#Extra Money In 2023

[hsmagazine254]

Setting Your Price Point: A Business Strategy

Understanding the Art of Pricing Pricing your products or services effectively is a critical aspect of running a successful business. Your price point not only impacts your revenue but also shapes customer perception and can make or break your competitiveness in the market. In this article, we’ll delve into the art and science of setting the right price point for your business. Understanding Your…

[stars-inthe-sky]

10. tell me about an insecurity you overcame.

It's been a while since I started freelancing for fun and profit, but the beginning of that journey is still a pretty big deal to me.

I'd previously worked at an agency for nearly three years, so I knew how to do client-based work, but I knew nothing about business development (or billing, or taxes, or client management, or admin).

And, for those I didn't know back in 2017, I started down that whole road in the first place after getting very unexpectedly and unceremoniously fired after like four months on the job. It was never clear exactly why, but I'd thought things had been going well, and that was a pretty gutting Thursday afternoon.

I'd also just gone through a job search, so I knew there weren't many positions available in the region that would be a fit—and that the most recent thing that had seemed to be a great fit had, uh, not been. (This was before remote/hybrid work was a real norm, even though my agency job had functionally been hybrid and taught me to work effectively as such.)

But when I'd gone through that previous job search, a couple of people I spoke with had mentioned maybe needing some freelance capacity down the road, and perhaps I should get in touch once I got settled in the job if I was interested. So I reached out to them, without mentioning the rest, thinking I could at least bridge the gap while I figured out what the fuck to do. Both had solid projects for me where I learned a bunch quickly, made some money, and was excited for more.

And then it just kind of made sense to keep seeing about those kinds of opportunities—both because I liked the client-based work and flexibility, but also because it quickly became apparent that it'd be harder for any one person or institution to fuck me over in the same way.

Plus, one of the people who needed a subcontractor turned out to be a great mentor and reference; I don't think I ever told him quite why I'd decided to go all-in on freelancing full-time, but I have thanked him repeatedly for some truly foundational early guidance as well as a couple of projects he helped set me up with. He's semi-retired now but I'm still using some of those templates!

Anyway, I networked my way into a couple of additional early projects and finished 2017 with about the same overall income for the year that I had had in my agency job for 2016. (Not the fuck-them one, the one I got laid off from because, well, that was a bad end-of-year for anyone working in Democratic politics, much like this one.)

And the rest is history: I've been self-employed for about 7.5 years now and, while the constant hustle and inconstant income/workload have their own challenges, I think I've landed in a pretty secure (emotionally/professionally) place about the whole enterprise.

[zeravmeta]

decided to actually sit down and look at aokos skills and Holy Fuck

[teddybearsims]

oc questionnaire !!

tagged by @raiiny-bay ♡

NAME: August Milan NICKNAME: nothing, other than being called sweetheart or honey or some other sickly sweet thing by Bear :3 (I haven't figured out his streamer @ yet which could be considered a nickname too!) GENDER: male, he/him STAR SIGN: scorpio HEIGHT: 6’0 ORIENTATION: bisexual NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY: san myshuno native, idk what this would make his ethnicity in sims logic, but ig he's some sort of European mix? FAVORITE FRUIT: honeydew FAVORITE SEASON: summer FAVORITE FLOWER: roses!! Bear bought him a (small) bouquet of roses on their first date and it's been his fave since. FAVORITE SCENT: Bear. Straight up. Anytime. After a shower, after a run, ANYTHING. He wants to bottle and inhale Bear at all hours.  COFFEE, TEA, OR HOT CHOCOLATE: iced coffee! AVERAGE HOURS OF SLEEP: around 8-12. Depends if he was out at a club late. Mostly wakes up on time to do his livestreams, and falls back into bed when he can, but he can't fall asleep ALONE so his hours revolve around Bear a lot too! DOGS OR CATS: cats ig.. but he doesn’t really ever want a pet. DREAM TRIP: Simply spending months in Sulani just relaxing in the sun with Bear at his side <3 He'd also love to take Bear around with him during Fashion Week but Bear does not have the energy for it :p NUMBER OF BLANKETS: one big fluffy duvet RANDOM FACT: he was an oopsie baby.. his parents never planned for him, & he has no siblings!

I tag: @machinegrl @dandylion240 @yuauaua @bubblepopsims @mobwhim & anyone else who would like to do this!! ♡♡

[ineedahugtm]

Dear diary,

It’s been approximately 2 hours since I’ve found out that ao3 has been down. I don’t think I can go on for very much longer. I keep typing the url into the address bar on safari before realizing that it’s still down and it’s only been 2 minutes since I last tried.

