AI Secrets is your weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on the AI jobs black market.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
AI Garbage In, AI Garbage Out ♻️ 🚮
Over recent weeks, the discussion around AI has slowly been shifting from 'will AI destroy society?' to a potentially more pressing issue: 'will society destroy AI?' Concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom have been fuelled by recent research confirming what many suspected: training AI models on AI-generated content leads to catastrophic failures known as 'model collapse'.
This is potentially great news for humans, as our precious input will still be required for a while yet, but now that the distant threat of full global unemployment has been allayed, attention is turning to more current concerns. A tremendous investigative piece by The Verge’s Josh Dzieza has cast a light on the shadowy network of task sites that is fuelling the current boom in Large Language Models, employing legions of underpaid foreign workers to annotate data for AI training. This isn’t just a reversal of the promised benefits of AI - the mooted jobs revolution is here, and it’s boring, confusingly abstract, offers no job security and is very poorly paid - but it also seems to run contrary to the needs of the AI firms, for whom quality training data is a must.
The Registerran a similar piece last week, interviewing a contractor who works on Google Bard’s training reinforcement program. He has described a harried working environment where staff are not afforded the necessary time to fact check Bard’s output. Given that Google’s parent company Alphabet recently saw $100bn wiped off its market value by one inaccurate Bard response, this may seem like a false economy, but old cost-cutting habits seem to be dying hard in Silicon Valley.
The big question is whether the tech industry can afford to continue using gig economy employment standards to reduce costs, given the obvious problems of doing so; a study last week from Swiss researchers at EPFL found that 40% of AI training work submitted on one of the most popular task sites bore the hallmarks of AI generation. It’s unsurprising that poorly paid workers fighting unrealistic deadlines are using AI tools to make their lives easier; It remains to be seen how surprising the consequences of this cost-cutting will be.
Meanwhile, AI continues to bring productivity gains for all, opening up new skills and opportunities in surprising areas. This week we’re looking at one of the most surprising of all; Adobe Photoshop’s remarkable new AI features, which have turned photo editing from a chore to a delight!
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A Time investigation finds that while Sam Altman was publicly calling for more regulation for the AI industry, he was privately lobbying the EU against more regulation for his own company, OpenAI.
The latest MCU series, Secret Invasion, has come under fire after its creators revealed they had used AI art in the show’s title sequence. Marvel is at pains to point out no human was replaced by an AI!
Meta has announced Voicebox AI, a text-to-speech model that the team at Meta claim is so good, they cannot release it publicly, for fear of “the potential risks of misuse".
The music industry has begun sending lawyers after AI Hub, the Discord server that trains its users in the arts of making audio deepfakes, and was responsible for the recent glut of fake Drake releases.
Superstar director Christopher Nolan is preparing to release his latest blockbuster, Oppenheimer, and has much to say about comparisons between the current AI hype boom and the nuclear arms race.
The Recording Academy has laid down the law: only “human creators” are eligible to be considered for the music industry’s most glittering prize, although there may be loopholes for AI collaborators.
