"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call."

What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..."

Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation, marketing, hype.

In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts not opinions.

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time).

It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc).

Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you.

These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.

Awfully early? We have "useful" LLMs for almost three years. Where is the productivity increase? Also, your example is not very relevant. 1) Would you pay the professional if you couldn't find the answer yourself? 2) If search engines were still useful (I'm assuming you googled first), wouldn't they be able to find the official calculator too?

It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring.

As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it.

Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process.

For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is.

I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs

I tend to use ai for the same things I’d have used Google for in 2005.

Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.

A friend of mine is working on a "RAG for tax advisers" startup. He's selling it to the tax accountants, as a way for them to spot things they wouldn't otherwise have the time to review and generate more specialist tax advisory work. There's a lot more work they could do if only it's affordable to the businesses they advise (none of whom could do their own taxes even if they wanted to!)

Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower cost of doing work generates more demand overall...

I actually paid for tax advice from one of those big companies (it was recommended - last time I will take that person's recommendations!). I was very disappointed in the service. It felt like the person I was speaking to on the phone would have been better of just echoing the request into AI. So I did just that as I waited on the line. I found the answer and the tax expert "confirmed" it.

> set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient

If that’s true, probably for the best that those jobs get replaced. Then again, the value may have been in the personal touch (pay to feel good about your decisions) rather than quality of directions.

I use it everyday to an extent that I’ve come to depend on it.

For copywriting, analyzing contracts, exploring my business domain, etc etc. Each of those tasks would have required me to consult with an expert a few years ago. Not anymore.

> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent

But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research.

One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.

The biggest harm today is people in training for "people interaction" specialties with a high degree of empathy / ability to read others: psychology, counseling, forensic interviewing. They pay a lot of money (or it's invested in them) to get trained and then have to do practical residency / internship: they need to do those interships NOW, and a significant proportion of the population that they'd otherwise interact with to do so is off faffing about with AI. The fact that anecdotally they can't seem to create "convincing" enough AIs to take the place of subjects is damning.

How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was wrong.

I’m a bit of a skeptic too and kind of agree on this. Also, the human employee displacement will be slow. It will start by not eliminating existing jobs but just eliminating the need for additional headcount, so it caps the growth of these labor markets. As it does that, the folks in the roles leveraging AI the most will start slowly stealing share of demand as they find more efficient and cheaper ways to perform the work. Meanwhile, core demand is shrinking as self service by customers is increasingly enabled. Then at some step pattern, perhaps the next global business cycle down turn, the headcount starts trending downward. This will repeat a handful of times, probably taking decades to be measured in aggregate by this type of study.

> Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk.

These examples aren't wrong but you might be overstating their impact on the economy as a whole.

E.g. the overwhelming majority of people do not pay solely for tax advice, or have a dietician, etc. Corporations already crippled their customer support so there's no remaining damage to be dealt.

Your tax example won't move the needle on people who pay to have their taxes done in their entirety.

Nearly every job, even a lot of creative ones, require a degree of accuracy and consistency that gen AI just can't deliver. Until some major breakthrough is achieved, not many people doing real work are in danger.

This is a great point, I was just using it understand various DMV procedures. It is invaluable for navigating bureaucracy so if your job is to ingest and regurgitate a bunch of documents and procedures you may be highly at risk here.

That is a great use for it too, rather than replacing artists we have personal advisors who can navigate almost any level of complex bureaucracy instantaneously. My girlfriend hates AI, like rails against it at any opportunity, but after spending a few hours on the DMV website I sat down and fed her questions into Claude and had answers in a few seconds. Instant convert.

Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options.

Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not.

Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on.

Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.

> And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.

Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.

> I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent.

That’s like buying a wrench and changing your own spark plugs. Wrenches are not putting mechanics out of business.

> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator

So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.

Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally not, wasn’t good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an effect.

> ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk

I doubt it.

Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search.

It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.

Your tax example isn't far off from what's already possible with Google.

The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers, digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire lawyers.

I don't trust what anyone says in this space because there is so much money to be made (by a fraction of people) if AI lives up to its promise, and money to be made to those who claim that AI is "bullshit".

