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I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse.

To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs.

A world where most marketing copy is written by mediocre AI, and more and more written and visual content are generated by big models that are technically impressive but intellectually hollow is going to be one where the quality of everything sucks just a bit more, but it's so cheap that it becomes pervasive.

(This trend is already apparent and not created by, or limited to, ChatGPT.)




> bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs.

This one really puzzles me.

Voice recognition replaced phone trees. And from what I can tell, it's just worse. In this particular use case I don't think it really replaced tier 1 support. Either I'm missing something that it's a lot better for some group(s) of people, or people adopted it because of promises that failed to materialize.


It exists to hide the fact that companies took a page out of Google's book and forewent customer service altogether.


This is more befuddling - they are replacing one automated system (button driven) with a worse automated system (voice driven). No one wins unless you still have a rotary phone.


The secret here is that for the majority of companies, the goal is not to support you as a customer effectively, but to rather minimize the amount of time spent organization wide supporting ALL customers. So to that end the automated systems are about frustrating customers to the point that they'll just "Go away" and the voice based systems are more frustrating than the button based ones, and infinitely more frustrating than actually talking to a human being who can actually help you, so it's a win for the majority of companies that just view customer service as a cost centre to be minimized, and it's a win for the SAAS companies that sell these useless, irritating and anti-consumer systems.


I've wondered why companies don't auction top places in line. If they're going to have people queuing, why not attempt to extract some money from them? Implementing such a system and selling it seems like a possible business idea for someone who believes this is a nicely utilitarian solution.


It doesn't matter that much because the human on the other side is not provided with the tools and information needed to help you.

Customer service, be it commercial or tech support, is always treated horribly.


I agree, I like it but a lot of customers will feel nickel and dimed even if they never pay for it.


Yes, it's what rfwhyte said. It's literally an externality to the company that people get inconvenienced for hours on understaffed phone lines and end up losing out on money, returns, support, etc. They benefit by reducing overhead and making the support innavigable (thus reducing successful returns/support overhead), you pay the cost with hundreds of hours of your life on hold.


A SaaS that sells voice-driven customer support wins.

A manager with misaligned incentives that reduced call center costs by 50% and got promoted also wins.


Phone trees are deliberately bad, so I assume voice recognition is deliberately worse. The goal is to frustrate nusance customers so that they give up.


What is so frustrating to me is how they could simply offer email/ticket based support so much easier and cheaper for most issues. And yet so many companies do not even have the option. I've been dealing with a home warranty company and they have an online portal where you can see the status of a claim. But if you click that you need help or to resolve an issue, it just gives you a popup to call their 800 number. Then you have to climb through a phone tree for 10 minutes until being told that they are experiencing higher than usual call volume and then wait on hold for 45 minutes. All for simple issues that could be handled through email. My only guess is that they don't want the paper trail of their terrible customer service.

It took a global pandemic for the California DMV to finally start an email ticket system. It is hands down so much better than going in to the DMV and has to be way more efficient for them. You simply fill out a form and you get an email with a ticket number. They respond within 3 business days asking you to send images of documents or whatever is missing. A comparatively pleasant experience.


> email/ticket based support

This would provide the customer with a written record which could be used against the corporation. Phone is generally favorable to the corporations because the corporation can decide whether/how to retain/destroy records, but the customer will almost never have a transcript or recording to use for their own evidence.

Many corporations have moved to a system where you can either call an automated line which does its best to make you hang up...or you can fill out a browser form which provides the customer no ticket/confirmation number/email/any record that you ever filled it out.


Time for legislation around this. Email support must be an option, and ticket confirmation record must be provided.


Pretty sure that it very noticeably results in lower costs. People often literally cannot figure out how to get through the voice recognition system to reach a human customer support person.

So the companies save money by then cutting the size of their call centers.


Agreed. These days though I tend to just mash 0 repeatedly and say the word "representative".


This is my default as well (although I use "talk to a human") but increasingly it results in the automated phone system hanging up on me if I dont at least navigate halfway through the bullshit first.


There've been some attempts at apps which navigate phone trees until they get a person or secure a callback for you. Not sure what the state of those is these days.


I just keep pressing 0 until a live person answers.


I once heard that in some countries you can just keep repeating "what" and they're legally bound to forward you to a human agent. Something about accessibility laws in case you don't know how to type numbers or can't understand what the voice wants (hearing aids or handicapped people)... Can't find the reference though.


Some months ago I was trying to setup a medical appointment for my dad when the robo-voice picked up I got frustrated and shouted "kurwa" (an universal swearword in Polish). The automaton responded "I understand, connecting you to our consultants".


That is amazing. I'm going to try this.


