Human-replacing AI startups reach $1bn unicorn status

Stability AI and Jasper – two startups that make AI software that auto-generates images, text, and other stuff – have each reached so-called unicorn status (valued at over $1 billion) after bagging $101 million and $125 million in funding, respectively. Stability AI, best known for open sourcing the code for its popular text- …

[Anonymous Coward]

Four things I don't need or want

"Stability AI and Jasper – two startups that make AI software that auto-generates images, text, and other stuff"

As if NFTs weren't useless enough.

"Residents in Los Angeles, California, will be able to take a ride in Waymo's autonomous vehicles soon."

When will people (and the press) realize that they are being taken for a ride with the self driving car hype?

"build a model capable of accurately classifying the skin tone, gender, and age of people in images"

Just what we need - less privacy and better targeted advertising.

"Meta builds AI translator for spoken-only language"

If it's Meta it Zucks.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Four things I don't need or want

The goal of a firm like Jasper isn't to create useless baubles for gullible tulip-traders. They want to automate the functions of marketers, graphic designers, and similar jobs, so their customers can get rid of relatively-expensive flesh units and replace them with social-media-drivel-on-demand services.

Stable Diffusion is already plenty good enough to generate things like advertisement background images, backgrounds for video games, and so forth. People are successfully selling SD-generated images as original art. We've had algorithmic generation of financial and sports news pieces for a while now, and we have ML systems that can generate competent, if unsurprising, genre fiction. Icon Publishing has been selling machine-written non-fiction books on demand for decades, at a healthy profit.

Jobs like marketing/communications, graphic design, and animation are in near-term peril. They won't all be wiped out immediately, but the market will shrink significantly. It will be harder for new writers to break into genre-novel publishing, which is where most of the money is for fiction writing. I don't see any barrier to automating the writing of most television and movie scripts, because 95% of them are already just "take a concept and run it through the Save the Cat! machine, with a final pass through the Joss Whedon Dialog filter".

The later 2020s are looking like a grim time for workers in the "creative" industries.

And, yeah, the same scythe is swinging for the less-demanding sort of programming jobs.

[CoffeeBlackest]

You say that like this article (or my post) weren't already written by bots...

Also.../cough...Videocardz.com =)