this comment.
Thank you for this experiment.
Some predictions:
1. This is going to be great for entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur is difficult in part because of the need to "wear different hats", which denies aspiring entrepreneur´s the benefits of specialization. Now, that is a hurdle that will be much easier to pass.
2. This is going to make many business services jobs more like professional athletes: Some workers are going to get all of the money and all of the works, working for the big companies, and the rest are going to be struggling and failing.
From your example, I can see this with:
- Marketing.
- Front-end web development.
- Community managers.
Jobs that right now are competitive, but in the future will be hypercompetitive.
This is excellent work. Thank you for sharing.
This is an interesting experiment but I'm not sure of the effectiveness of what was created. How much editing does it need?
It make me think of low paid authors. They can output lots of words for a few dollars. But then you have to spend hours editing.
I don’t see how this doesn’t lead to large job losses, and in demographics that are totally unused to losses of that scale. It will no longer be blue collar people in flyover states affected, but college educated white collar workers who think they made all the right decisions in life. This will have huge downstream effects on politics and a lot besides.
When there have been large productivity gains in the somewhat recent past, they have never led to declining work hours and increasing leisure hours. They have always led to fewer workers working similar hours.
Maybe my imagination is not strong enough, but this technology seems perfect for replacing workers rather than creating new jobs.
On a side note, I think people are putting too much hope in learning to prompt as some sort of secret skill that can lead to making a lot of money or building a career. Writing good prompts is *much easier* than learning to code proficiently, learning the myriad little skills that go into most white collar jobs, etc. And the fact that it is much easier will result in it being not very valuable a skill at all. Unskilled or semiskilled work in other words.
When you ask
"When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens?"
you should see that you've already answered your question a sentence or two earlier:
"I am sure humans could have done better, but they could not have been as fast."
I've been reading your blog for a couple months now (which is, like, ten thousand years in AI time?), and I really appreciate that you by and large take an agnostic stance towards the tech. It's scary, but simultaneously AMAZING! The problem for me here is that you (and most other nominally critical observers) still conflate terms like "better" and "superhuman" with terms clearly linked to efficiency and productivity (like "faster" and "amounts of work").
You're continuing to promote a worldview (a very fucked-up one, from my perspective) that thinks of efficiency, quantification of human labor, maximization of profit, and similar bullshit with superlatives like "better" and "superhuman." If what you're after is just getting shit done faster and "better" (where "better" means "more efficiently"), then I hope you've purchased your ticket on the Singularity Express, because it's leaving the station soon.
I hear Friedman has a few tickets he's hawking outside the Skynet tent, but the price is dear. Still, I understand you'll get your money back--guaranteed--at this train's terminus.
.....Hopefully, we will be in a future where we do less boring work, offloading the annoying and unfulfilling tasks, so that we can focus on the more creative and generative work we like to do.....
The above statement is great if you as an individual have a creative flair, but let's not forget the millions of people around the world for whom this is not in their DNA, and excel best in doing standard functional tasks well.
We are moving to a world where the focus is moving from producing to curating
If I were a potential customer for this game I would skip over all this and probably not look at the product itself because it is so painfully generic. I get excited by communications and products that show some creativity, style and quality. None of this qualifies. The internet is drowning in stuff like this already. Better to put some investment in standing out with a real human touch.
Tried to use GPT4 but still it tells me that it s based on GPT3 - even after joining the waitlist...anything I may have done wrong :-/? Any recommendations plss??
Thanks for sharing Ethan. This paints a vivid picture of just how disruptive AI tools will be (and, in fact, already are). It’s nearly impossible to keep up with how quickly this space is moving. You could probably repeat this experiment on a near-weekly basis, incorporating the latest advances in AI tools each time. What would this experiment look like 3 months from now? In 6 months. How will your inputs/prompts and the results differ?
Thank you so much Ethan, this article is very helpful and interesting, actually we are already in a world of superhumans, we just have to wait for the implications.
Would you describe yourself as a “prompt engineer “? Seeing this title lately…
Great experiment, but it appears that all the content derives from web-based material you provided at the outset. Bing just repackaged your content into the forms you requested. That's impressive, but rests heavily on the effort of the human(s) who created the original copy.
CRAZY
Ethan, Congrats on being the number 1 story on Ben's Bites today!! (https://www.bensbites.co/p/30min-ai-challenge)
Excellent use of the tools available to us. I enjoy your teaching style!