I think that's old fashioned. Newer systems I've dealt with just say "sorry, I can't understand you, please try again later" and hang up.


Related to this, I've had to call an airline and get told the queue is too long and to try calling back later. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea to implement because the queue will always be super long.


> Related to this, I've had to call an airline and get told the queue is too long and to try calling back later. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea to implement because the queue will always be super long.

It's 100% internal metrics.

When I was in the military, there was some metric that the clinic was graded on - I think it was number of days between when an appointment was made and when the visit happened. So the clinics just didn't allow unimportant people to make appointments more than 2 weeks out.


I’m happy enough if they just straight up say you’ll be waiting a while, and to press a button to get a call back when you reach the top of the queue.

Can get on with life until they ring you back then.


> get told the queue is too long and to try calling back later. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea to implement because the queue will always be super long.

A call deferred is a call denied.

Convincing the customer to give up is one way to reduce workload.

See also: automated systems that play a prerecorded message along the lines of "we're currently experiencing higher than normal call volume" regardless of how long wait times even are.


the best is when the queue is too long and they let you opt-in to being called back when it's your turn.


I double down and press 0 while shouting "Agent!"


there’s a rumour that cursing can also help you get to the operator (faster?). not sure how true that is, though


If too many people do that they will turn it off, just a few representatives cannot handle such inflow of requests. The problem is skimping on customer service personnel.

I could see it saying "I understand you want to reach customer representative", "Please select from these options while I connect you to a representative" while circling you around a graph of options or just automatically hanging up after 45 minutes to an hour of being on the call.


What you've described is something I've directly experienced. There are phone systems that will do just that when you ask for an operator.


Shouting "operator" or "I want to speak to a human" in your loudest, most karen-like voice, also seems to work.


"Representative! ... Representative! ... Representative!"


On the latest systems this often results in the automated system hanging up on you.


You should automate that.


This feature has nothing to do with lower costs and everything to do with the management chain in customer service taking a victory lap for adding voice recognition to the phone tree. Lowering cost is certainly how they justify it, and they also just get credit for being modern and keeping their systems up to date with current trends. The actual reality of whether it actually saves anything or has any positive benefit is immeasurable and irrelevant.


Both were pretty bad. Even when I know I want something that should be easy I often cannot find it. Thing like account balance are just to hard to get - and then instead of a balance they finally give me a long set of numbers that include balance, but also the last payment, last 10 charges... Thus making it take too long to get what I really want.


Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mean, not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor, all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors: now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents.

ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts, where great artists will be unaffected but making it nearly impossible for “good enough” artists to compete while also pushing up the floor of what is an acceptable competency level that merits being paid for making it more difficult for people to support themselves while improving their skills.


> Trading quality for price

Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example:

> not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor

If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible.

> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians

If you could afford to go to concerts.

> all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors

If you could afford to go to the theatre.

> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents

Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target instead of having to wear homemade; sure, not the same as a custom tailored suit, but good enough. Now they can buy digital recordings of world class musicians and theatre actors for much, much less than it would cost to see them live.

> ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts

That already happened decades ago, as soon as mass produced recordings became widely available. It's already next to impossible for any artist who isn't world class (or, more precisely, is not publicized so that people think they're world class) to make a living at their art. ChatGPT and the equivalent in other arts aren't going to affect that much.


> > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor

> If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible.

Or you bought clothes infrequently and maintained them, and they lasted longer because the quality was much better.

People are so used to fast fashion these days that they assume that the poor in previous eras suffered in this regard way more than they actually did, because people assume the poor quality of clothing today is representative of how it always was, rather than a recent phenomenon.

The quality of clothing was much, much higher - even for the relatively poor - and clothing wasn't treated as disposable, so people would maintain and repair it, so it would last much longer.

> Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target

Buying clothes at Walmart or Target is a step down, not a step up. (And ironically, it's not even necessarily cheaper!).

If we're talking about clothing, it's very clear that these trends have served to the detriment of the average person, not to their benefit. The ones who actually benefit are the ones capturing the profit - the Sam Waltons of the world.


You write like as soon as I put on a pair of jeans from Walmart it immediately begins disintegrating. It's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I've had relatively cheap clothes for years without having to worry about it very much.

And it's nice that when my clothes are stained or irreparably damaged I can afford to replace them quickly.


People still have high quality clothing available, but when given the option they choose to buy cheaper clothing more frequently rather than mend high quality ones.

This is a preference that has been demonstrated time and again throughout the world as it became an option.

So no, I don't believe it is clear at all how this is to the detriment of the average person.


> People still have high quality clothing available, but when given the option they choose to buy cheaper clothing more frequently rather than mend high quality ones. This is a preference that has been demonstrated time and again throughout the world as it became an option.