The only thing I can remotely trust is my own experience. Recently, I decided to have some business cards made, which I haven't done in probably 15 years. A few years ago, I would have either hired someone on Fiverr to design my business card or pay for a premade template. Instead, I told Sora to design me a business card, and it gave me a good design the first time; it even immediately updated it with my Instagram link when I asked it to.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how AI, as we now know it, doesn't take the wind out of the sails of certain kinds of jobs.

Ironically, your example is what you used to get from a Google search back when Google wasn't aggressively monetized and enshittified.

This thought process sort of implies that there's a limited amount of work that's available to do, and once AI is doing all of it, that everyone else will just sit on their hands and stop using their brains to do stuff.

Even if every job that exists today were currently automated _people would find other stuff to do_. There is always going to be more work to do that isn't economical for AIs to do for a variety of reasons.

I thought the value of using a licensed tax agent is that if they give you advice that ends up being bad, they have an ethical/professional obligation to clean up their mess.

Not consulting a real tax advisor is probably going to cost you much more.

I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.

Google (non-Gemini) has always been a great source for tax advice, at least here in Canada because, if nothing else, the government's website appears to leave all its pages available for indexing (even if it's impossible to navigate on its own).

Here’s why I don’t think it matters , because the machine is paying for everyone’s productivity boost, even your accountants. So maybe this tide will rise all boats. Time will tell.

Your accountant also is probably saving hundreds of dollars in other areas using AI assistance.

Personally I still think you should cross check with a professional.

The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn’t going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway.

This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.

"AI is all hype and is going to destroy the labor market"

We're ten years and a trillion dollars into this. When we were 10 years and $1T into the massive internet builout between 1998 and 2008, that physical network had added over a trillion dollars to the economy and then about a trillion more every year after. How's the nearly ten years of LLM AI stacking up? DO we expect it'll add a trillion dollars a year to the economy in a couple years? I don't. Not even close. it'll still be a net drain industry, deeply in the red. That trillion dollars could have done some much good if spent on something more serious than man-child dreams about creating god computers.

My dentist already uses something called OverJet(?) that reads X-rays for issues. They seem to trust it and it agreed with what they suspected on the X-rays. Personally, I’ve been misdiagnosed through X-rays by a medical doctor so even being an LLM skeptic, Im slightly favorable to AI in medicine.

But I already trust my dentist. A new dentist deferring to AI is scary, and obviously will happen.

> Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.

This is such a broad category that I think it's inaccurate to say that all editors will be automated, regardless of your outlook on LLMs in general. Editing and proofreading are pretty distinct roles; the latter is already easily automated, but the former can take on a number of roles more akin to a second writer who steers the first writer in the correct direction. Developmental editors take an active role in helping creatives flesh out a work of fiction, technical editors perform fact-checking and do rewrites for clarity, etc.

> Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts

Do you mean Philip Tetlock? He wrote Superforecasting, which might be what you're referring to?

Name a better duo: software engineering hype cycles and anti-intellectualism

Video VFX artists are already suffering from lower demand.

> - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.

It has been a very, very long time since editors have been proof-reading prose for typos and grammar mistakes, and you don't need LLMs for that. Good editors do a lot more creative work than that, and LLMs are terrible at it.

> it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous

"Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1].

The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...

Im not sure this is a great example... yes the infrastructure of posting and applying to jobs has to go, but the cost of recruitment in this world would actually be much higher... you likely need more people and more resources to recruit a single employee.

In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world. Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may no longer exist because anyone and their mother can generate a professional-looking cover letter or personal web page or w/e.

Resume-sending is a great example: if everyone's blasting out AI-generated applications and companies are using AI to filter them, the whole "application" process collapses into meaningless busywork

> This is what happened to Google Search

This is completely untrue. Google Search still works, wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.

In the specific case of résumé-sending, the decline of the entire sector is a good thing. Nothing but make-work.

> This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.

Well their Search revenue actually went up last quarter, as all quarters. Overall traffic might be a bit down (they don't release that data so we can't be sure) but not revenue. While I do take tons of queries to LLMs now, the kind of queries Google actually makes a lot of money on (searching flights, restaurants etc) I don't go to an LLM for - either because of habit or because of fear these things are still hallucinating. If Search was starting to die I'd expect to see it in the latest quarter earnings but it isn't happening.

