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phriot t1_itrnoq2 wrote

As a recent anecdote: I was talking with some friends the other day. (College educated, but not my "STEM friends.") Someone had been required to let a subordinate go who couldn't handle a task that probably could be automated. This friend had to take over that job, in addition to their own, for no additional pay for the time being. I jokingly suggested that they look into having an AI language model do the work, instead. There were some questions, but no one really thought that the idea was that farfetched. A separate friend mentioned a few aspects of their field that they knew were automated by software.

I think a few years ago, this group would have taken the whole idea a lot less seriously. Today, they pretty much accepted that narrow AI could do a bunch of different things. The conversation didn't progress into discussing the impact on our actual jobs.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_itrs4b3 wrote

Was the job very text based? I'm surprised if not, most people associate AI today as text only, or drawing pictures.

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phriot t1_itrsxpx wrote

Yeah, much of what the person who got fired did was text-based, but not exclusively. When I mentioned that AI writes a lot of formulaic articles already, like with financial reporting, it sounded enough of the job was similar to that to save my friend a significant amount of time doing the second role work.

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