This is extremely incorrect. First of all, fast fashion isn't actually necessarily cheaper. The real difference is that fast fashion exists in an industry that has gutted the entire infrastructure for alternatives, so people actually don't have the alternative options anymore.

It's like saying that "people prefer to drive cars, which is evident if you look anywhere in the US". Sure, almost everyone drives cars, but that's because the previous rail infrastructure was literally ripped up and destroyed by the auto industry, so now there's no alternative.

If you look at the developing world, it's very clear how incorrect your statement is, because there, fast fashion is more expensive, and other forms of clothing are far cheaper, far better quality, and far more common.


I was never talking about fast fashion. There's a huge swath of clothing items between "dirt-cheap, disintegrating crap" and "high quality clothing".

Those articles of clothing I'm talking about are almost never worth mending, but they still can last for years.


> I was never talking about fast fashion. There's a huge swath of clothing items between "dirt-cheap, disintegrating crap" and "high quality clothing".

It's all fast fashion, just different points along the line.

Yes, broccoli and kale look different, and one is a fancier class signifier than the other, but at the end of the day they're still the same species.


> It's all fast fashion, just different points along the line.

So there's only high quality tailor-made clothes... and fast fashion?, of which there may be a spectrum that goes from something like "very fast fast fashion", all the way to "slow fast fashion"?

> Yes, broccoli and kale look different, and one is a fancier class signifier than the other, but at the end of the day they're still the same species.

So you're against... clothes? And possibly also agnostic when it comes to the existence of taste buds?

I'm sorry but your line of reasoning is making zero sense to me. This is getting to the point where I have to ask: Have you ever bought clothes yourself or does someone else buy them for you? Can you put into words of your own (without googling) what makes an article of clothing like a shirt not fast fashion?


Fast fashion is certainly cheaper for "fashionable" clothes. The market they are disrupting is a relatively small one. Cheaper clothing is available to everyone through stores like target, Walmart, or other department stores. And the quality is perfectly fine.


> Fast fashion is certainly cheaper for "fashionable" clothes. The market they are disrupting is a relatively small one. Cheaper clothing is available to everyone through stores like target, Walmart, or other department stores.

All of that is part of fast fashion - including Walmart and Target; it's just the lower end or very far down the pipeline. You can't separate one from the other, because they are economically codependent.

> And the quality is perfectly fine

Fast fashion is indubitably much lower quality, and it's weird to see people here denying that, when the fashion industry itself is completely in agreement about that fact. It's not a secret - they discuss it openly.


No one in the world ever bought a wardrobe at Walmart because they could afford to drop $20k at a tailor but chose not to cause Walmart is good enough.

They made econmic trade offs depending on their level of poverty.


Clothing today is low quality? I literally have jeans and shirts I bought from Walmart ten years ago in my rotation today. I would have more if my wife didn't keep getting rid of them...


I think you’re romanticizing the past. For 99% of human history, 99 of women had to make do with one I’ll fitting “dress” from teenage to death, including pregnancy


> Trading quality for price

> Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality.

There is also a feedback loop where automation puts people out of work, and even though it helps make products cheaper, it also creates less of a market for the products. Your post makes it seems like there are only positives.


Society was awash in music for centuries before recording and radio.


If by "awash" you mean "significantly less present in regular people's life by orders of magnitude", then yes.

Not to mention the degree of control over what music is actually being played.


I was thinking more along the lines of the rich traditions of folk music. I'm peripherally involved in the fiddle music scene, so I have some contact with this. The sheer quantity and variety of folk tunes, songs, and styles, is huge, and is probably the tip of the iceberg. This is why I think that people were rich with music, even if they weren't necessarily immersed in it 24/7. But cost wasn't a barrier to the enjoyment of music.

Sure, people with more disposable income could enjoy more formal, and perhaps more professional, musical performances. The growing middle class created demand for music and other forms of entertainment.

Music was taught in the schools. Even small towns had a bandstand in the park. Music was used in public ceremonies, including church. Any tavern was likely to have a musician, paid or not. Sometimes the pay consisted of food and lodging.


It wasn't significantly less present. Singing yourself was just a given. During work, at celebrations etc. It gave full control as well.


I guess IF I'm still alive in a few years too since I can barely afford eggs now. Do you have an AI replacement for food yet?


Yep. Recording and photography killed almost all the value (social and financial) of middling artistic talent in music, storytelling, and visual arts, which may well have been what gave a lot of people a significant part of their sense of self-worth before that—plus, maybe, some income.

Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.


That's an interesting set of transition that I hadn't really comprehended. People used to be entertained by live performers in their local area.