May god help us

[mymoneychronicles]

70+ Side Hustles for 2023

[shafiul1]

Press THIS BUTTON To Unlock Your Financial Freedom: The Ultimate Guide To Side Hustles 2023.

In this video we guide you through 8 different side hustle ideas that can help you earn extra money. From online teaching, where you can earn $30 to $100 per hour, to personal training at an average hourly wage of $70, there are plenty of options to choose from. We also cover managing digital operations and social media for SMEs, independent graphic design, organizing parties, driving for Uber, freelance work on Upwork, and photography. Each side hustle is explained in detail, including the average hourly wage, the benefits, and how to get started. Whether you're looking for a flexible way to earn extra cash or want to start your own business, this video has something for everyone. watch this for how to make money at home-

Watch Now :  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O0zi..

[newbusinessideas]

Top 10 Best Side Hustle Ideas from Home

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In today’s dynamic world, starting a small business has never been easier, especially for a working professional with an entrepreneurial dream. So, starting a part-time small business – Side Hustle Ideas can allow working professionals to pursue their passions, increase their income, and gain more control over their time. And, If you’re passionate about a particular skill or have a unique talent,…

[edxnian]

And now I have to head off to work. I'm almost all caught up, tho!

[fiercynn]

on ao3's current fundraiser

apparently it’s time for ao3’s biannual donation drive, which means it’s time for me to remind you all, that regardless of how much you love ao3, you shouldn’t donate to them because they HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY AND NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH IT.

we’ve known for years that ao3 – or, more specifically, the organization for transformative works (@transformativeworks on tumblr), or otw, who runs ao3 and other fandom projects – has a lot of money in their “reserves” that they had no plans for. but in 2023, @manogirl and i did some research on this, and now, after looking at their more recent financial statements, i’ve determined that at the beginning of 2024, they had almost $2.8 MILLION US DOLLARS IN SURPLUS.

our full post last year goes over the principles of how we determined this, even though the numbers are for 2023, but the key points still stand (with the updated numbers):

when we say “surplus”, we are not including money that they estimate they need to spend in 2024 for their regular expenses. just the extra that they have no plan for

yes, nonprofits do need to keep some money in reserves for emergencies; typically, nonprofits registered in the u.s. tend to keep enough to cover between six months and two years of their regular operating expenses (meaning, the rough amount they need each month to keep their services going). $2.8 million USD is enough to keep otw running for almost FIVE YEARS WITHOUT NEW DONATIONS

they always overshoot their fundraisers: as i’m posting this, they’ve already raised $104,751.62 USD from their current donation drive, which is over double what they’ve asked for! on day two of the fundraiser!!

no, we are not trying to claim they are embezzling this money or that it is a scam. we believe they are just super incompetent with their money. case in point: that surplus that they have? only earned them $146 USD in interest in 2022, because only about $10,000 USD of their money invested in an interest-bearing account. that’s the interest they earn off of MILLIONS. at the very least they should be using this extra money to generate new revenue – which would also help with their long-term financial security – but they can’t even do that

no, they do not need this money to use if they are sued. you can read more about this in the full post, but essentially, they get most of their legal services donated, and they have not, themselves, said this money is for that purpose

i'm not going to go through my process for determining the updated 2024 numbers because i want to get this post out quickly, and otw actually had not updated the sources i needed to get these numbers until the last couple days (seriously, i've been checking), but you can easily recreate the process that @manogirl and i outlined last year with these documents:

otw’s 2022 audited financial statement, to determine how much money they had at the end of 2022

otw’s 2024 budget spreadsheet, to determine their net income in 2023 and how much they transferred to and from reserves at the beginning of 2024

otw’s 2022 form 990 (also available on propublica), which is a tax document, and shows how much interest they earned in 2022 (search “interest” and you’ll find it in several places)  

also, otw has not been accountable to answering questions about their surplus. typically, they hold a public meeting with their finance committee every year in september or october so people can ask questions directly to their treasurer and other committee members; as you can imagine, after doing this deep dive last summer, i was looking forward to getting some answers at that meeting!

but they cancelled that meeting in 2023, and instead asked people to write to the finance committee through their contact us form online. fun fact: i wrote a one-line message to the finance committee on may 11, 2023 through that form, when @manogirl and i were doing this research, asking them for clarification on how much they have in their reserves. i have still not received a response.

