I liked how Eevee pointed out a perspective that I hadn’t really considered, about how Content is used as a way to make “Whatever” that can be sold and how that’s related to the recent rise of generative AI models.
It succinctly describes something that would have taken me much longer to explain to someone, and it’s also nice to see someone else share a frustration that I think many of us creatives feel.
Nice article.
I believe they are stopping their argument a bit too early.
The point of AI is not the content it produces, it’s not if it’s able to do a task, and that’s not what people want.
The article claims that people will produce content (an album for example) and that it won’t be consumed by anyone. It’s misunderstanding of the psychology of the AI user. The content is not made to be consumed by anyone else. [^1] The AI user is consuming the elation of creating something. They are the co-creator and sole consumer of the product. The end-product is not what is being sold; the creation is the product.
Before, you would go to a pottery class, dirty your hands, have an ugly pot maybe, but it’s coming from your hands, so you feel satisfaction. They don’t want to sell the pot. AI just short-circuits that, by making your pot without dirtying your hands, and just plug yourself to this satisfaction.
Humans are rewarded when they create something or solve a problem. This is a button to go straight to that.
Underlining the shortcomings of AI is fruitless. It’s a machine to reinforce Dunning-Kruger. The less you know, the more you believe it works. Remember that before AI, we would consider a large part of engineers not being able to resolve fizzbuzz. [^2] In interviews, I got people with 40 years of software experience struggling with Hello World. Those people are preyed upon by AI.
They do not want to listen, they do not want to learn. Even worse! They have emotional investment in it (or are quite literally addicted to it), and you trying to “unplug” them will trigger the same defense reaction as persons who have fallen for a scam.
The article skirts around this point, by mentioning Bitcoin but does not enter it fully.
Most software technology of the last 40 years was made to sell hardware. A website for every gas station. A computer in each home. Facebook to sell iPhones. Bitcoin and crypto. Bad programming practices, insane architectures to sell Cloud and servers. Big Data, NFT and AI? Yeah, more hardware.
It’s not a pump and dump, they just keep running because if they stop it will crumble. AI is not profitable for any company. Even OpenAI is losing insane amount of money per year. Its total nonsense. But it’s not if you think all of them are expecting the returns on hardware to be bigger than the losses on AI.
[^1] This is not entirely true. There is certainly passive consumer of AI “slop” but I believe it’s consumers who were not satisfied by the present offer for media.
[^2] Tech would then invent leet-code style problems and people would just grind them. The process would go to select employee that you can overwork the most.