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OpenAI CTO: AI Could Kill Some Creative Jobs That Maybe Shouldn't Exist Anyway (pcmag.com) 88

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati isn't worried about how AI could hurt some creative jobs, suggesting during a talk that some jobs were maybe always a bit replaceable anyway. From a report: "I think it's really going to be a collaborative tool, especially in the creative spaces," Murati told Darmouth University Trustee Jeffrey Blackburn during a conversation about AI hosted at the university's engineering department. "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place," the CTO said of AI's role in the workplace. "I really believe that using it as a tool for education, [and] creativity, will expand our intelligence."
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OpenAI CTO: AI Could Kill Some Creative Jobs That Maybe Shouldn't Exist Anyway

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  • Guy who stands on your head and crushes it says "too bad!".

    • So will a "CTO" whose job is actually cheap PR.

    • Then that guy will end up in your place and realize that he isn't capable of replacing a light bulb - and that goes for the AI so everyone has to crap in the dark from now on.

    • What is a "creative job"? Sounds dumb.

      • Um.

        People who design signage. People who make usable UIs because coders generally suck at it. People who shape that cool vehicle you like (and the one you don't, but that's someone else's dream). People who create attractive, useful and energy-efficient office buildings. People who design the look of sets of exterior door hardware so your house doesn't look like a dump. People who make comprehensible roadmaps. People who photograph things you can buy in catalogs.

        Need I go on? Really?

        • People who make two minute discussions into two hour meetings that accomplish nothing. People who âoecreateâ by leeching off of the one actual artist in the department. People who are âoeidea menâ who mostly just use whatever they saw on MySpace when they were a teenagerâ¦

          • None of these jobs are going to be endangered at all by "AI". Image generators are massively automating "creating by leeching off of actual artists".

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • accountants

    • Guy who stands on your head and crushes it says "too bad!".

      More like he says, "Your head really should have been flat to begin with."

  • by The Cat ( 19816 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @09:18PM (#64568319)

    There's a 43% chance you have at least one full time HR employee at your company who gets paid to post fake jobs.

    At least the creative employee produces something.

    • Dude the company is rapidly growing there's a 100% chance they're posting fake jobs. They want as many H1Bs as they can get and they want the investors to think they are rapidly hiring up.
    • I've never worked at a company like that, even the big one I worked for. The HR department there had and I hear from friends still has a rich and interesting variety of much worse problems. All centering around making more work for everyone else and inserting themselves everywhere so they are the ones who get the final say, and get to make the processes. For some reason not fake job ads. Probably because there is no mechanism for them to lord their power over people they see daily.

      Is that a job which should

  • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @09:22PM (#64568323)

    Oh so clever to get the outrage farmers to jump on you and give you free publicity, while investors will read it and lap it up ... gotta make Sam rich.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @09:32PM (#64568335)
      A massive number of jobs is about to go away and he's starting up a narrative that that's okay because those people deserve to have their jobs go away.

      It's the same technique we use to underpay Walmart employees and fast food workers to the point where they can't keep a roof over their heads. It's pretty run of the mill class warfare.

      It works too. Half the people here have at least one time in their lives convinced themselves that somebody has a four-year degree in underwater basket weaving even though it was literally nothing more than a community college class teaching a basket making technique American Indians used to use to board housewives...

      It is super easy to turn working-class people on each other
      • by dvice ( 6309704 )

        > starting up a narrative that that's okay because those people deserve to have their jobs go away

        That is not true. OpenAI CTO talked about jobs, not people. What people deserve is a different story, but any job that can be automated, should be automated, and those who disagree, also reject washing machines, farming machines etc. as those are already taking away jobs.

        Yes, automating jobs will cause suffering to some people, but that happens only because our society is build that way. Majority of those pe

        • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          The difference here is that the washing machinesand the farming mahince ( at least to some extent) took away peoples jobs many decades ago, so they don't threaten the jobs of people thst are in employment today, but ai mey, an will in any cases, at least a decade from now. Or said another way person thst lost their job decades ago, = not my fing problem, tech that might just cost me my job down the line = kill that thing now, it's dangerous
        • so that he can make it seem less personal and less likely to affect you.

          He's also taking it for granted that our society is built this way. Go to YouTube and look up some videos about video game layoffs by the Jimquisition show. They explain it better than me.
      • So if you go through social media you'll expect that narrative to be repeated? Instead of everyone being outraged?

        I'm not even going to check ... it's all outrage. That's what they were trolling for, outrage ... except from investors, who hear this and see dollar signs. The outrage gives them free publicity to reach investors.

      • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday June 22, 2024 @04:49AM (#64568729) Journal

        A massive number of jobs is about to go away and he's starting up a narrative that that's okay because those people deserve to have their jobs go away.

        The guy's a psycho.

