> "If it takes me 30 seconds to fire off a prompt that has potential to benefit me it's worth it regardless of the 2 minutes of work it creates for a dozen people" scaled to all of society.

People love this stuff if it benefits them. It even gets cheered on when the receiving end can be reduced to something disliked, like a big corporation or a bureaucracy.

There was a startup that would fight traffic and parking tickets for you and everyone loved the idea. Until, that is, you realize that the company is doing automated requests to jam up your local government systems with extra work. The ticketing agents and government workers who have to put in extra time on these cases don't really care because it's no different than any other work. In some cases they might be able to get some overtime.

The real losers are people who have legitimate complaints who get backlogged behind a thousand automated requests from people who asked ChatGPT to try to fight something for them.

Then later, we all lose when the only way to contest things is to go to a physical location in person and prove that it's you trying to do it, not the bot.

Already seeing this with job applications, too: Apply for a job and you'll be mixed in with 1000 automated submissions. Do the interview remotely and they'll be wondering if you're cheating. Now you have to fly on site for middle interview stages to prove that it's you, not a bot, who can answer the questions.

> I don't think people are ready for the amount of work AI agents are going to be creating for real humans.

Funny story about that. I joined a hackerspace/makerspace called Denhac. A guy wanted to make a prop for a Escape from L.A. costume, Snake's countdown timer on his wrist. ChatGPT told him to go to Denhac (the Denver hackerspace) for help making it!

My friend told him to talk to me since I knew about hobby electronics (think Ben Eater projects etc). At first I thought I was just going to teach him how to multiplex the digits of the 7-segment LEDs but I ended up just doing it all myself for a couple weeks. I sourced and bought the parts (Arduino Pro Micro USB-C, 7-segment displays, and some other small parts; he supply a credit card sized USB-C battery pack to power it). After trying it out on breadboards first, I was going to wire it up on a protoboard but it was giving me trouble, so I designed a PCB, and ended up ordered it from a couple different places, because it wasn't clear when the ones from overseas would arrive due to tariffs. I also designed and 3D-printed a case and spray painted it to look metallic, as well as green lighting gel (clear plastic) for the display. It came out pretty cool! But they totally nerd-sniped me to work on that.

Also, the thing you mentioned about AI creating work for humans instead of humans using it as a tool is what Corey Doctorow's book about "reverse centaurs" is about.

Since the robocall tsunami of the 2020s, people stopped answering phone calls entirely.

The same thing might happen to the entire internet.

AI agents create works are great from a consumer side.

Big companies has been using this to create frictions to disincentivize people for things they should deserve or the law requires them to do.

For example, cancel Gym membership, dealing with Xfinity/ATT jack up your pricing, applying for all different low income programs in the USA.

If companies can make you talk with AI, I should be able to use AI to talk with them.

I see a future where AI is banned to avoid that situation. If AI creates too much work and ends reducing advanced countries output then something will need to be done.

Individually, AI helps me to be more productive. But, as you point out, at society level makes everybody less productive. So, I have no incentive to stop. Nobody has. Only if we all agree to stop using it then it works. A tragedy of the commons problem.

And AI becomes the only way to handle the deluge - the system insists upon itself.

This is why it's virtually impossible right now to hire (a billion fake/BS applicants) _and_ to find a job (good luck standing out in aforementioned flood, _plus_ there's AI spammed posts that aren't even for real jobs), or to connect with someone via cold email (swamped).

The US political "flood the zone" strategy is being applied to anything an agent can interact with.

On the upside, maybe some people will realize just how much trash we already were swimming in before it became economical to produce.

Like, if you pay attention to American politician bribery scandals, I think most people come to the conclusion: how fucking cheap are American politicians? They'll take a fucking hamburger to screw over their constituents.

Except most people aren't mass spammers, and most people aren't actually heard most of the time, and most of our systems are actually set up to make sure this continues to be the case.

How about AI will show us where we are intentionally underfunding things we have promised people?

quote requests are about to skyrocket

Sounds like the AI job apocalypse won’t happen, we’ll have plenty of Bullshit Jobs available to fix AI mistakes.

I'm applying for jobs right now all of them requires some sort of AI-familiarity.

Now I am being spammed with "AI-assessments" which are actually attempts to steal time/effort and train ai agents. This industry is infuriatingly stupid.

Hacker News has also served as the ticketing system for more than one angry blogger who needed to get attention from the right engineers

"Better not hear any complaining from you, be a shame if something were to happen to your app submission…"

>Immediate lifetime ban before taking even a single action

This actually sounds like a fun way to manipulate these large companies...

Put together a set of stolen credentials that contain business owners and other people that are likely to make these companies money.

Then use that information and bots to get them permanently banned from the platform. You'd have to do it somewhat slowly, but eventually it would start adding up to real damages.

The gig companies that are _directly_ people's occupation are the same way. Support actually emphasizes that they cannot actually do anything every time I call them. They actually say those words.

Capitalism cannot solve this problem. If I can get free support for my business why shouldn't I?

There was a time that reputation damage could counter valance that. But, nowadays, what the average working calls thinks does not matter because money is not on their side. Most money is in the super-rich pockets, and they are the ones that profit from abusing society. Until that is solved, I see a painful future for any people willing to give their own time for free.

>Just because these businesses don't charge you a fee doesn't mean they shouldn't be customer support

Isn't there customer support for their actual customers, who buy ads?

So can vandalizing public property. which is apparently how big tech companies feel when you try to enjoy yourself on the platform instead of simply consuming their slop.

Well of course, the entire budget is being spent in tokens not hiring competent people.

> for support, ask on StackOverflow!

Just a euphemism for "we have no customer support". In fairness, it's a more helpful suggestion than just a customer support stonewall.

Some companies had employees monitor their company's Stack Overflow tag. I think Stripe did that. I probably benefited from that at least a few times, which, in those moments of need, would have been quite helpful.

At pre-AI scale, StackOverflow was largely able to handle this traffic-flow. It was a bit frustrating for everyone, but that was kind of the norm on SO. Ultimately, a lot of support questions did get answered and the AIs trained on that, so when it's not telling you to email journalists you can thank SO for the tech support ChatGPT gives.

Random people that you're expecting to look stuff up for you aren't customer support; they're comparable to 404 Media, except they don't even make a living from views. They're simply random people that you're taking advantage of.

People linked you to lmgtfy because they were saying you were lazy or stupid, not because they weren't going to support their products. They hadn't sold you anything.

I know it's falling out of fashion, but some people still care about things other than making money.

I don't see the author complaining about it, instead he thought it was an interesting story. So I guess he already did that.

I have my business email read first by an LLM, I imagine someone who works at a tech-oriented website does too so those emails are basically filtered into a pile anyway.

Leads for what? Restoring Meta accounts?