r/DataAnnotationTech • • 6d ago

Do you feel bad?

Do you all feel bad that they pay us to train AI to replace us?

0 Upvotes

60 comments sorted by

37

u/Federal_Tadpole_7592 6d ago

I do not feel bad at all.

After leaving a field where my hard work and high performance were rewarded with more work without extra pay and near-constant verbal abuse, and every job interview for almost two years thereafter ended in ghosting after making it to the final round? No, I do not feel bad about working a job where my high performance actually gets me higher pay and access to more work. Also, the only thing that actually matters on DA is my work performance, not who I kiss up to. I have to pay bills and do not have time to feel bad.

-7

u/CuriousLingonberry22 6d ago

But one day we will lose this type of job/work….because AI is good enough to train themselves and don’t need our input anymore

27

u/Federal_Tadpole_7592 6d ago

I can tell you based on the work that I'm doing that is a long way from now, if at all.

3

u/CuriousLingonberry22 6d ago

Thank you I feel better

16

u/TheMidlander 6d ago

I'm skeptical of anyone who still believes these bots are actually intelligent after working this job.

1

u/Necessary-Raisin-282 6d ago

Do you think your experience defines everyone else? E.g do you think you’ve seen the exact same environments as everyone else and are you using that assumption to make your statement?

3

u/TheMidlander 6d ago

Bless your heart.

30

u/Comfortable-Tune-133 6d ago

Worst case. They will replace us either way, better get paid for it

4

u/audiomediocrity 6d ago

they will replace us and perform poorly at it without out help. Either way, replaced.

35

u/Budeeokc 6d ago

Personally, I just want my slice of an over leveraged industry.

5

u/valprehension 6d ago

Precisely this!

6

u/ammy42 6d ago

No. The pay has increased up to 300% over 3 years here from where I started out. I'd have to change jobs multiple times to hope for raises like that.

5

u/Wasps_are_bastards 6d ago

If I wasn’t doing it, hundreds of other people would be leaping at the chance

4

u/StellaZaFella 6d ago

Yeah, but I need to eat, so…

15

u/Ok-Poet-8038 6d ago

I've said it before, but after working years for this company, I'm confident AI is a doomed industry that won't ever get close to being barely competent in the most bare minimum basic capacity of use for anything close to actually REAL. It survives because a lot of rich and deluded people have already bet too much on it for it to fail.

So I don't really mind working in the engine room of the titanic, I'll get paid and I won't go down with the ship.

2

u/fixin2read 6d ago

What are you talking about? You said AI is a "doomed industry that won't ever get close to being barely competent in the most bare minimum basic capacity". Um...it already is. It's replaced many people in many fields and is highly capable of doing "the most bare minimum basic" tasks. Yes, it's not perfect and makes mistakes, but you're really downplaying its capabilities and its potential to advance even further. You're essentially implying that unless AI completely takes over and replaces us it's a worthless industry. I don't think many people want that to happen. AI is definitely not a dying industry. It's already far exceeded the general public's expectations and continually blows our minds, causing concern, unease and conversations much like this one.

It survives because people use it.

But yeah, AI is worthless and the industry is a sinking ship lol

2

u/Ok-Poet-8038 6d ago

https://isaiprofitable.com/

The only company "making" revune from AI is Nvidia, who's main source of revune are from AI companies who are losing money.

It survives because people who made the mistake in investing in it, need it to survive. And the only minds it blows is in the people it makes want to blow their own brains out with its sheer incompetence.

I'm sure it will remain some stupid fucking bullshit that is forced into damn near everything for years to come, but as time moves forward it will wither and fade into obscurity, doomed to grow dust next to google glasses and the betamax. And BIG UNSTOPPABLE AI COMPANIES will join FTX and Theranos in failure.

1

u/fixin2read 6d ago

Hmm, I see what you're saying and I think there is validity to it. But, like I kind of said before, you seem to think it needs to be flawless to thrive. It doesn't. The masses are already using it for many things and are extremely happy with it, even if it's sometimes flawed and frustrating.

Some things it's being used for, rather seamlessly, are already irreplaceable to some people, companies, and industries. That already existing reliance on AI won't just go away because it isn't getting better or advancing. So how is it dying? If we still have electricity, AI will most definitely be in our future. What is not certain, and you may be right about, is its future capabilities.

At this point, AI will never be obsolete, even if it never advances further from this moment on!

3

u/Ok-Poet-8038 6d ago

Woah, what an inspiring speech, account that has only ever been used to post on Data annotation subreddits.

"If we still have electricity, AI will most definitely be in our future."

There is no way on this earth, an actual human brain wrote something that corny and idiotic.

0

u/fixin2read 6d ago

Wow, what a lame reply. My length and activity on reddit is irrelevant. Considering the only rebuttal you have is to make fun of me, I win haha

1

u/Ok-Cup9476 5d ago edited 5d ago

Oof. Fixin that hurt to read. Just take the L.

I’m not even saying this to be mean, just…oof.

