When OpenAI three years ago presented to Chatgpt To the world, millions of people asked themselves the same question: “Will IA replace me at work?“. The concern was not new. The labor history of humanity has been marked in recent centuries by the dispute between human production forces and mechanical production forces. An advance of the latter is interpreted without remedy as a defeat of the former.
The difference in 2022 resided in the social group object of the substitution. Before the advent of AI, the “automation“From work was one of economists’ great concerns. Millions of jobs would have lost themselves in industries as important as the car or oil extraction Fruit of the slow but inexorable incorporation of robots and other tool machines. Manual workers, blue collarthey would have seen economic and socially displaced.
The impact and severity of the “end of work”, as this debate became pompos, pompos It is in dispute. It is not clear That the incorporation of a robot supposes the end of work human. This was, however, an alien and even trivial issue for millions of workers white collarintellectual production, outside this kind of automation and substitutions.
The irruption of AI has resulted in a thousand data and a lot of confusion. There are several The studies They have tried Estimate the loss of jobs caused by Chatgpt and other chatbots. It is soon to reach drastic conclusions. Like some companies They are discoveringget rid of hundreds of workers Thanks to the AI forces act immediately to hire others in tasks that before They were not planned. This has been a constant pattern in the history of human labor substitution: technology kills some works, generates others.
The good, old days in which at least the horoscope still wrote it. (Unspash)
The fear of this process was immediate in the media. If we attend to the nature of the generative AI, this becomes evident without greater explanation. If ChatGPT is able to generate a coherent and well documented text in a handful of seconds, what need would the newspapers keep dozens of editors on the squad? It would suffice with a couple of editors on the shoulders of a handful of Prompts. You feed the AI with certain data, the kitchens and voilà: you have very cheap news.
It has happened and will continue to happen. Some media took advantage of their economic and business difficulties to make blur and new account: dismissing their editors and replacing them with an AI achieved a cheaper means. Also much worse. But this has not been the main function of AI in the journalistic environment. The danger did not reside in the “replacement”, but in something that has been afflicting the media (already their readers) for many years. In a tangible, real, not future problem.
In obsession with content.
Write my next news, chatgpt
It turns out that AI has not eaten our jobs. On the contrary, it has helped us to continue incurring the same perverse practices that we would incur before the arrival of ChatgPT: produce content at all costs, without discretion, covering all fronts and needs self -generated by ourselves. If the “content” was the biggest disease that afflicted the media industry, the AI has not worked as a cure but as a fentanyl: an addictive and accelerating drug, also mortal.
Thus, the reader has had to get used to all kinds of AI -related experiments.
The most obvious of all of them is futurology. What did many media did when a blackout left without electricity to the entire Spain? Open chatgpt, ask “when it would be the next blackout” and publish the answer as is on its website. Headlines as “What will be the date of the next electric blackout in the world, according to artificial intelligence” either “Neither in 2026 nor in 2030: the date of the next electric blackout worldwide, according to AI“They sneaked into the Google or Discover media module.
The point is that the content works.
The reader is interested in a complex event in real time and the media can produce quick responses at low cost. Another thing is that the answers are useful. Chatgpt hardly predict the unfathomable designs of a nonagenarian curia isolated in the Sistine Chapel, but that did not prevent the media from publishing things like “Who will be the next Pope according to the predictions of the chatbots of AI?” either “The prediction of artificial intelligence about who the new Pope would be“Deepseek, Perplexity and others gave Paraolin or Tagle favorites. That is, they didn’t even have the most remote idea of what they were talking about, they just regurgited.
Is the final of the Copa del Rey approaching? Using tools only slightly more sophisticated than the Paul octopus, we were able to illuminate holders as solid as “The AF forecasts the winner of the Copa del Rey between Madrid and Barça“. Are Google searches disturbed because the Christmas raffle arrives? There we went to look for answers in the chatbots:”What number will be the fat winner this year? The AI reveals it” either “This is the Gordo number of the Christmas Lottery 2024, according to the seers and the AI“(Kudos to the Herald for respecting the worthy trade of seers in front of the machine).
A very happy man discovers that he will touch the lottery according to AI. (Unspash)
The “according to the AI” search in Google News offers countless examples. We can discover How many years will pass XIV as Pope before saying goodbye to the world of the living; which The ideal work for each zodiac sign; how much money You need to charge Anyone to live without shocks; which The best town in Zaragoza to buy a house; or what is it LaLiga’s ideal eleven.
Of course, the most paradigmatic example of this whole process is war. The conflict between Iran and Israel He has aroused certain latent tensions in the planet’s psyche: do we succeed at a Third World War? We do not know, but in case there are means that have opened chatgpt and have asked. “This will be the date on which a global conflict could be triggered, according to AI“, promise us in 20 minutes or The sixth; while in The provinces or ABC offer us “The safest countries“In which to take refuge in the case of Third World War, according to AI.
In the hands of the media, AI is a glorified horoscope. Readers know it because, sometimes, as in this news of OK daily, the Prompt used by the editor To write the news, it sneaks into the ante.
Thanks for so much, Sam
As we see, the problem is not so much that AI has eaten our work: it has helped us to worsen it even more. The appearance of chatgpt and other chatbots has created the worst possible incentive system and has placed us in the time of horrors that predicted Gramsci: The old that does not end The time you will do in Bizkaia This summer according to AI.
It does not cease to have its comedy than one of the most technologies apparently sophisticated From our era it has ended reduced to the greatest communicative virus of our time: the content. It doesn’t matter what high intentions have a technology, always ends up “slop”videos of presidents converted into gigantic animals, cats participating in the Olympicthe disciples of Jesus Christ engraved with a mobile. Sam Altman can imagine a future where we describe lakes in Kazakhstan to feed millions of data centers and automate all our tedious tasks in AI; At the moment, we have a somewhat more glorified version of the Shitopsting.
If we have arrived here it is largely because of your fault. For Altman’s and for the rest of technological giants who have found in the “generative AI”, which not in AI, an easy and simple way to continue climbing their businesses and capturing investments. For the most part, the products that Silicon Valley has been developing three years around AI have only automated “content creation”. They have not even refined it. The utility that the media are giving to AI sprouts from the generative the AI defects as we know today.
Already in your discover feed.
And this It is something obvious in the limitations that OpenAI and the rest of the companies are finding in their way. When Altman predicted that general artificial intelligence would reach our lives In 2025 knew perfectly That was not possible. Chatgpt and the rest of chatbots They recruit investmentsefforts and infrastructure precisely in the class of platforms that move us away, do not approach, to the IAG. There will be no IG in 2025 and there will not be in its new Deadline, 2026simply because the immense resources mobilized by the technology industry They are not being allocated to it.
The priority, for the moment, is another. It is to achieve attractive products that manage to capture user subscriptions. OpenAi is in it, although at prices prohibitive. Other companies also. While we hope that IAG will free us and perhaps, who knows, in the future “replace” work, for now we have “slop”.
Consumption. Content. What we always wanted.
Image | Chatgpt
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