so yeah. please spend your money on people who actually need it, like on mutual aid requests! anyone who wants to share their mutual aid requests, please do so in the replies and i’ll share them out – i didn’t want to link directly to individual requests without permission in case this leads to anyone getting harassed, but i would love to share your requests. to start with, here's operation olive branch and their ongoing spreadsheet sharing palestinian folks who need money to escape genocide.

oh, and if you want to write to otw and tell them why you are not donating, i'm not sure it’ll get any results, but it can’t hurt lol. here's their contact us form – just don’t expect a response! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[irrealisms]

i've seen a lot of people talk about mcyt as a constantly burning library of alexandria recently, and to some extent that's true. people are constantly deleting their blogs, going scorched earth with animatics, fanfics, etc., that they made. but i've also seen people (three in the last few days!) make this claim about VODs, when talking about large fandoms like DSMP and QSMP, and.... guys. that was true in 2020. that's not true anymore. archivists have been working tirelessly for years now to make sure that isn't true.

the dsmp VOD masterlist is here. in november 2020, it's missing 16 VODs, if i am counting correctly--which is still a fairly small minority, but it's a lot, and it sucks!--but in november of 2021, it's missing one, and that's because the cc of that VOD does copyright takedowns, not because the archivists didn't save it. no one in the archivist project is deleting VODs off youtube with no backups the way people are deleting fanfics. three months ago, one of my dsmp archivist friends finished coding a tool that let them reconstruct VODs out of twitch clips, and reconstructed six tubbo dsmp VODs from 2020. not only are we basically not losing VODs anymore, we are actively gaining VODs that have been lost for years, that were thought to be lost forever. the library isn't burning anymore; it's being rebuilt.

the qsmp VOD masterlist is here. it is usually a month or two behind the present day, to give creators time to archive their own VODs, but... look at it. in january of 2024, every single qsmp vod was archived. the same is true of december of 2023, and november, and the vast majority of months for the past year.

i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem. just a few days ago, i realized that a lifesteal VOD from last year was missing--that its youtube upload was messed up somehow, and no one noticed and it wasn't mirrored on the internet archive and the person who uploaded it deleted the original file. and now it's gone forever. this made me super sad! like i said: i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem.

but... look at the lifesteal VOD masterlist here. lifesteal's a smaller fandom than qsmp or dsmp. open the 2022 tab and you'll see months and months of lost VODs, of no one's VODs being saved, because there weren't any archivists saving them. then open the 2023 tab and see: they lost four VODs, over the course of a year. even in smaller fandoms, archivists are working. they're making progress. they're saving VODs. in 2024, lifesteal archivists screenrecorded five streams on tumblr live to make sure they would not become lost media. mcyt may be a constantly burning library of alexandria, but the people with fire extinguishers are dedicated. they're making incredible progress. i know people with petabytes of VODs saved, who have spent money on extra storage for this. i know people who are constantly running up against their storage limits as they download/upload to the internet archive/delete for space/rinse and repeat. a decent fraction of the time, my internet at home is slow because it's downloading VODs.

and these aren't the only mcyt fandoms with archiving projects! the outsiders smp VOD masterlist is here. origins smp VOD masterlist is here. smp earth VOD masterlist is here. rats smp VOD masterlist is here. there are so many others that i just don't happen to know about. the older and smaller a fandom is, the more likely it is to not have an attached archiving project, or for the archive to be missing a lot of VODs. but... guys, we've saved a lot. there are people out there, working tirelessly to save even more. yes, mourn what we have lost--the archivists i know are also the ones mourning the most for the VODs that are, in fact, forever lost media. but don't dismiss how much people have saved. we are making progress. we are losing less and less every month. the vast majority of the dsmp and qsmp still exist, i am not going to say they're the same experience as watching live because they're really not, but.. they're out there. people have put in a lot of work to save them.

if you have publicly available VOD masterlists or other mcyt archiving projects that aren't on this post, please add them in a reblog. i want this post to serve as a reference for how much archivists have saved in this community; unfortunately, i'm not super connected to every community. but i know that--for every person deleting things, there are people working, tirelessly & with little external reward, in so many different mcyt fandoms, to save things. and we should appreciate that more often.

[playing2win]

Here are my numbers for tomorrow night.

I created a new number mixer that has more combinations.  It also only mixes the last 2 rows for 3 groups then remixes for the last 3 groups.  Then I have the same pattern below mixed up even more.  That gives me 36 total combinations for that mixer.