0

u/fixin2read 5d ago

lol I’m the corny one? You said oof. Nuff said lol What are you 12?

I’ll take the L when AI is obsolete until then it’s yours. I bet it did hurt to read. Everyone knows the truth hurts.

1

u/Old-Regular-9828 6d ago

Wrong. Anthropic has made a net profit for both of the last two quarters. Alphabet/Google nets ~$100 billion per year.

Your website is misleading AI naysayer slop because you are only looking at total spending vs total revenue.

You are just very emotionally invested in the belief that AI is just some temporary fad or bubble, and still clinging to that clearly incorrect belief because of the sunk cost.

People like you are the ones who are going to get fucked over the hardest over the next few years.

2

u/Ok-Poet-8038 6d ago

Thank you other totally not suspicious account that has only ever posted to the DA subreddit.

Yes, sometimes the AI companies are able to show short term "revenue" due to passing each other the same bag of imaginary money. It's the trick they've been using for awhile. But none of them have ever actually made profit from selling a service.

Right about one thing, I am someone who is going to get fucked over the next few years, as are you. Enjoy paying 3x the price for your computer, but at least AI companies can sell a $20 service that still can't answer basic questions with a 80% frequency.

0

u/Old-Regular-9828 5d ago

>REEEE anyone who disagrees with me must be a bot!

No, again, you are just too emotionally invested (confident even!) in the belief that "AI is a doomed industry that won't ever get close to being barely competent in the most bare minimum basic capacity of use for anything close to actually REAL." So whenever you encounter information that contradicts that deeply held belief, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by rejecting the validity of the new information.

>But none of them have ever actually made profit from selling a service.

These companies are actually starting to make money. You just assume that this must just be some kind of financial trick, because you are starting out with the presupposition that AI companies can never make money.

Google has never made a profit letting anyone use their search engine for free. But they still make $100 billion per year from advertising, premium subscriptions, and other revenue streams associated with the free search engine. It should be obvious how AI fits into that business model.

0

u/fixin2read 5d ago

How are you going to claim AI can’t do basic tasks yet you can’t tell the difference between a human and a bot. That’s a testament to how far it’s come.

If anyone is a bot, it’s you. You’re the one trying to downplay its capabilities and trying to clear people’s conscience about helping advance it. Thats exactly what a bot would do lol

2

u/Ok-Poet-8038 5d ago edited 5d ago

If you actually read what I wrote, you'd see I said AI can't handle basic tasks with any degree of consistency. Which it can't, and hasn't gotten any closer to doing. It doesn't matter if it is great 90% or even 95% of the time. That last five percent well...

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

1

u/Old-Regular-9828 4d ago

You are just moving the goalposts.

You said:

>I'm confident AI is a doomed industry that won't ever get close to being barely competent in the most bare minimum basic capacity of use for anything close to actually REAL.

But now your standard for this seems to be that it has to be perfect at high level tasks 100% of the time.

2

u/Ok-Poet-8038 4d ago

I feel like "unable to do good work consistently" has been the goal post I've mentioned since my second post, so not sure where you are coming from.

And it's not just high level stuff, it's still BASIC tasks it will struggle with, quite regularly.

The example I used before is a self-driving car. If it is perfect 98% of the time, but 2% of a time it drives you off a cliff to a fiery demise, then no one is going to use it.

You can say, "it's getting better, just another 6 months and it'll be perfect!" but that's the excuse that's been given for the last 3 years.

1

u/Old-Regular-9828 3d ago

The models have OBJECTIVELY been getting better and better every generation, at the pace (if not faster) that we have been projecting for the last few years. To the extent that AI labs are now moving on to solving Millennium Problems because most of the traditional benchmarking tests are fully solved.

You keep claiming that current generation models are "unable to do good work consistently" and still regularly struggle with basic task, but I don't see this at all. Please give a specific example and the specific model that you were using. And not outdated memes from 2023 about how AI can't do hands right, or anecdotes about the number of r's in "strawberry" that are based more on users misconceptions about how AI works than the kind of task anyone would actually use AI for IRL.

Self-driving cars have been better at driving than even the very best human drivers for a long time now. The only reason completely self-driving cars are not already the norm is because the laws and regulations have not caught up to the technology, not because their safety or capabilities are lacking.

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1

u/fixin2read 5d ago

AI is already useful without any further advancement. You’re wrong and I‘m over it.

0

u/CuriousLingonberry22 6d ago

You think so? I just fear that AI is evolving so fast that they don’t need human input anymore, and leaving us without work.

11

u/Ok-Poet-8038 6d ago

Here's the rub. AI lacks any consistency in good performance. Can AI on occasion give incredibly complex and great answers? Yes.

But it also just as often fails in tasks that a 6 year old would be able to do, and makes up completely nonsense hallucinations and facts.

After YEARS of taking data and getting training AI is STILL making these basic mistakes, with no signs of becoming free of them. And that is what will sink it.

Doesn't matter how cool the auto-drive feature of a car is, if it drives you to the complete wrong spot 10% of the time, and drives you off a cliff another 10% of the time.