Are you sure suggesting google search is in decline? The latest Google earnings call suggests it’s still growing

GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery.

Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem already.

Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers, delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and hotels.

The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster, your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers and programmers first, even if some fear it.

The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital. Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues to accelerate.

So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed, human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital transition into feudal lords.

What's the alternative here? Apart from well-known, but not so useful useful advice to have a ton of friends who can hire you or be so famous as to not need an introduction.

Making dumb processes dumber to the point of failure is actually a feature.

Funny you call it value I call it inefficiency.

Why is this a worry? Sounds wonderful

Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate.

And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search.

If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.

I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse without ad-blockers.

How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame? I've seen a number of companies go "AI first" and stop hiring or have layoffs (Salesforce comes to mind) but I suspect they would have been in a slump without AI entirely.

AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said.

Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations.

As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.

> I humbly disagree

Both your experience and what the article (research) says can be valid at the same time. That’s how statistics works.

That's a repeating pattern with technologies. Most of the early investments don't pay off and the transformation does happen but also quite a bit later than people predicted. This was true of the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, and the railroad. It actually tends to be the later stage investors who reap most of the reward because by then the lessons have been learned and solutions developed.

The dot com boom gave us $1T in physical broadband, fiber, and cellular networking that's added many many trillions to the economy since. What's LLM-based AI gonna leave us when its bubble pops? Will that AI infrastructure be outliving its creators and generating trillions for the economy when all the AI companies collapse and are sold off for parts and scrap?

People overestimate what can be done in the short term and underestimate what can be done in the long term.

> 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.

> The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.

Horses, for thousand of years, were very useful to humans. Even with the various technological advances through that time their "unemployment" was very low. Until the invention and perfection of internal combustion engines.

To say that it is doubtful that it will ever happen to us is basically saying that human cognitive and/or physical capabilities are without bounds and that there is some reason that with our unbounded cognitive capabilities we will never be able to create a machine that could replicate those capabilities. That is a ridiculous claim.

2025 US has some really big complicating factors that'd make assessing the job market impact really hard to gauge.

For example, the mass layoffs of federal employees.

>"lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second"

Case in point: Klarna.

2024: "Klarna is All in on AI, Plans to Slash Workforce in Half" https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-is-all-in-on-ai-plans-to-...

2025: "Klarna CEO “Tremendously Embarrassed” by Salesforce Fallout and Doubts AI Can Replace It" https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-ceo-tremendously-embarr...

Surprisingly, Denmark is one of the easiest countries in which to fire someone.

> every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not

This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small.

Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally copied an image.

A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.

I miss the old internet, when every article didn't have a goofy image at the top just for "optimization." With the exception of photography in reporting, it's all a waste of time and bandwidth.

Most if it wasn't bespoke assets created by humans but stock art picked by if lucky, a professional photo editor, but more often the author themselves.

Yeah, I saw a investment app that was filled with obviously AI generated images. One of the more recommended choices in my country.

It feels very short-sighted from the company side because I nope'd right out of there. They didn't make me feel any trust for the company at all.

It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ...

Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every demographic.

Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem - OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.

I don't know. Even with these tools, I don't want to be doing this work.

I'd still hire an entry level graphic designer. I would just expect them to use these tools and 2x-5x their output. That's the only changing I'm sensing.

Probably not, economists generally stay in school straight to becoming professors or they’ll go into finance right after school.

That said I don’t think entry level illustration jobs can be around if software can do their job better than they do. Just like we don’t have a lot of calculators anymore, technological replacement is bound to occur in society, AI or not.

> Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator?

"Equip yourself with skills that other people are willing to pay for." –Thomas Sowell

> you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage

in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus, eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going to not want to pay when the "old" way was cheaper/faster/better.

> It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.

not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the total cost dropping) is true.

Short-term gains for individuals can gradually hollow out systems that, ironically, worked better when they were a little messy and human

For that last point, as a graphic designer competing with the first generation of digital printmaking and graphic design tools, I experienced the opposite. DIY people and companies are DIY people and companies. The ones that would have paid a real designer continued to do so, and my rates even went up because I offered something that stuck out even from the growing mass of garbage design from the amateurs with PageMaker or Illustrator. I adopted the same tools and my game was elevated far more than the non-professionals with those tools further separating my high value from the low value producers. It also gave me a few years of advantage over other professionals who still worked on a drawing table with pen and paper.