Printing, photography, radio, film, television, etc have all increased the availability and 'quality' of entertainment available at the same time as reducing the number of creators involved. (Obviously there is some debate possible around quality)


That kind of assumes people consumed the same amount of entertainment throughout history, which I don't think is correct.

It also assumes that they were constrained to local creators.

It is possible that people simply did other activities that don't involve a creator. Another possibility is that most people consumed content from a small set of non-local creators, like authors with wide distribution.


It's Vonnegut's observation. He brings it up in a couple books or stories, IIRC, but like nearly all his themes or messages, it's included in Bluebeard.

Being a half-competent folk musician or good storyteller or being able to sketch pretty well used to be super valuable to your family and community. Not so much anymore. Expressions of those sorts of skills are more often tolerated than genuinely looked-forward-to, now. The need is gone.

People on this site complain about folks being consumers and not producers, not being creative—well, for a large swath of the arts, that's where it started. Recording and photography. Took it from something that was strongly socially encouraged & rewarded to something private. You can't fix that with "maker" movements—not in any major way.

Technology changed the social context and wiped out the external motivation & encouragement for a bunch of kinds of creative expression that were accessible to & achievable by the masses. AI is more of the same.


Still many people are delighted if you offer them a drawing you made specially for them or if someone handles his guitar and begins to play.


On the other hand, this is a great opportunity for new artists to embrace AI and make a career out of it, instead of cowering in fear.

There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting.

AI dungeon is an text adventure where the content is AI-generated.

I also imagine tools similar to Github Co-pilot for other markets. Some AI could generate music or video games levels based on inputs from a user, then the user can take or modify the best bits. The goal hopefully being that they get something no human could have thought up, instead of just generating a bunch of mediocre content.


>There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting.

Hang on, AI tool? Joel Haver converts every frame manually. His method is the literal opposite of using an AI tool. It's incredibly painstaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo


Uh no. Did you watch the video you posted in full? He uses software called “ebsynth”. He draws over a couple of frames in a scene and feeds the rest to the software, which attempts to match the style. It’s not perfect, which is why you see some weird glitches in the videos.


Most people can't afford top talent to play live music at their wedding or photograph it.


I'm sort of sick of the top talent argument.

My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers.

My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming.

Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.


Exactly, that's my point. I'd rather listen to a "good enough" local band performing live than some "World's best" recorded performance.


Most people wouldn't and millions of the cds are sold from the most popular bands (world best is subjective). When it comes to live most people would pay 10x times more to sit 100x further away to see world class vs a cover band playing the same music.

This is going to push us back to making our own music like we use to. Singing/playing should be a fun group activity rather a performance given to a group of non performers. We are all artists.


I mean the whole concept of "world's best" in terms of art doesn't even make sense. It rarely, if ever, makes sense in other areas or fields as well. (even sports, where it is is sometimes objective, records and acheivements are broken all the time again and again)


Also have to consider the kicking of the ladder away. Nobody gets to excellent without passing through the lower stages. Hard to stay motivated if it'll be 5 years just to see if maybe you have something a computer can't offer.

Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.


This. How are people going to learn/become better if all the base work is being done by an AI.

Reminds of the Empire in Asimov's Foundation where they knew just enough to keep the current tech running, but not enough to fix it if something major breaks or create new tech.

When the AI breaks something, we will be missing the people who knew how all this s$%T works.


The Machine Stops eventually.


Reminds me of the guy who built his own os but took 17 years so the UI is terrible but a few years ago he finally finished. Someone will but that person isn't following a typical or even sane life and the results will be brilliant messes.


For a somewhat more "normal" example, see https://serenityos.org/. Started by one person, though there are many other contributors now.


Yeah but Terry had manic-depression, schizophrenia, and possibly God, on his side.


Reminds me of many great musicians


> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents.

No, they cost exactly as much as they always had. Before machines, people didn't have wardrobes full of tailor-made clothes. Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.


> Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.

Many, perhaps most, people don't have any tailor made clothes because they can't afford a tailor. Which has indeed always been the case. But before machines, people who couldn't afford a tailor had no other option for clothes except homemade. Now, with machines, they do.


That’s exactly what stavros is is saying.


Supporting industries losing economies of scale drives up costs. If you have fewer tailors, local cloth suppliers become insolvent. This leads to the few tailors having to import cloth and increase prices.


That makes sense, thanks. I guess the high end becomes slightly more expensive, while the low end becomes massively cheaper.


Closely related to Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease If one option becomes many multiples cheaper, anything that can't also get that cheap will almost inevitably rise in expense as a result.


