#chatGPT news

[slinkywhat]

Opportunity Cost & AI

[An off-the-cuff essay no one asked for but I word-vomited anyway because I am exhausted]

I literally started a Python coding course on Friday so that I can ask ChatGPT or other AI tools to write me scripts to execute basic, tedious tasks that currently take up an absurd amount of my time.

I work a highly-paid role that’s supposed to be very strategic, but I’m easily spending 40-60% of my time executing repetitive, tactical tasks across multiple, disparate systems because my company (and every company prior—it’s not unique to this place) won’t pay for productivity software, automation plug-ins for our project management software, actual project managers, or additional junior headcount, our third-party agency partners don't have access to work inside internal systems, etc. etc. etc.

People spend more than half their day doing busywork, according to survey of 10,000 plus workers | CNBC, 2022

“The amount of time office workers have to spend doing their primary job duties decreased in 2016, from 46% to 39%. When asked what gets in the way of work the most, workers say wasteful meetings (59%) and excessive emails (43%) are the biggest offenders.” U.S. State of Enterprise Work Report | Workfront, 2016-2017

If you take just my salary and calculate the opportunity cost there, it more than justifies the cost of at least one or two these tools—then multiply that by all of the other employees in the company with the same or similar barriers to actual productivity and it’s literally a no-brainer.

opportunity cost (noun) • the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen; can be implicit (intangible) or explicit (tangible, dollar amounts); often calculated as the difference between the return on investment (ROI) between the most profitable business decision and the current/chosen one.

Alas, almost every company I’ve been at or heard about from others is short-sighted when it comes to realizing opportunity cost—whether from the ROI on investments like software, ongoing training, professional development, employee satisfaction and retention, systems maintenance and technological upgrades, user experience, or bare minimum marketing strategies—because they “cost money.”

I’ve never understood this, because humans have an inherent loss-aversion cognitive bias—psychologically, we’re twice as motivated by avoiding potential loss than we are by pursuing potential gain, and we’re more likely to take risks to prevent loss. I suppose the problem is that the culture of busywork is so ingrained that it’s perceived as the baseline, where “increased” productivity is viewed as a potential gain, rather than decreased productivity as a major loss.

Hasn’t anyone ever heard of short-term pain for long-term gain?

So, please hit me up if you have ideas on how to leverage ChatGPT and other tools to do things like batch cloning Jira tickets and generating documentation from templates; managing an overflowing email inbox; logging system data into disparate, static spreadsheets instead of intelligent, connected systems; manually searching old Jira tickets to append implementation dates to that data; finding and replacing duplicative instances of copy that aren’t using global elements/a single database source for management; pulling, consolidating, and analyzing reports from multiple disconnected systems; etc.

I’m really, really tired of spending my time and energy on easily automated work that does not challenge me or contribute to my sense of pride or satisfaction in my work, but does radically waste my time and my employer’s money.

Let’s help each other automate some shit and work smarter, not harder. It’s 2023 and we have not made all of these technological advancements just to ignore them and perpetuate the arbitrary 40-hour work week.

If we can spend half the time or less to reach our goals at work, then we can actually focus on the strategic parts of our roles to move the needle and invest more time in ourselves. We have the tools to be able to spend more of our time on personal passions and pursuits, family and friends, travel, leisure, hobbies, community engagement, volunteering, political activism, exercise and health, financial planning and management, home improvement, or whatever is currently being neglected or would improve our quality of life, happiness, and in return, our contributions to our workplaces.

Automation is the future. Contrary to much of the fear-mongering around the topic of work automation, four out of five knowledge workers see it as a chance to rethink work in new and exciting ways. Sixty-nine percent believe work automation will give them back time to perform their primary job duties better. The only hesitation that exists seems to lie in how much of work will ultimately be done by machines and how much will still require the human touch.” The State of Enterprise Work, U.S. Edition | Workfront, 2017 - 2018

It’s literally a win-win—except, perhaps, for the politicians and systems of power that seek to limit our financial flexibility, ability to organize, and the security to push for change.

P.S. Call and email your representatives—repeatedly—and tell them you will donate, campaign, and vote for their opponents in the next election if they do not vote NO on The Restrict Act.