That last point is especially important.

Yeah this is like counting horses a few years after the automobile was invented.

At the end of the massive investment period, about a trillion dollars of broadband, fiber and cellular build out between 1998 and 2008, that infrastructure had already added a trillion back to the economy and would add that much nearly every year after. LLM AI is nearing 10 years of massive investment, approaching $1T. Where are the trillions in returns. And what amazing economy-wide impacting infrastructure will that trillion in AI investment leave us with when the bubble pops and these AI companies are sold for parts and scrap and the not-AI companies boosting AI all pull back? When the dot com boom collapsed, we still got value from all that investment that continues to lead the global economy today. What will LLMs leave us with?

Does the same follow for The Metaverse, or for Blockchain?

They are saying that and yet on one of the last earnings calls the VP of Sales admitted that they are shifting the weight of their sales force from peddling Copilot to traditional money-makers like migrations or updates. This could merely speak to Copilot being a dogshit product, but that never really stopped Microsoft from trying, so it could also signal a certain shaking belief in Enterprise AI being that revolutionary.

We saw that happening before LLM bots with pre-LLM chatbots, FAQs, support wizards, and even redirects to site-specific or web-wide search. If you save more money avoiding human support costs than you lose from dissatisfied customers, it's a win. Same for outsourcing support to low-wage countries. Same for LLM chatbots. It's not some seismic event, it's a gradual move from high quality bespoke output to low quality mass production, same as it ever was.

> We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer.

And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g. customer support is to need less support staff, for example through better self-service websites, chatbots / conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not end up doing something other than their intended task (like Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors).

One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes etc, before calling customer support.

Yeah, exactly. It's not about a sudden "mass firing" event - it's more like a slow erosion of entry-level roles

Those types of jobs are mostly in India & Philippines, not the US or Denmark, so let them deal with it.

Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.

I have had AI support agents deflect my questions, but not resolve them. It is more companies ending customer support under the guise of automation than AI obsoleting the support workers.

I mean, if it really works in the end, we just redefine levels humans need to deal with. There are lots of problems with AI, but I can't see one here.

Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and half person.

> Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers.

Long before the industrial revolution. The ox-drawn plow was invented about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia or India (my memory's poor, sorry) and it put a lot of workers with hoes out of work, while also growing prosperity and the number of people who gained work thanks to that increased prosperity and population growth it supported. It has always been this way and always will be.

> [LLMs] won't get any better.

Can you pinpoint the date which LLMs stagnated?

More broadly, it appears to me that LLMs have improved up to and including this year.

If you consider LLMs to not have improved in the last year, I can see your point. However, then one must consider ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.5, Deepseek, and Gemini 2.5 to not be improvements.

As a graphic designer, my work didn't evaporate because Aldus shipped PageMaker. It didn't collapse when Office and the Web made clip art available to everyone. It didn't disappear when credit card, letterhead, and logo templates and generators came online. Every time a new tool allowed more DIY, the gulf between the low-effort stuff and my stuff grew and I was able to secure even more and better paying work. And using those tools early myself, I also gained advantage over my professional competition for various lengths of time.

This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did.

Because you can buy a microwave and pizza rolls doesn't make you a chef. Maybe in 100 years the tooling will make you as good as the chefs of our time, but by then they'll all be doing even better work and there are people who will pay for higher quality no matter how high the bar is raised for baseline quality so eliminating all work in a profession is rare.

Thank you

I keep seeing these "my output is 10X with LLMs" but I'm not seeing any increase in quality or decrease in price for any of the very many tech products I've updated or upgraded in the last couple of years.

We're coming up in 3 years of ChatGPT and well over a year since I started seeing the proliferation of these 10X claims, and yet LLM users seem to be bearing none of the fruit one might expect from a 10X increase in productivity.

I'm beginning to think that this 10X thing is overstated.

>The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.