I’m not sure tailored clothes have become more expensive at all. You can have a tailored suit for what, a couple of thousand? So 1-2 months of the average wage? That’s peanuts historically


> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors

well, no, you probably didn't listen to much music or see many stories at all because the average person couldn't afford to experience such things more than a few times in their life. shocking that Luddites are still a thing in the 21st century, especially here.


I think this misses the point that _everyone_ used to sing and tell stories. What do you all think families did in the winter around a fire? Where do "folk tales" come from? It's as if you think joy in sharing stories and music is restricted to a monetary transaction. Sure, some people were better story tellers than others, or more beautiful singers than others, but that gave reason for communities to exist, to share food and company; not for money, but because once you have shelter and food, what more than that do you really need? And also, without community, can you even have shelter and food? The vast majority of humans that have lived, let's say since spoken language developed, have shared stories and music as a gift. It wasn't until very recently (relatively) that sharing these things became transactional.

Sorry that was a ramble, please take no offense.


> more than a few times in their life

Whereas now we have the complete opposite problem, we're inundated by (much) lesser variants of these things to the point of saturation, addiction, and emotional depletion. I'm not sure either one of the extremes is particularly desirable, nor how acknowledging issues that mass-market consumerist societies currently visibly suffer from makes one a Luddite.


I think you'd be surprised at the degree to which the "little people" did experience live entertainment before the advent of mass market recordings. Festivals, traveling troubadours, other traveling performers...


Yeah, I guess all those groundlings standing around eating oranges and laughing at the dirty jokes at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare's day just didn't exist in this guy's universe.


It always amuses me when people on Hacker News use Luddite in the pejorative "caveman" sense of the word instead of the actual "skeptical of the societal drawbacks of advancing technology" sense, especially since people on this site like you effect an air of being so much smarter than the average pleb.


Subtitles got noticably worse now that their generation is often farmed out to AI, especially in translations.

Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.


And in return I can get subtitles on literally everything I want now instead of hoping the creator added them. I have no doubt that some places that were paying for transcription decided to go to AI/ML route but for every 1-2 of those there have have to be thousands of examples of subtitles existing where they never would have before.

I always have YT's subtitles turned on and while they aren't perfect they are way better than the alternative (none).

Network/Streaming TV/Movies should absolutely be paying someone to, at a minimum, clean up the first pass by AI and we should demand that but I'm not at all ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.


I have observed subtitles with mistakes that change the meaning to the exact opposite! On a video about the supply lines of components for a particular approach to fusion. Single word change which meant the CEO was saying his company wouldn't work. Are you sure you don't want to throw the navy out with the bathwater?


> the navy out with the bathwater?

I realise it is not good HN form to talk about the comment instead of adding to the conversation but the subtlety with which you injected this was brilliant.

I was ready to ignore the change as human error/typo until it hit me.

Point about AI driven subtitling very well made!


Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?


Sometime last year, someone published a guide on auto-generating subtitles using an emacs plugin and WhisperAI. A lot of anime release groups use it so they can get an English subtitled version of a show released a couple hours after it airs in Japan.

It's nice to have access sooner, especially for less popular shows that might never get any kind of release outside of Japan, but it's a lot worse then most fan subs and sometimes misses entire sections of dialog.


That scene has long had the "janky but really fast translation" niche and the "good but takes a couple of days" niche. From what little I experienced of the former, people who cared about translation quality probably weren't using it anyway.

I've been away from all that for rather a long time, so I don't know. Still, I'd guess these robo-subtitles are probably replacing the "fast and bad" niche. The "slow and good" niche seems like it could survive.


Looks like anime fansubbing scene has not changed much in the 30 years.

Back then there were multiple fansubber camps - notably Artic Animation which fell into "janky but really fast translation" releasing many shows and purist fansubbers who released maybe a few titles a year but with extremely high quality subs.

Then you had extremists who demanded no subs whatsoever and then those who preferred commercial dubs...


Lots of Chinese dramas with barely-parseable subtitles as well. Missing sections, and completely wrong contextual glosses, which are particularly easy to get horribly wrong in Chinese.


I've been getting the advice (but I'm learning German, not Japanese) that the best thing is to watch shows with subtitles in the foreign language to gradually acquire it.


Mostly videos I stream online. YouTube is a good example, but I've noticed an uptick in bad subtitles on other streaming platforms that stream content with higher production values.


I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.


The sad thing is, AI could be used in a clever way - have AI do the large amount of leg work in transcription, and have a human refine that.


Maybe. But at least today my experience is that AI podcast transcription with good audio is off enough that I only use it to check quotes or pick out short excerpts. If I'm going to publish a full transcription, I'll just have a human do it. Not clear to me if it's faster for someone who does that sort of thing to be making a lot of corrections as opposed to just transcribing--though it will get there.