——————

More reading for the nerds:

“Digital workers won’t settle for bad tech - Nearly half of workers say they’re likely to leave their current job if they’re unhappy or frustrated with workplace tech. (49%)” The 2021 State of Work — How Covid-19 changed digital work. | Adobe Experience Cloud, 2022

“Wasteful practices and tools—namely email and meetings—continue to thwart worker productivity. As in years past, poorly used meetings and email topped the list of things that keep knowledge workers from getting work done, with U.S. workers having an average of 199 unopened emails in their inboxes at any given time. This report certainly makes the case that email has reached the limits of its effectiveness as a work management tool.” The State of Enterprise Work, U.S. Edition | Workfront, 2017 - 2018

Why Busywork Is Making Your Employees Spend Less Time Doing Their Actual Jobs | Inc., 2016

Opportunity Cost: Missing the Mark on Motivation for Two Types of Employees | Maxim Kind, LinkedIn, 2018

[opportvnist]

why would you encourage people to use AI when there is a website that is AI-free that is designed to do exactly the same thing. you literally just reblogged the post for it. what

oh, no. I have bad news for you.

let’s take a quick look at OneLook Thesaurus ‘s website (which I must confess I last visited in 2017, but I suspect you don’t use it either):

see the word “scans”? that’s an indication that OneLook uses web scraping and other machine learning techniques. most tumblr users would not consider this website AI, but it uses a baby version of the chatGPT algorithm. do you know what else is powered by a similar algorithm? the squiggly lines in your fucking Google docs. even early 2000s Google was powered by early artificial intelligence. you’re already using AI in your writing, and you don’t even know it!

and yes, I understand how scary this idea is. there’s a reason mad scientists call AI a black box. chatGPT isn’t human. we can’t talk to it. it quite literally has a mind of its own. what IS it doing with your data? literally nobody except for chatGPT knows for sure.

but most experts agree that chatGPT skims your writing like a human would; then, just like a human, it picks the things it likes about your content and style. and then it “forgets” the rest. of course, I’m anthropomorphizing, but that’s essentially what genAI does to new information.

I’m pretentious, so I’m gonna pull out the socratic method now: do you consider a human who reads your work and imitates your writing style to be stealing your work? is there a functional difference between the ways chatGPT and your favorite reader processes your writing? in what ways is AI already using your data, and which of those ways do you think are ethical?

there are bigger questions that even I can’t answer for you: what about AI makes you uncomfortable? would learning more about AI make chatGPT seem less scary? what parts of your life can new technology make easier, and what parts of your life should technology never touch?

I actually have a lot of thoughts about this exact topic, and I’m likely going to post more about AI as I work through my data science masters. until then, hope that answers your question :)

[dduane]

Well, this would be interesting...

[m-ultraarticles]

ChatGPT new update allows it to browse internet, provide more accurate responses

ChatGPT is going to the next level with the new update and now the artificial intelligence platform will have the ability to connect to the internet. The new update will allow the platform to generate more updated information and the accuracy level of the responses is also expected to increase. For now, ChatGPT is trained to use information available up to the year 2021 and the new update is…

[the-automators]

April, 2023 AutoHotkey Newsletter

April 2023 AutoHotkey Newsletter April 6th, 2023 AutoHotkey Newsletter Most of us have some amount of stress in their lives. One of the big causes of stress is having too much to do and too little time to do it. This is why I don’t have a lot of stress because I put in time years ago learning how to use AutoHotkey to work Smarter, not Harder! No, AutoHotkey isn’t some kind of “magic pill”. It…

[techboilers]

ChatGPT Shutdown - Users Left Confused & Helpless

Last night, due to a massive outage it was observed that the OpenAI programme ChatGPT shutdown. Users were left confused with no explanation while the AI was not working. Is ChatGPT the future while crashing like this? Let’s dive into the details of this crash. ChatGPT Shuts Down? So yesternight, users reported seeing an error message pop up on the ChatGPT website. The message read “ChatGPT is…

[shi-qingxuans-child]

I updated this post to make it a bit more clear, hope this helps!!

[reasonsforhope]

got anything good, boss?

Sure do!

-

"Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT's dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.

NPR spoke to two people "with direct knowledge" who confirmed that the Times' lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary "to protect the intellectual property rights" of the Times' reporting.

Neither OpenAI nor the Times immediately responded to Ars' request to comment.

If the Times were to follow through and sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, NPR suggested that the lawsuit could become "the most high-profile" legal battle yet over copyright protection since ChatGPT's explosively popular launch. This speculation comes a month after Sarah Silverman joined other popular authors suing OpenAI over similar concerns, seeking to protect the copyright of their books.

Of course, ChatGPT isn't the only generative AI tool drawing legal challenges over copyright claims. In April, experts told Ars that image-generator Stable Diffusion could be a "legal earthquake" due to copyright concerns.

