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I know some of you may be sick of "wow, look at this cool thing AI can do, how eerie is that?" posts, but I can't help but be blown away by some of the applications of this technology.
I play in a band, and we upload our music to streaming platforms using a company called DistroKid. When you're uploading music, they strongly encourage you to submit the lyrics for the song at the same time for SEO reasons (and so that the lyrics will appear onscreen if someone shares the song on Instagram). It's a little textbox where you paste your lyrics in, then you're done.
I went to upload a song today, and found that they've added a new feature. After uploading the audio file, you can get an AI to try to transcribe the lyrics rather than typing them out manually.
It nailed it. The song is 215 words long, and the AI only made about 6 mistakes i.e. 97% accuracy. For reference, this is a noisy post-hardcore song with layers of shoegazey guitars, feedback and pounding drums. What's more, it achieved this 97% accuracy in a matter of seconds, maybe 5% of the total runtime of the song itself.
A few years ago I used a voice transcription service called Happy Scribe, which achieved comparable levels of accuracy - but only for plain speech recorded in a quiet environment with no background ambiance. If you record speech without a directional mic in an environment with a lot of background noise (e.g. a café), Happy Scribe was pretty much useless and I had to transcribe everything the old-fashioned way.
But now AI can transcribe words near-perfectly from lyrics with a musical accompaniment? That's insanity. I can't imagine how anyone will be able to find work as a transcriber for any major language a year from now.
There's a free model released by OpenAI called Whisper that is excellent for transcribing voice to text in any context, not just music. Runs pretty well on modest hardware too to boot.
At any rate, I'm basking in the schadenfreude of being the Cassandra warning people about the incoming scourge of AI induced unemployment for at least 5 or 6 years now, only to be vindicated in real time.
You're all fucked, some just about to be fucked before the others.
Aren't you Indian?
Don't you have a ridiculous civil service which people kill to get into because once you're there, some quirk of iron rice bowls and pork barrels and constituency building has basically made Indian civil service jobs a sinecure where you never have to do any work but also you can't be fired, and this situation has persisted for 70 years despite the grinding poverty of all other sections of the Indian economy, because it's politically impossible to untangle this snarl?
And you think people are going to lose their jobs... because new labour saving tools become available?
Most jobs don't exist to fulfil tasks. Most jobs exist to fulfil government kayfabe. That an AI can perform a task is therefore completely irrelevant to the question of who has a job.
I've been pushing the meme of 'Government jobs are mostly middle class welfare' for years and people mostly just shrug and go about their day.
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