        Jobs do go away and it sucks. I remember meeting an unemployed former PCB layout guy, who's job was replaced with cheap and effective CAD software (which I was using at the time). It was a good technician job you could get, but like a lot of technician jobs, not transferable. The march of time overran him, and I wouldn't go back to the way it was (not like I could have afforded to pay someone to do the work), but it sucks.

        He certainly didn't deserve to lose his job, he just got unlucky and picked the wrong technical career, which got utterly wiped out 30 years after he started. He deserves a job every bit as much as this asshat CEO.

        An speaking of which this kind of thing always goes hand in hand with shitting on people on benefits as useless layabouts (though the actual shitting is usually outsourced to useful idiots). Even though the cries from the unemployed masses are never "give us money2 but "gives us jobs".

        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          The problem is that the LLM is not going to invalidate too many jobs. It's a hype cycle. The bottom is going to fall out eventually. This dude is trying to delay that day a bit.

          • by west ( 39918 )

            > The problem is that the LLM is not going to invalidate too many jobs.

            My worry is that LLMs will replace a ton of jobs, but very badly.

            However, price will, as always, end up more important than quality.

            What will suck will be the several decades where you won't be able to buy quality, even if you are willing to pay for it, because the infrastructure to supply quality will have entirely disappeared.

        • Pick the wrong career three times in a row. Once is concerning, twice as a tragedy but three times and something's going on behind the scenes.

          There's a business inside or article that links to a study showing that 70% of middle class jobs were lost to automation.

          At no point did I say what the solution I had to the problem of automation was you just inserted The idea that I would ban automation Amish style.

          What's crazy is people can't even imagine a solution to the problem other than Amish style t
          • Pick the wrong career three times in a row. Once is concerning, twice as a tragedy but three times and something's going on behind the scenes. There's a business inside or article that links to a study showing that 70% of middle class jobs were lost to automation. At no point did I say what the solution I had to the problem of automation was you just inserted The idea that I would ban automation Amish style. What's crazy is people can't even imagine a solution to the problem other than Amish style technological regression. Any other solution is basically off the table. You can't even think about it much less suggest it. It's so far outside the Overton window it might as well be halfway to the Andromeda Galaxy

            We could try that society thing that all the kids rave about. You know, where we build a community that's primarily focused on making sure everyone is at least up to "have a safe home and decent food" baseline before making sure that the biggest gorilla in the room gets his extra banana? NAH! That could never work! How would the C suites survive on one less billion dollars? They might have to cut back to only three summer homes and six yachts!

        • PCB layout guy "just got unlucky and picked the wrong technical career, which got utterly wiped out 30 years after he started"?

          Unlucky? Tell that to bitcoin/blockchain bros whose "skills" devalued within 2 years, now that the bubble burst.
          I think that's pretty lucky to be active in the same field for 30 years probably has transferable skills and having made good money.

  • About that.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @09:35PM (#64568341)

    "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place" the CTO said

    Must be nice to casually dismiss the livelihoods of an entire trade, knowing full well that you'll be immune from the initial fallout.

    Fucking scumbag.

  • These "AI" systems could eliminate plenty of bullshit jobs, and bring about some lovely efficiencies, but then instead getting very little for what we pay these folks, we would get nothing at all and still have to pay them. Not to mention the impact of additional "idle hands..."

  • by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @10:04PM (#64568367) Homepage Journal

    I know it's a nitpick, but the school is quite sensitive to being Dartmouth College, not University. It's the only college in the Ivy League.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I know it's a nitpick, but the school is quite sensitive to being Dartmouth College, not University. It's the only college in the Ivy League.

      Don't mean to point out the obvious, but I’d be more embarrassed over any association with an “Ivy League” these days. Won’t matter what they call themselves when CEOs are starting to view that particular level of “education” as an expensive joke at best, and toxic for a workplace at worst.

      The coddled cash cow era enabling liberals to get cheap money to hire thousands of their pointless liberal friends, is over. Gonna be a bitch for certain liberal institutions to conti

  • by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @10:08PM (#64568377)
    It sounds like you he could be replaced by an AI, unless of course he already has been. He and AI are both really good at making meaningless statements in too many words.
    • Is Mira Murati a she or a he or an it? I am not sure which pronoun Murati prefers. Statistically speaking, Murati appears like a she.

      • Mira Murati is most definitely a she.

        Itâ(TM)s hilarious reading all of the responses from slashdot readers who just automatically assume the CTO is a dude. They obviously know very little about the company, and probably even less about OpenAI as a company, or even AI, for that matter.

      • Basically nobody (with 8 billion humans there may be someone) goes by "it". Non binary people use "they". Unless you were being intentionally cruel to non binary people rather than just ignorant.