English dubbed English subs are completely different, the subs (presumably) being translations of the original language instead of the dubs. It's very jarring and I can only imagine this getting better with AI.


I've been rewatching some Star Trek Voyager on paramount+ and there is no way a person did all the subtitles. It's like 98% accurate, I'll give it that. But there are enough glaring mistakes that there's just no way a person would have made those kind of mistakes and also they are easily catchable if a single person were to proofread.


Subtitle mistakes are very common. I have tons of DVD's from before AI. The subtitles have tons of obvious errors. I doubt they re-subtitled it, thought they may have run it thru a generic AI? They probably took whatever was there and just dumped it onto the service. Some are even more fun in that they will have 3 generations of subtitles all on one disc. The TV CC fit into the vertical blank, the dvd subtitle, and the for the hearing impaired subtitle. I usually go for the hearing impaired ones. As they seem to be the most accurate, and usually have a nice bonus of putting the text over/near the person who is actually speaking. Which is nice for when chars on the show overtalk each other. A fun touch was on the toy story ones they used the font from the title cards as the font for the subtitles.


Paramount+ sucks. If you try to play DS9 season 5 episode 1, it simply throws an error. So all legal option for watching that episode is gone.

(I’m almost ashamed I watch Star Trek so often that I know this offhand…)

The subtitles are literally the worst, short of being incomprehensible. Like so bad that until someone experiences them, you can’t really grok how terrible they are. They’re a solid D minus.

Maybe it‘s an iOS thing. But every so often, the positioning codes sneak in to the subtitles themselves, so you start seeing x,y coordinates. And any time anything is italicized, the italicized part jumps to the opposite side of the screen, meaning the caption gets split in half. It’d be comical if it wasn’t frustrating.

(Thanks for the opportunity to vent about how sad it is that Star Trek is trapped behind such a bad streaming service. And I even pay for no ads, yet they still show ads every 8th episode or so.)


I agree Paramount+ is my least favorite streaming service. It never seems to remember what I was watching or where I am in an episode.

Subtitles are not something I normally have on since I know almost every word verbatim for stng and voyager... so maybe they are even worse than I realize!

I only pay for this service because I want to support my beloved star trek.. glad it's been getting some new life in recent years at least!

But yes.. it's sad that they have such a crappy service.


The subtitles I've seen come out of Whisper have been astounding. Dealing with heavy accents, and stammering without trouble. Current youtube auto CC is pretty bad, but the current gen AI is really impressive.


I experienced this with older shows on Amazon


Subtitles have never been better idk what you're smoking


I've worked tangentally to some of the orgs trying to do these types of things. Having a person review everything especially when some titles are only up for 3 to 6 months and they only get a few days notice is really difficult.

Public numbers for prime is around 60,000 titles in 2021. Those are most likely going to be in four languages. And there's going to be at least two versions of each of those depending on what regions are playing in. That also assumes that a title is only one piece of content not a TV show if we assume that 50% of the titles are TV shows and each of those has a minimum of 10 episodes and we assume every title is around an hour including movies so that'll average out with shorter shows longer shows and longer movies. That ends up being around 4.8 million hours worth of content.

Let's just assume that the rate of title entry is one-to-one with the length of content though it's much more likely 1.5 to 1 or 2 to 1 given that people have to pause go back and fix things. That gives us with the average worker working 2,000 hours a year 2400 person years to data enter the entire catalog. Manual entry also obviously leaves rooms for poor workers or fat fingering. So if you wanted really high quality you would spot check other workers and so you might bloat that up to 3,000 people years.

So if you hired a brand new team of unskilled workers train them for 6 months with 3,000 people and then spent them for a year you would be able to backfill all of Prime's catalog right now.

But what happens when you on board say 10,000 titles from getting a new licensing deal with searchlight films?

You want that content up as fast as possible and people actually like it less if it doesn't have titles on it then if they're bad as some other comments have said.

Also just running the numbers let's say you pay someone around $30,000 a year to do this data entry at a very low wage double that for facilities and support HR and all that crap. 3000 employees at that wage for a year is 180 million. That training alone is 90M.

Should each of the streaming services take a large chunk of their budget just to make sure that a human reviews the subtitles possibly at an accuracy rate only slightly higher than the machine learning can do currently. Would you rather have 5% human coverage or 100% 90% accurate AI coverage.

From my understanding most content doesn't actually have subtitles on it unless it was on a premiere TV network that was required for government regulations to subtitle their shows such as a BBC TV show. That means that the streaming networks are actually doing this out of customer interest as opposed to being required to do so so they're actually backfilling work for the people that produce the videos in the first place. And from the little bit that I've worked in broadcast subtitles sharing isn't all that standard and Netflix for instance may have added subtitles but that doesn't mean that prime video or Hulu is going to get those subtitles if they take on that content later the video producers aren't that interested in pulling the information back into their catalog they don't have the tech support to do stuff like that.

