Post #1604893
2026-04-20 06:19 UTC
Here's Saturday's newsletter about how an online freelancing marketplace reacted when the site introduced an AI tool to help freelancers produce their proposals for offered jobs.
Proposal quality went up, but became decoupled from worker ability and effort - it's value as a signal collapsed. Without this signal the market became less functional overall, workers working harder, few jobs awarded and employers less able to tell high for low ability/effort workers
https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/when-trusted-signals-collapse
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Replies (2)
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@tomstafford@mastodon.online 2026-04-20 06:22
I think signalling theory is useful for understanding the effects of LLMs - they don't just *produce work*, they disrupt the indicators that we are used to relying on for judging how much effort someone put into communicating with us. When someone writes to me now, I cannot as easily judge the level of care they took, their expertise in a domain, or bespoke knowledge about me that they have used to customise their communication Problematic! 2/
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@jbenjamint@mastodon.scot 2026-04-21 07:41
@tomstafford super interesting thread, thanks.