This has never been the truth of the world, and I doubt AI will make it come to fruition. The most successful people are by and large those with powerful connections, and/or access to capital. There are millions of smart, inspired people alive right now who will never rise above the middle class. Meanwhile kids born in select zip codes will continue to skate by unburdened by the same economic turmoil most people face.

What about technical debts related to the generated code?

If it actually works like that, it'll be just like all labor-saving innovations, going back to the loom and printing press and the like; people will lose their job, but it'll be local / individual tragedies, the large scale economic impact will likely be positive.

It'd still suck to lose your job / vocation though, and some of those won't be able to find a new job.

What I'm seeing is marked decrease in standards and quality everywhere I see LLMs (and diffusion models, any of the transformer-based stuff.)

Sometimes that decrease in quality is matched by an increase in reach / access, and so the benefits can outweigh the costs. Think about language translation in web browsers and even smart spectacles, for example. Language translation has been around forever but generally limited to popular books or small-scale proprietary content because it was expensive to use mult-lingual humans to do that work.

Now even my near-zero readership blog can be translated from English to Portuguese (or most other widely used languages) for a reader in Brazil with near-zero cost/effort for that user. The quality isn't as good as human translation, often losing nuance and style and sometimes even with blatant inaccuracies, but the increased access offered by language translation software makes the lower standard acceptable for lots of use cases.

I wouldn't depend on machine translation for critical financial, healthcare, or legal use cases, though I might start there to get the gist, but for my day-to-day reading on the web, it's pretty amazing.

Software at scale is different than individuals engaging in leisure activities. A loss of nuance and occasional catastrophic failures in a piece of software with hundreds of millions or billions of users could have devastating impacts.

For my part, I would like for there still to be wild and quiet places to go to when I need time away from my fellow man, and I don't envision a world paved over for modern infrastructure as desirable, but rather the stuff of nightmares such as the movie _Silent Running_ envisioned.

That said, the fact that I can't find an opensource LLM front-end which will accept a folder full of images to run a prompt on sequentially, then return the results in aggregate is incredibly frustrating.

I agree! People will become more productive, meaning fewer people can do more work. That said, I hope this does not result in the production of evermore things at the cost of nature!

I think we are at a crossroads as to what this will result in, however. In one case, the benefits will accrue at the top, with corporations earning greater profits while employing less people, leaving a large part of the population without jobs.

In the second case, we manage to capture these benefits, and confer them not just on the corporations but also the public good. People could work less, leaving more time for community enhancing activities. There are also many areas where society is currently underserved which could benefit from freed up workforce, such as schooling, elderly care, house building and maintenance etc etc.

I hope we can work toward the latter rather than the former.

Yes, lets extract even more resources from the Earth when we're already staring down the barrel of long term environmental issues.

I like that some places are empty.

Planet earth is still resource constrained. This is easy to forget when skills availability is more frequently the bottleneck and you live in a society that for the time being has fairly easy access to raw materials.

are graphic artists actually getting replaced by AI? If so that would surprise me for as impressive as AI image generation is, very little of what it does seems like it would replace a graphic artists.

Since when? If they're writing online content then that was wiped out somewhat recently by Google changing their search algorithm and killing a huge amount of content based sites

To be fair, those jobs were already pretty precarious.

Ever since the explosion in popularity of the internet in the 2000's, anything journalism related has been in terminal decline. The arrival of the smartphones accelerated this process.

I was discussing with a colleague the past months, my view on how and why all these AI tools are being shoved down our throats (just look at Google's Gemini push into all enterprise tools, it's like Google+ for B2B) before there are clear cut use-cases you can point to and say "yes, this would have been much harder to do without LLM/AI" is because... Training data is the most valuable asset, all these tools are just data collection machines with some bonus features that make them look somewhat useful.

I'm not saying that I think LLMs are useless, far from it, I use them when I think it's a good fit for the research I'm doing, the code I need to generate, etc., but the way it's being pushed from a marketing perspective tells me that companies making these tools need people to use them to create a data moat.

Extremely annoying to be getting these pop-ups to "use our incredible Intelligence™" at every turn, it's grating on me so much that I've actively started to use them less, and try to disable every new "Intelligence™" feature that shows up in a tool I use.

You should take time to learn what those jobs are for. You'd be surprised what it takes to keep a business running past any reasonable level of scale.