Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans hired to clean AI slop
50 comments
·September 24, 2025lordnacho
mikepurvis
Brad Pitt as Rusty: "Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances..."
(from Ocean's Eleven)
rich_sasha
Is that so ironic? Think of humans in factories fishing out faulty items, where formerly they would perhaps be the artisans that made the product in the first place.
sltr
> AI was supposed to replace humans
There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. 2. AI is diluting/degrading media culture.
For the first, I'm waiting for more data, e.g. from the BLS. For the second, I think a new category of media has emerged. It lands somewhere near chiptune and deep-fried memes.
mschuster91
> There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor.
The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics.
What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda.
Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.
bbarnett
This is my fear for everything. I lay no blame here, but at the same time, I can imagine an entire younger generation not actually learning... anything.
Part of learning is doing. You can read about fixing a car, but until you do it, you won't know how it's actually done. For most things, doing is what turns "reading a bunch of stuff" into "skill".
Yet how far will this go? I see a neuralink, or I see smartglasses, where people just ask "how do I do this" and follow along as some kind of monkey. Not even understanding anything, at all, about whatever they do.
Who will advance our capabilities? Or debug issues not yet seen? Certainly AI is nowhere near either of those. Taking existing data and correlating it and discovering new relationships in that data isn't an advancement of capability.
cladopa
We have been doing this for decades. I was hired to correct and train speech recognition and OCR programs like 20 years ago. A friend of mine corrected geolocated tags.
In the history of AI systems you basically had people inputing Prolog rules in "smart" systems or programmers hardcoding rules is programs like ELIZA or Generalised Problem Solvers.
fifilura
Like being a middle manager for employees that don't learn :)
mmmllm
The greatest irony is that the only comment on that article is AI generated
grey-area
We have not yet entered the AI age, though I believe we will.
LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful. Perhaps they will evolve or perhaps they will prove a dead end.
bheadmaster
> LLMs are not AI. Machine learning is more useful.
LLMs are a particular application of machine learning, and as such LLMs both benefit by and contribute to general machine learning techniques.
I agree that LLMs are not the AI we all imagine, but the fact that it broke a huge milestone is a big deal - natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI!
I believe it is only a matter of time until we get to a multi-sensory self-modifying large models which can both understand and learn from all five of human senses, and maybe even some of the senses we have no access to.
pyzhianov
> natural language used to be one of the metrics of AGI
what if we have chosen a wrong metric there?
1718627440
I don't think we have. Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that.
anonzzzies
We keep moving the goalposts...
alexander2002
Someone can drop a sick blog post called LoremIpsum.ai
SuperHeavy256
Man complains about AI giving him a starting point to do his work from.
null
ares623
I for one am super excited for what my kids, and the other children they grow up with, will do in their future careers! I am so proud and cheer this future on, it can’t come soon enough! This is software’s true purpose.
notachatbot123
The article has a strong focus on deceptive media, used on social media to penetrate viewers' attention. It makes me sad and glad that my kids and family did grow up before all this insanity of psychological abuse.
wtcactus
First thing that came to mind when I started seeing news about companies needing developers to clean up AI code, was the part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because they bought this new machine to produce the toothpaste, but then they re-wire him for an higher salary because the machine keeps breaking and they need someone to fix it.
AI (at least this form of AI) is not going to take our jobs away and let us all idle and poor, just like the milling machine or the plough didn't take people's jobs away and make everyone poor. it will enable us to do even greater things.
riffraff
Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones.
The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago.
(I don't think LLMs are like that, tho).
Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships.
But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes.
visarga
By the same logic, people working in transportation around the time Ford Model T was introduced did NOT diminish 100 years later. We went from about 3.2 million in 1910 (~8% of the workforce) to 6–16 million in 2023 (~4–10%, depending on definition). That is the effect of a century of transportation development.
Sometimes demand scales, maybe food is less elastic. Programming has been automating itself with each new language and library for 70 years and here we are, so many software devs. Demand scaled up as a result of automation.
Towaway69
> it will enable us to do even greater things.
Just as gun powder enabled greater things. I agree with you just humans have shown, time after time, an ability to first use innovation to make lives miserable for their fellow humans.
delis-thumbs-7e
Industrial revolution caused a massive shift from fairly self-sustained agrarian communities to living horrible poverty in urban factory and mining towns, just look up numbers of children deceased during work in the 19th Century England. It did not make everyone poorer - it made plenty of people helluva lot richer - but it did increase the number of those in poverty and the effects of their destitude. The mega rich capitalists class greated by the industrialisation replaced the old aristocrats being able to buy goverments and leaders to do their bidding, smashing worker’s rights and unions created to defend the workers from the effects of industrial capitalism with police violence, William Hearst and the like were able to essentially control public opinion since they owned the newspapers…Sound familiar? We are not entering an era descriped on an utopian scifi, but just returning to the good old 19th century.
Except I still doubt whether AI is the new Spinning Jenny. Because the quality is so bad and because it can’t replace human’s in most things or doesn’t necessarily even speed the prodiction in a sognificant way, we might just be facing another IT-bubble and financial meltdown, since US seems to have but all of the eggs in a one basket.
pydry
>it will enable us to do even greater things.
It doesnt do this.
It's not so strange that e-commerce is the first thing that AI has visibly altered. Most "buy this thing" sites really just have one proposition at their core. The presentation is incidental. You can't have a website looking like it's still 2003, but you also don't really care what your 2025 shop front looks like. Your ads are there to draw attention, not to be works of art.
What does AI do, at its heart? It is literally trained to make things that can pass for what's ordinary. What's the best way to do that, normally? Make a bland thing that is straight down the middle of the road. Boring music, boring pictures, boring writing.
Now there are still some issues with common sense, due to the models lacking certain qualities that I'm sure experts are working on. Things like people with 8 fingers, lack of a model of physics, and so on. But we're already at a place where you could easily not spot a fake, especially while not paying attention.
So where does that leave us? AI is great at producing scaffolding. Lorem Ipsum, but for everything.
Humans come in to add a bit of agency. You have to take some risk when you're producing something, decisions have to be made. Taste, one might call it. And someone needs to be responsible for the decisions. Part of that is cleaning up obvious errors, but also part of it is customizing the skeleton so that it does what you want.