Also almost all of this was dictated via Google voice AKA subtitles via ai and the only mistake I noticed was it didn't understand tangently it instead put 10 generally.


you definitely see this in the translation industry. neural net machine translation misses enough nuance that it can't replace a human translator where it really matters, but it 'looks right' enough to convince clients that it can.

as a result, it's a lot harder to make a living as a freelance translator these days - there are fewer jobs and what jobs exist are often proofreading machine translations, which command lower rates because 'the machine did most of the work already,' even though they often require full rewrites.

at the same time, human translation quality has gone down too, since a lot of people will pass off machine translation as their own work, and when rates are too low, you can't spend too much time on any particular job.


When everything will suck a bit more in the future, will it then recursively suck even more over time given that AI feeds itself content?


I have the same worry. Another example: Is furniture nowadays more beautiful and durable than it used to be 100 years ago? Is there more variety now? Not in my book. Same goes for a lot of products that are now produced in the cheapest way possible at scale.

Looks very much like a race to the bottom dominated by a few big players to me. Consumers don't seem to care that much.


There's absolutely beautiful and durable furniture available, it's just a lot more expensive than Ikea. There's a local place that makes furniture on-demand; as far as I can tell, the quality is great, but we're talking $8–10k for a dining table. That segment of the market still exists and I don't see it going anywhere.

Cheap, mass-produced furniture has taken the bottom of the market but there really is a wide variety available today.


See Japan, it will go out at one stage, these are hard jobs with low margin and returns. Quality of raw materials is going down too


Your example is true only if you include the criteria that it be affordable. You can probably get any furniture you want made locally or by a highly skilled person far away who is willing to ship to you.

100 years ago, how much did the family dinner table cost? Would you measure it in hours or days of salary? When that family in 1923 went table shopping, they were either going to buy from a company like Sears Roebuck or from a local store and there probably wasn't much variety from either source.

Today, there's lots of cheap stuff available, but there's also lots of high end custom stuff available as well. We have more of everything.


Exactly. What we’ve done is not lower the quality bar on “excellent”, we’ve actually raised the quality bar on “cheap”.


We have way less in the middle. A lot of super high end luxury stuff, a lot of very cheap affordable stuff.

There's a moat, and it's very evident just by looking at family pictures from the sixties and eighties.


Does it matter? There is a lot of 100 year old furniture out there that nobody wants. They don't fit modern lifestyles.

100 year houses are only livable because someone put a ton of money into retrofitting things like plumbing, electric, and HVAC. Most of that has had major rework done several times as well since it was first added. Even at that, the fundamentals of those houses mean that they cannot be retrofitting for good insulation, and it can be argued they should all be scrapped for that reason.


I would say more tastes than lifestyles. You can use old wardrobes, drawers etc. just fine. It's just that people are used to looking at vaguely modern (often bland and disposable) stuff from the media, and at least think other people would think them weird and nonconforming for using old furniture. Even if you can get it relatively cheap, which is suggested by the "no one wants it" phrase.

I think there is an ethos of buying new and overpriced (and also buying "experiences") to show off that you have money for that and aren't some poor nerd trying to optimize their budget at the expense of consumerism. Often you don't actually have that much money for actual conspicuous consumption, so at least you're trying to imitate the Apple aesthetic. I am getting this vibe from talking to a distinct set of people of my age group, of course not all.


A different take on lifestyles: unfortunately there's a big gap in convenience between being able to move across the world and get everything you need in one afternoon in IKEA, and tracking it all down second hand.


The poor quality furniture of 100 years ago is no longer around.


Households had way less furniture in general, then, too, and yeah, some of it was makeshift or rough-built and probably didn't make it to today.

Office furniture seems to have been incredibly well-built, though, by modern standards. Kinda like how office and government buildings used to be built a lot better. Institutions seem to have cared a lot more about that kind of thing back then. They built desks for ordinary low-paid clerks or typists like they expected the office to still be running, and still using that same desk, in 200 years.

[EDIT] Also, part of what makes older furniture seem so nice is that excellent-quality wood was abundant. It seems so nice because they used wood that'd be ultra-expensive luxury-grade today, for, like, interior structural parts you never even see. Same story for houses. I've seen wooden support beams that'd be almost impossible to find at any price, today, the quality's so high and the piece is so large. Floor underlayment (again, not even intended to be seen) so knot-free it'd probably be used for veneer, now. That kind of thing.


