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Thinking about The purpose of AI

Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.

@theclack

Mar 24, 2024

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I run a customer Support team and ai is ruining my life

As others have said, companies put chatbots in place in a race to the bottom to solve the “huge” problem of paying people (usually not very well in entry-level roles at least) to help their customers navigate their broken products. My industry is no stranger to extreme cost reduction: support teams are almost always seen as a cost center and like outsourcing before it, companies are always looking for an alternative to just paying domestic people fairly to do the very real work of, um, keeping your customers loyal and paying. But it’s disheartening to see how much worse things are getting with the forced introduction of chat bots that barely function in lieu of just paying people. Lol I feel like such a dweeb talking about this here, but I’ll finish with one salient example: my company was beyond willing to spend in excess of 100k a year on a chatbot that not only doesn’t work, but also pisses our customets off supremely (our product is for older people, who mostly want phone support). But I had to fight tooth and nail to increase my team’s hourly rate for the first time in company history (an increase that amounted to less than 50k annually for a team of 10). Soooooo, yeah, fuck this shit.

@tortitude

Mar 1, 2024

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write to brian merchant about how ai is killing your job

One of my favorite tech journalists is fielding messages about the effect AI has had on peoples' jobs. He recently wrote about Duolingo's shift to AI over humans, and it got enough feedback for him to start a whole new series on how this tech is creeping into every industry in damaging ways. Check out the link! (@TORTITUDE Your post got me thinking about this!)

@theclack

May 10, 2025

Top Recs from @tortitude

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UNSUNG LOVE STORIES

@tortitude

4d ago

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Buying a bag of 50 frozen dumplings for $15

We know what’s for dinner this week

@tortitude

Feb 1, 2025

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BEING A CHATGPT VIRGIN

I probably have to pop that cherry today for work and I’m deeply sad since I’ve gotten this far with never once using it, which is the way things should be.

@tortitude

May 9, 2025