        • Oh, I have come across people (actually just one) preferring to be addressed as 'it'. The person said, "it" hated the whole male, female, sex, reproduction and all of that. So just wanted to be addressed as 'it'.

          • by nasch ( 598556 )

            See I knew someone would! But unless a person specifies that's how they want to be addressed, it's quite rude.

      • In Standard English, a person of unknown sex is referred to as he. This may be sexist, but it is the standard. People have been trying to create alternatives for some time without any real acceptance.
  • by JBMcB ( 73720 )

    AI can't do much worse than those stock photography companies selling pictures of people holding soldering irons by the tip.

  • by pixelpusher220 ( 529617 ) on Friday June 21, 2024 @10:23PM (#64568389)

    Disruptive tech disrupts, news at 11.

    Buggy whip makers still had a market after the car, just *significantly* smaller.

    Skilled content creators will still have a place, but vast swaths of simple copy will become AI created. It's not going away.

  • Elon Musk recently said [cnn.com] AI will take all our jobs and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly some CTO jobs don't need to exist anyway. I wonder how Mira Murati will feel when it's her job's turn to go? I'm guessing she'll won't be happy about it.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      I wonder how Mira Murati will feel when it's her job's turn to go? I'm guessing she'll won't be happy about it.

      Maybe wont care that much. When you're making millions for the years leading up to it you have a lot more options on what to do next when your job goes away. The people making much less are the ones who will be scrambling to figure out how to keep a roof over their heads.

  • AI as it exists now, isn't creative.

    All these systems are doing is sorting through existing data, and occasionally, creating a new correlation. But they're not creating information-- they're just regurgitating existing information.

    The risk is that people think AI is creative-- but an AI won't look at a falling apple and deduce gravity. It will faithfully reproduce Newton's ideas, but it's not going to come up with an original idea. Any creativity is solely within the purview of the person creating the pr

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      > But they're not creating information

      AlphaFold2 created protein structure predictions for 200 000 000 proteins (one protein prediction used to cost 200 000 dollars when done by scientists):
      https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/ [ebi.ac.uk]

      While technically it is not creating information as the proteins already exist in the nature, it did make it visible for the researchers.

      But AlphaFold3 will change this, as it will create new drugs that might have never even existed. They are expecting that we will start seeing new drugs in

      • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

        Oh, absolutely AI is incredible for sorting through existing information and finding correlations. It has the potential to revolutionize many fields, including medical research, pharmaceutical research, materials research, and as you say, mathematics.

        It is, in the terms of Thomas Edison, the 99% of invention-- "perspiration", ie, hard work. What's lacking is the 1% of invention, "inspiration". Take the original incandescent light bulb-- Thomas Edison wasn't the first to pass a current through a filament

      • So an AI/LLM trained on protein folding data has exactly the same Harry Potter Magic Wand infallibility as a "creative" oriented AI/LLM trained on truly random unfiltered crap scraped off sketchy websites all over the world.

        You're astounding. You really believe that AI is magic pixie dust that turns garbage into gold and silver, as long as you start with enough garbage and a quetta-ronna-yotta-zetta-exa-petta-terra-giga-mega pixieflop per microsecond superduper computer.

        (If you're interested I know a Nige

      • by Misagon ( 1135 )

        That's still not being creative.

        "Deep learning" AI models is just refinement of big data science: finding correlations in large data sets.
        The creative part here is still the human that has gathered and preprocessed the data and instructed the data inference engine to look for certain types of correlations and then to apply the found correlations to make new drugs.

        Similarly, the creative entity for a generative AI model, is the person who created the generative AI model: not the user or the model.

      • Alphafold is good but

        https://biosciences.lbl.gov/20... [lbl.gov]

        But AlphaFold3 will change this, as it will create new drugs that might have never even existed. They are expecting that we will start seeing new drugs in 2 years.

        No, it will not. It will propose new molecules based around structures. Someone then has to figure out how to synthesize those reliably, purify them and deliver them in metabolically useful amounts. Then test them in mice. Then humans, and make sure they (a) still work and (b) don't have side e

    • This conversation is like the question of whether a submarine swims. It doesn't matter. If an AI can produce an output of sufficient quality to replace a human worker, the executive team is not going to mind if it's "not actually creative".

  • A lot of pop media is far from creative
    Much of pop music is based on simple, familiar forms. It needs to sound like what the consumers are used to and comfortable with. Real creativity is often hated. People booed and walked out of the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. People hated the Eiffel tower. Frank Zappa had a small following, even though he was a once in a century musical genius

    AI is the ideal tool to create Spiderman 25 or the next pop hit

    • ...any mention of Frank Zappa deserves a response...
      I stumbled on some youtubes of Zappa on the .. Phil Donahue Show, I think... playing a *bicycle*... fun times with Frank explaining stuff... it was a black and white video clip, so I'm thinking early 1960. I'm not sure if you were quoting, but he said pretty much exactly that. ummmm ... 60 years ago!