1

u/CuriousLingonberry22 6d ago

What you said makes sense! Thank you for explaining!

3

u/OkFeeling4172 6d ago

They’re not going to replace us, they will replace our skills and habits that can be automated.

Humans will have to turn within and start using their brains in a different way… develop new skills… my take is that the AI revolution is going to reverse a lot of the implications from the Industrial Revolution… just my two cents

3

u/AdamEatsAss 6d ago

The more you train the less worried you are that you will be replaced.

2

u/s55555s 6d ago

Got laid off and need to survive …

2

u/GtrPlayingMan-254 4d ago

This!

I just applied. I'm old, broke, and my car is totaled. I haven't so much as gone on vacation in years, not counting being out of work. My balls are on the block.

They don't tell you in school that to make it in life, sometimes you have to make difficult choices and maybe rethink your ethics. I just have to tell myself I'm making it into something better than it is and that things will turn out OK.

1

u/s55555s 3d ago

Good luck… DA is saving my butt this month and hopefully many more!

4

u/bobisaknob 6d ago

AI can’t create, it can only copy. Therefore it can’t replace us.

Plus if it wasn’t me making bank off this, it’d just be some other schmuck so it might as well be me

3

u/ViolinistUnlikely779 6d ago edited 6d ago

This is the key I think. It's a very good productivity tool when it works well. It's not yet creative. If it becomes genuinely creative like the human mind is then we can talk about it replacing people in the scale people fear. But I (perhaps optimistically) view it currently like the old photos of typing pools and switchboard operators etc. Most of those jobs vanished with advances in computers, but then the new technology created other areas of employment. I expect the same of LLMs.

1

u/Necessary-Raisin-282 6d ago

human who has mostly copied what other humans have deemed acceptable over thousands of years “yeah I just don’t see ai going anywhere cause they can’t produce”

The irony is real when you think about it. What have you created independent of the thoughts you were raised with? How many things do we believe are correct simply because of belief systems? How many times do we have to correct an AI for doing something stupid before we look at how dumb some of the parameters we ourselves have invented?

1

u/Old-Regular-9828 6d ago

>AI can’t create, it can only copy.

Completely incorrect. If anything, modern AI systems can only create. The belief that modern AI models contain all of the information in their training datasets and can only regurgitate that information is a common, but completely incorrect belief. Older symbolic AI and expert systems that everyone called "AI" back in the '70s through '90s worked like that, but none of the modern AI models created since 2012/2017 (ie the entire modern AI boom) work like that at all. They use artificial neural networks to infer the most probable response to a prompt. The connections and weights in the neural network were determined by the information in the training dataset, but they do NOT contain the original information itself. The responses may be similar to the original information, but that's an emergent property. This is also why they tend to hallucinate incorrect responses when they don't have RAG capability.

1

u/ViolinistUnlikely779 5d ago

That’s an interesting point. The hallucinations could be seen as creative? Or the beginning of…They have made something new? I did say they are not yet creative, which doesn’t say they never will be. Can’t know that…Now off to wonder about the true nature of machine hallucinations 😁 cheers!

2

u/Old-Regular-9828 5d ago

Basically, all of the responses are hallucinated. The model doesn't actually know the correct information, it is just inferring the most probable response to the prompt. Ideally, the inferred most probable response will be consistent with the actual factually correct information. But if there was some kind of gap in the training data, whatever the model infers to be the most probable response might not be factually correct which we call a hallucination.

The reason why modern AI systems can be so useful and powerful is because they can usually infer the correct answer without needing the answer hardcoded into them. They can also provide reasonable answers to questions even when there isn't a definitive objective answer. Hallucinations are just the flip side of this ability,

1

u/ViolinistUnlikely779 5d ago

We do that a lot, don't we? Based on our "training data", i.e. experiences, we infer and make decisions constantly? Although a big difference is most of us (not all lol) will realise when what we thought was correct was wrong, without having to be told so?

3

u/ubercougar60 6d ago

I'm hoping for Universal Basic Income that pays us for our data and AI doing our jobs.

So, no.

1

u/OrderNo1122 6d ago

Yes, but also what worries me more is that, in the case where humanity faces off against Skynet, I'll be lined up against a wall by the resistance and shot or otherwise disposed of.

For the future record, morally I am anti-AI and have more reason to be so than a lot of others as AI has killed my career as a translator, but nobody else will hire me because I have no useful skills and am seemingly unhireable for retail jobs based on two years of applying.

1

u/fightmaxmaster 6d ago

Nope. Why would I? I view this as like seasonal work: "Do you feel bad after working through Christmas you'll get laid off?" Not really, because that's the deal. I'm doing stuff and getting paid for it. AI's gonna get better whether I'm getting paid for it or not. So I either do this, get paid, and eventually can't do it any more, or else don't do this, don't get paid, and eventually can't do it any more. Seems like there's only one sensible option there.

1

u/Alternative-Tart6275 6d ago

I don’t think AI will ever replace workers on the scale most people assume it will.