π Newsletter #012 - AI + Job Market = Cognitive Dissonance
β¨ In This Edition β¨
- π Short-Form Content: AI & the job market: The cognitive dissonance of "Oh no, recent grads used AI in college!" vs. "New hires will absolutely be required to use AI once on the job"; Job applications from people that aren't real; and why is replacing human labour with AI so expensiiiiiive π©
<insert crocodile tears here> - π Good News!: Librarians are still cool; AI overview opt-out is becoming a thing; and lawsuits may be happening.
- π― The Post-Script: Reading Karl Bode's excellent piece on how the AI Hype Reckoning is Upon Us.
Mashup of two images by Markus Winkler & Tyler Prahm on Unsplash, cropped & glitched.
π Short-Form Content
Chatbots ("AI")
- Damned if you do, damned if you don't: Bosses are "horrified" as "AI native" grads hit the workplace. Only to then, uh, require them to tokenmaxx once they've been hired, as they will be ranked among their peers in terms of how much they prompt the chatbot? Make it make sense. That's cognitive dissonancemaxxing, if you ask me.
- Oh look! Another thing the people have to fight: Meta plans on building its first Canadian data centre in Alberta, north of Edmonton. In a fine piece of "CEO Said" journalism, the slop factory is expected to "generate more than 3,000 construction jobs and support 300 permanent positions once operational" and "deliver roughly $250 million each year in provincial benefits through royalties, taxes, levies and fees." Great! And we'll probably totally still have a clean water supply and somewhat affordable power and all that.
- AI leaders are suddenly changing their tune on jobs. Hmmm. Maybe the grandiose "promises" (threats?) that AI boosters made vs. the job market were all just.... part of the ploy!? (Recommendation: Cory Doctorow's new Book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, which sheds a lot of light on the motivations & economics behind AI boosterism.)
- As if finding a job in tech (or anywhere else, really) wasn't already tough enough, job postings are now being flooded with applications from applicants that do not exist. You read that right. Not embellished CV's, not candidates letting Claude dream up that they've been power users of Claude since the early 90's - nope. Fake or "borrowed" identities, deep fake interviews, the works. Putting booby traps into your job postings (like "candidate must be able to eat two tons of Belgian chocolate every day") may be one way in which to combat this.
- I had to do a double take to ensure I wasn't reading a Beaverton or Onion headline: "CEO Pleads With AI Industry to Stop Charging So Much to Replace Human Labor." "With each passing day without an AI labor revolution, the tech industryβs pricing scheme for AI is becoming more and more disconnected from reality β so much so that even its biggest clients are starting to revolt." Oops!
- Here's Ed Zitron once again hitting the nail on the head:
"Everything must be done faster, with less people, with less organizational support, but more use of a tool best known for its hallucinations and ruinous cost, which you must use a lot, but also not too much. However much you use it, you must constantly celebrate it for fear a cult of personality and mediocrity will isolate or fire you for the crime of not wanting to 'Do AI'."
- Also this toot by user jcoglan:
"LLMs have taken steve jobs' "a computer is a bicycle for the mind" and replaced it with driving a huge american pickup truck to the corner store that's a five-minute walk away"
Non-Chatbots
- The European Union is telling Meta to implement big changes to Facebook and Instagram, including disabling autoplay and infinite scroll, or there may be big fines on the horizon. This comes on the heels of a preliminary finding that some current features may be addictive, contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsory use.
- Side note! If you'd like a primer on the vicious cycle that keeps people "engaged" on legacy algorithmic media, hop on over to Feeding the Fire: Psychology, Engagement, and Algorithmic Media.
- If you're using a chat app, which you probably are, give this article on Encrypted Messaging a read. Not all encryption is created equal, and for some chat apps, you actually have to take some steps to enable encryption. If you're not sure what encryption even is, the article gives a quick intro to that too!
π Good News!
- Librarians in Maine are helping their patrons resist AI and Big Tech, for example by helping folks realize that they do not have to use the devices the way they came out of the box - especially as "out of the box" often includes "helpful" AI assistants being shoved under our collective noses at every turn:
βA lot of times, itβs just telling people that they have choices,β Library Director Steven Brown said. βTheir phone came a certain way, but they donβt have to use it the way that it came. [...] I really try to make sure people not only know where to tap or click to get done what they want to do, but to understand the values and issues at play as theyβre using different pieces of technology,β she said.
- In the UK, press publishers can now opt-out of Google's AI Overview while staying represented in search results.
- This is partially good and partially bad news - bad news because we live in the kind of world that needs/precipitates this sort of thing, good news because we're seeing glimpses of potential accountability: Meta is staring down $1.4T in lawsuit over teen mental health β one of the largest corporate penalties ever proposed.
- Meta was going to allow everyone to use your public Instagram photos for AI, but this has since been rolled back. I'd be shocked if this doesn't make a triumphant return in the future though, so - Pixelfed is very good, actually :)
- Remember that ChatGPT browser that OpenAI tried to make happen? Yeah, it's not happening.
π― The Post-Script
- Reading Karl Bode's excellent piece on how the AI Hype Reckoning is Upon Us. Here's a sample:
The sales pitch for AI is heavily predicated on the fact that this is all a profitable and sustainable venture that evolves into computerized sentience, and there's simply no evidence that's true. These models are all absurdly expensive to run, and the mad dash toward pseudo-productivity masked the reality that execs blew gargantuan wads of cash on negligible net benefit and a lot of chronic migraines.
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