I have also decided to keep the same extra ball for the foreseeable future.  I figure that if I can hit 5 without the extra ball using PowerPlay that’s still $2 million.  If my regular balls hit more consistently then when the extra ball also matches up then I’ll make some good money.   Chasing it and rarely hitting is exhausting.

[memecrypto]

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[sobahan784]

Press THIS BUTTON To Unlock Your Financial Freedom: The Ultimate Guide To Side Hustles 2023.

In this video we guide you through 8 different side hustle ideas that can help you earn extra money. From online teaching, where you can earn $30 to $100 per hour, to personal training at an average hourly wage of $70, there are plenty of options to choose from. We also cover managing digital operations and social media for SMEs, independent graphic design, organizing parties, driving for Uber, freelance work on Upwork, and photography. Each side hustle is explained in detail, including the average hourly wage, the benefits, and how to get started. Whether you're looking for a flexible way to earn extra cash or want to start your own business, this video has something for everyone. watch this for how to make money at home-

Watch Now :  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O0zi...

[cartierre]

AGORA HILLS | ln4

SOCIAL MEDIA!AU lando norris x fem!russell!reader

side note: i'm depressed and the f1 season is starting soon again so here we go. side note pt2: this is kinda short and the ending feels rushed but oh well

♡ liked by landonorris, danielricciardo and 14,293 others

tagged: landonorris

y/n_russell permanent shenanigans

view all 475 comments

user1 oh that's not-

user2 oh she didn't- yes she did

user3 y/n getting a lando norris tramp stamp was not on my 2023 bingo card ⤷ user4 i don't think it was ever on anyone's bingo card

landonorris mine ⤷ y/n_russell yours 🤞

user5 i can't decide if it's cringe or a major slay

georgerussell63 i don't know if i should strangle you or norris ⤷ y/n_russell maybe neither of us?

♡ liked by landonorris, oscarpiastri and 13,293 others

tagged: yourfriend, yourotherfriend, landonorris

y/n_russell pizza boy always knows how to capture my heart

view all 361 comments

user6 lando and y/n being in their hot couple era was not on my 2024 bingo card ⤷ user7 no couple does it like y/n and lando

user8 i'm a bit concerned about their recent behaviour, ngl

landonorris i'm a professional pizza boy off season ⤷ y/n_russell earning some extra money to spoil your girl? ⤷ user9 so you admit you use lando for his money? ⤷ y/n_russell sorry your partner apparently doesn't know how to treat you. i'd be bitter as well if i were you

user10 y/n being totally unhinged is my favourite type of media ⤷ user11 george being the emotionally older sibling and y/n being the unbothered younger sibling makes so much sense

♡ liked by landonorris, georgerussell63 and 16,938 others

tagged: landonorris, georgerussell63

y/n_russell to clear some things up: obviously george isn't always happy with how lando and i present our relationship (online or not) but that doesn't mean he hates lando?! i'm his little sister, it's natural he doesn't always enjoy what lando and i do. nonetheless, lando and george have been friends for ages! this was literally them on our shared holiday in '23! carmen and i were third-wheeling the whole time lol. george can sometimes be a little cold but that's just how he processes things, it doesn't mean he's not supportive of my relationship with lando. please respect that.

comments have been disabled for this post

♡ liked by landonorris, georgerussell63, danielricciardo and 16,292 others

y/n_russell accurate representation of how i felt after watching george and lando's "drama" on drive to survive. now i understand why y'all blew this whole situation up.

view all 364 comments

user12 now she knows how we all felt watching that episode

user13 me when i watch dts in general

user14 me when i hear the dutch national anthem yet again

user15 me when i think of charles not winning wdc because ferrari literally sucks

landonorris me when i realise y/n won't attend every race ⤷ y/n_russell um excuse me i'm a working gyal

user16 me when life

♡ liked by landonorris, georgerussell63, mclaren and 17,293 others

tagged: mclaren, mercedesamgf1

y/n_russell maybe i should become lando's and george's pr manager when it means getting flowers from their teams

view all 437 comments

user17 no cuz that is so cute that they sent her flowers cuz she solved the whole lando-george drama

user18 that's why they both are my favourite teams

mclaren the contract is ready to be signed! ⤷ mercedesamgf1 not if she choses us first! after all, blood is thicker than water

user19 not mclaren and mercedes fighting over y/n

user20 i wonder which flowers are from who

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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