<\/p>\n
In his thread, Mims makes the case that the \u201ctheoretical capability\u201d of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. \u201cWe introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily,\u201d the researchers write. This is based in part on the \u201cAnthropic Economic Index<\/a>,\u201d which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January<\/a> that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include \u201cComplete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines,\u201d \u201cDraft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications,\u201d and \u201cBuild, debug, and customize web applications and websites.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Not included in any of Anthropic\u2019s research are extremely popular uses of AI such as \u201ccreate AI porn\u201d and \u201ccreate AI slop and spam.\u201d These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. Researchers appear to be too squeamish or too embarrassed to grapple with the fact that people love to use AI to make porn, and people love to use AI to spam social media and the internet, inherently causing economic harm to creators, adult performers, journalists, musicians, writers, artists, website owners, small businesses, etc. As Emanuel wrote in our first 404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis<\/a>, people love to cum, and many of the most popular generative AI websites have an explicit focus on AI porn and the creation of nonconsensual AI porn. Anthropic\u2019s research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the \u201cgood\u201d uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for. (It may be the case that people are disproportionately using Claude at a higher rate for more traditional work applications, but any study on the \u201clabor market impacts of AI\u201d should not focus on the uses of one single tool and extrapolate that out to every other tool. For what it\u2019s worth, jailbroken versions of Claude<\/a> are very popular among sexbot enthusiasts).\u00a0<\/p>\n This post is for paid members only<\/p>\n Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.<\/p>\n