But OpenAI seems to be a prime target for early lawsuits, and NPR reported that OpenAI risks a federal judge ordering ChatGPT's entire data set to be completely rebuilt—if the Times successfully proves the company copied its content illegally and the court restricts OpenAI training models to only include explicitly authorized data. OpenAI could face huge fines for each piece of infringing content, dealing OpenAI a massive financial blow just months after The Washington Post reported that ChatGPT has begun shedding users, "shaking faith in AI revolution." Beyond that, a legal victory could trigger an avalanche of similar claims from other rights holders.

Unlike authors who appear most concerned about retaining the option to remove their books from OpenAI's training models, the Times has other concerns about AI tools like ChatGPT. NPR reported that a "top concern" is that ChatGPT could use The Times' content to become a "competitor" by "creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff."

As of this month, the Times' TOS prohibits any use of its content for "the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.""

-via Ars Technica, August 17, 2023

[tippenfunkaport]

FYI, I have also locked all my fanfics down to registered users only because of the AI scraping on AO3. I'm one of many fan creators doing this right now and I know it stinks for users without an AO3 account, but it's the only option writers have available to us at the moment to stop our work from being scraped and stolen.

If this makes you mad, the Federal Register is currently open to comments on AI accountability until June 12th, 2023.

It only takes a second to leave a comment to ask for legislation that works used in AI creations or training MUST secure the express consent of the original creator before they can be used. If we can get protections for artists, writers, musicians and everyone who creates that their work cannot be used in AI without their permission, we can go back to making fanworks freely available without fear of them being misused. Until then, we're stuck playing defense until the courts catch up.

(If you're a fan creator looking to do this as well, AO3 has a tool to let you do all your fics at the same time in seconds. On your dashboard, go to Edit Works and you'll be able to change the status on everything at once.)

If you missed the context, AO3 recently found that the archive was scraped for use in AI services like ChatGPT and Sudowrite. While they put in protections in December 2022 to try to stop it from happening in the future, it's not foolproof and there is nothing they can do about works already swiped prior to that date. The archive is recommending fan creators restrict their works to registered users only to prevent against additional large scale scraping in the future.

[aiweirdness]

"When the publisher of Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal announced last week that its magazines would start to publish AI-generated articles, its CEO assured readers that the practice wouldn’t result in a decline in quality."

Men's Journal's AI-generated article: 18 serious factual errors

CNET's AI-generated articles: rampant factual errors and also plagiarism

Using AI to generate articles is the modern journalistic equivalent of selling "strawberry jam" made of red dye and no strawberries

[alwaysbewoke]

honestly, FUCK ISRAEL!!

[genericpuff]

I just KNOW they’re only having sex for episode 265. I CAN FEEL IT IN MY BONES

no that's literally all it is

it's morpheus talking gibberish about dream diving for like 5 panels

and then the rest of it is just the same shot of H x P from different angles talking about things we've already seen them talk about

and then hades 'proves' to persephone she's a good queen by boning her

i'm not fucking joking

you're not missing out on a THING

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A British Columbia lawyer alleged to have submitted bogus case law “hallucinated” by an AI chatbot is now facing both an investigation from the Law Society of B.C. and potential financial consequences.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that lawyer Chong Ke allegedly used ChatGPT to prepare legal briefs in a family law case at B.C. Supreme Court.

In reviewing the submissions, lawyers for the opposing side discovered that some of the cases cited in the briefs did not, in fact, exist.

Those lawyers are now suing Ke for special costs in the case.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[noogats]

ko-fi commission of clyde and pip!! he's teaching him how to be cool 😎

[hypertechnica]

for the electric dreams remake, all i care about is that edgar has the most obnoxious early 2000s internet aesthetic possible. i repeat, THE MOST OBNOXIOUS. 2 billion blinkies, terrible gradients, bad contrast, absolutely unreadable bullshit. if modern tech minimalism comes anywhere near that entire movie i’m going to throw up

[techboilers]

Elon Musk's custom ChatGPT in development, this is the real AI bot!

Elon Musk's custom ChatGPT in development, this is the real AI bot! #Chatgpt #ElonMusk

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has become one of the most popular artificial intelligence chatbots in recent times, thanks to its ability to answer questions, express opinions, write books, and even give medical advice. It is widely known for its advanced capabilities, which are continuously evolving as OpenAI works on improving the chatbot’s performance. Below is everything you need to know about…