      The wheels fell off pop music creativity with automation .. about 30-20 years ago. There are references out there... I've read articles, WaPo probably, with ac
  • You know, all that junk blurb designed for SEO that's all over the internet. They used to pay humans to do it but now LLMs can do it faster & cheaper. There's also image generators but they're not so good at fooling people.

    That's a job that can vanish tomorrow & nobody, except the copy writers, would notice. I suspected it's already reducing quickly, i.e. getting 1 copy writer to write the same volume of copy as 10.
  • I have seen a lot of anger brewing out there in artists', writers',musicians' and coders' communities.

    Some creative could kill CTO for an AI that maybe shouldn't exist anyway.

  • When they say 'creative jobs' they mean fun jobs - jobs that jealous types wish they could do. Humanity doesn't need those jobs - humanity needs tedious, soul-crushing work that feels like work!
    • by Phact ( 4649149 )

      Ha ha, so true, as one who has had creative jobs, i used to have a saying: "everyone wants to finger paint".

  • I can't think of many creative jobs that shouldn't exist.

    Jobs that I can think of that shouldn't exist include a LOT of middle management and non-functional executives. Neither of those strike me as creative!

    The nearest to those that is are the people who think up those positions!

    • A lot of middle management exists because of other jobs that shouldn't exist. I ended up in middle management at my last job (I'm now working for much less pay and makin' shit). I had a quite big team (30 odd people), and figured it was my job to make my team as productive as possible.

      In the context of the company it's a job that needed to exist. But most of the job was fighting against the company bureaucracy trying to make sure people and the resources they needed, didn't have to spend too long doing poin

      • by west ( 39918 )

        Why was there a purchasing department who just crapped up ordering computers at a glacial pace? Why was the accounting so fucked that getting a $2000 workstation was a massive mission...

        Sadly because companies that don't have the mind-numbing bureaucracy occasionally cease to exist. Much of the content of the building code is useless, except for preventing the 1 in a 1000 event that cause the building to collapse. Is it useless expense for the other 999? Yes. But the value in many of these annoying safety measures is what we never see them prevent.

        Of course, it's absolutely natural that protective measures end up bloated by self-protecting bureaucracies, but when assessing why do stupi

        • Yeah I'm not going to pretend I'm an organisational wizard. Bureaucracy is how humans organise things at scale. Scaling is always sub linear and so large organizations are necessarily inefficient.

          Also no one sets out to build an insane system.

          With that said, the place was unusually dysfunctional for a company of its size. Leadership bragged about it being dynamic and flat and so on, but it was often get hard to get things done. No budgets were ever given out to managers. Instead one had to enter into a mora

          • by west ( 39918 )

            There's an extremely valuable skillset in knowing how to navigate the bureaucracy in a particular company (one I've never managed to acquire), and I'm often in awe of those in my company that appear to possess it. They are, indeed, very valuable to the company, especially if they're in management positions. It's sad that often this skill isn't acknowledged above, but that would be admitting that the bureaucracy may be necessary, but it's a big productivity drag.

            (I'm fine understanding why we have costly i

  • odd that because the one thing AI really could replace is whole swathes of CEO jobs but it wont
    • odd that because the one thing AI really could replace is whole swathes of CEO jobs but it wont

      Best not to assume.

      The days of Boards getting cheap money to sustain half a dozen bloated CxO egos may be getting quite competitive when the AI-driven competition isn’t pissing away millions on paychecks, bonuses, and sexual harassment lawsuits, while The Machine makes business decisions instead of political ones.

  • No way that an AI can draw something that ugly!

  • Insensitive, sure.

    Wrong?

    Well, okay, wrong too, because it's poorly worded, lol. Obviously before a tool existed to replace them, the jobs needed to exist.

    But if a tool now exists that can crank out your "creative" output, without you, then ... well, your job will need to at the very least change, if not cease to exist.

  • by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Saturday June 22, 2024 @10:17AM (#64569091) Homepage
    Oh dear AI is going to replace jobs? Who would have thought that. AI will replace a lot of jobs just like many automations replaced a lot of jobs. Society should have already had a system in place which would make sure people don't have to work for being able to live (housing, clothing, healthcare and food). Now a big group will gave to undergo more problems due to society not having reacted in time. AI and general purpose robots will take a lot of jobs within the next 20 years, and no jobs will return in place of those.
  • Murati is welcome to resign right now. AI will take care of things.

    BUT, if OpenAI is unable to do the easily regurgitable job of CTO, it should be fired for incompetence anyway.

    I hear Sam Altman is smart. Kinda like Elon was said to be smart.

    Clowns to the left of me... Jokers to the right...

    Please send fifty billion dollars so I can stay motivated.

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