Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.Anthropic\u2019s paper, called \u201cLabor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence,\u201d essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job\u2019s tasks \u201care theoretically possible with AI,\u201d which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW\u2019s Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.)In his thread, Mims makes the case that the \u201ctheoretical capability\u201d of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.\u00a0But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. \u201cWe introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily,\u201d the researchers write. This is based in part on the \u201cAnthropic Economic Index,\u201d which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include \u201cComplete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines,\u201d \u201cDraft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications,\u201d and \u201cBuild, debug, and customize web applications and websites.\u201d\u00a0Not included in any of Anthropic\u2019s research are extremely popular uses of AI such as \u201ccreate AI porn\u201d and \u201ccreate AI slop and spam.\u201d These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. Researchers appear to be too squeamish or too embarrassed to grapple with the fact that people love to use AI to make porn, and people love to use AI to spam social media and the internet, inherently causing economic harm to creators, adult performers, journalists, musicians, writers, artists, website owners, small businesses, etc. As Emanuel wrote in our first 404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis, people love to cum, and many of the most popular generative AI websites have an explicit focus on AI porn and the creation of nonconsensual AI porn. Anthropic\u2019s research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the \u201cgood\u201d uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for. (It may be the case that people are disproportionately using Claude at a higher rate for more traditional work applications, but any study on the \u201clabor market impacts of AI\u201d should not focus on the uses of one single tool and extrapolate that out to every other tool. For what it\u2019s worth, jailbroken versions of Claude are very popular among sexbot enthusiasts).\u00a0Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth.\u00a0Anthropic\u2019s paper does attempt to estimate what the effect of AI will be on \u201carts and media,\u201d but again, the way the researchers do this is by attempting to decide whether AI can directly do the tasks that AI researchers assume are required by someone with a job in \u201carts and media.\u201d Other widely-cited papers about AI-related job loss also do not really attempt to consider the potential macro impacts of the ongoing deadening and zombification of the internet, and instead focus on \u201cAI exposure,\u201d which is largely an attempt to predict or measure whether an AI or LLM could directly replace specific tasks that people need to do. Widely-cited papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research and Brookings released over the last several months attempt to determine the adaptability of workers in specific sectors to having many of their tasks automated by AI. The Brookings paper, at least, mentions the possibility of a society-wide shift that is impossible to predict: \u201cthe evidence underlying the adaptive capacity estimates here is derived primarily from observed effects in localized displacement events, rather than from large-scale employment shifts across occupations. As a result, the index may be most informative when displacement is relatively isolated\u2014for example, when a worker loses their job but related occupations remain stable. In scenarios in which AI affects clusters of related occupations simultaneously, structural job availability may matter more than individual-level characteristics. Moreover, if AI fundamentally transforms the economy on a scale comparable to the industrial revolution (as some experts have suggested could be possible), it could make entire skill sets redundant across several occupations simultaneously.\u201dTo be clear, AI-driven job loss is a critical thing to study and to consider. But many, many jobs, side hustles, and economic activity more broadly rely on \u201cthe internet,\u201d or social media broadly defined. Study after study shows that Google is getting worse, traffic to websites are down, and an increasing amount of both web traffic and web content is being generated by AI and bots. Anecdotally, creators and influencers have told us it\u2019s getting harder to compete with AI slop and harder to justify spending days or weeks making content just to publish it onto platforms where their AI competitors can brute force the recommendation algorithms effortlessly. We have heard from websites that have had to lay people off or shut down because Google\u2019s AI overviews have destroyed their web traffic or because they lose out on search engine rankings to AI slop. Authors are regularly competing with AI plagiarized versions of their books on Amazon, and Spotify is getting overrun with AI-generated music, too.\u00a0This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media. We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What\u2019s happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"