It is called survivorship bias. For example I can look back to 80s NES games. Some of those games are very good. But I would say 80% of the total catalog were either very bland or just outright bad. Most consumer type goods have this issue. In 30 years we will look back at this time and say 'they dont make XYZ like they used to' then point at the cream of the crop of whatever genre XYZ is in for this year. Just remember the same year that Shawshank Redemption came out so did Police academy mission to Moscow.

edit removed: Leonard Part 6.


You make a good point, but your dates on Leonard ('87) and Shawshank ('94) are a little off.


Consumers don't have much of a choice. Wages have stagnated for decades, so their incomes' purchasing power has decreased over time. It's often a choice between buying what's affordable or not buying it at all.


Modern furniture is much lighter and easier to disassemble, thanks to screws, nuts and bolts being much cheaper than 100 years ago.


This is a really bad take.

1. Creativity can be achieved at faster speeds than humans can consume. 2. We have no evidence to say AI and the techniques behind it wont keep improving (there are already so many low hanging fruits, alot of it is infra problems and the other half that we can't even imagine can probably be solved by AI better than humans can)


> allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service

Does it, really? I find that most of the time that while people can spot the difference between facts and a sales pitch, repeating the pitch enough still changes the common discourse.

People can say things like "technology x may be more expensive but saves development time" (where X can be anything from the latest frontend framework to microservices to voice recognition) while in fact there is no data that it saves any development time at all.

Is it even true that voice recognition reduces the amount of customer service compared to a simple menu system? If it isn't, the premise doesn't hold.


True, and this has real effects on jobs.

There was a similar dynamic with translation market and Google Translate. It didn't matter that human translation was superior. What mattered was that Google Translate (or similar) brought down prices so much that it effectively destroyed the market for everyday-type of translations. Why? Because customers said that, well, just use Google Translate and then improve it a bit.


> To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs.

I had to go through hoops talking to the Doordash bot to get a change to my order. And I pray for the poor soul that runs afoul of Google…


Also, how do you continue to train a model like this when everywhere you look is just output from the same model? Like, at some point, the real conversations and text gets overwhelmed by the fake stuff. Where does the model pull more training data from?


Maybe let's wait until people get good at using it?

It's been like a 1.5 months since it was released.

For me I am doing a lot my writing with it becuase my writing is worse than mediocre.

As long as you don't expect it to know things off the bat, it has a decent memory, though seems to be unaware of what it knows e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370057)

So you can just feed it the good info, get it to update things with more context and it will spit out pretty decent prose (though you have to ask to for it to be well written).


ChatGPT is basically automated reversion to a slightly worse mean for applicable areas. The algos as sophisticated as they are produce a credible remix of the training input.


But just give it context about what you want it to write and it will write about it. Obviously this is much easier if you have an existing body of work but you can still write to ChatGPT clumsily and it will often turn what you are trying to say into better prose.

My analogy is that it is to writing what the spell checker is to spelling. Very few people in the world have to be good at spelling anymore. Yeah everyone is okay, but it's not as valued a skill as it used to be. ChatGPT is doing the same for writing. Yes you need to be able to write to an okay level but you don't need to be able to write well, ChatGPT does that.


The question is how many times will it elevating bad prose vs removing opportunities to write great prose.


There's also the fundamental problem of AI-generated content "polluting" the training data, right?


This is an old concern (and nevertheless a good one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...


Haha, its true but I feel like GP's thought stops way short of Heidegger's. Products we buy being a little worse because of the necessities of capitalism (or whatever you'd rather say) is small change compared to the very essence of Being getting enframed into total occlusion.

That is, I don't know if I would say getting frustrated by an automated voice system is the same thing as a hammer breaking for your given Dasein, but one could make the argument I bet.


Turn it on its head, then. We can build bots which navigate bad customer service portals on your behalf.


most marketing copy is now written by mediocre humans who are much worse than mediocre ai


[dead]


I like mchurch, and I think he'll be safe from AI, since the context window needs to increase exponentially in size in order to accommodate an mchurch-style doorstopper.


It's only true literature if it's spawned by neuron networks bred inside the skulls of free ranging apes. When it comes from simulated neuron networks built by software in datacenters it's just sparkling copy.


> more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse.

Hit the nail on the head. ChatGPT will replace the wrong things, and probably create a world where we still need to solve problems ChatGPT has become attached to.

It's all noise, I can't perceive a signal at this point.


It's just good at writing, it's contextual understanding is bad (at first).

But give it context and it flies. Ask it to write a cover letter for an engineering role, it will turn out mediocre crap.

Give it the actual role and your CV in the prompts, you're pretty much good to go. It's unique, you still control the narrative (please highlight my ability to work under pressure) and it's done in 10 secs.

I really don't see what isn't to love about that.

Also it usually writes better if you tell to write well.




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