I agree with the article, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while now as well.
I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost.
So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.
I found this post yesterday on this exact same topic. As someone who is interested in the space of creating visual things and its design choices, it's a bit disheartening to see the current situation, and brings you to the point of "why even try doing anything anymore" rather than just follow the copywagon.
I feel this will be a similar effect to the current slowdown of hiring of juniors: you're killing the pipeline of future seniors that lead development.
Yup, or we'll find out there's nothing to fear for folks who are using this responsibly.
It seems a huge "the sky is falling" to think all LLM use is bad for fear of some "addiction" to me. Even many skeptics (eg Hashimoto) have come around to the idea of using LLMs.
One thing is clear in my mind. VCs are burning cash, and so if you have an LLM flow you find useful, take some free cash. The sky is not falling in this respect imo.
Which is not a defense of AI, to be clear. AI may very well be a big societal problem, but in this context i don't see Hashimoto/etc becoming heroin addicts like ya'll are so concerned about. It's just a fancy autocomplete. The fear seems a bit over hyped.
> one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.
Who expects this behavior? It doesn't make sense. You just want to go back where you were.
Most file browsers I've used wanting to implement going up a level in hierarchy, have an arrow pointing up.
You can't avoid big corps training on your data if it's available, because "fair use".
But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.
This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence. Like crediting wi-fi router owners with creating Wi-Fi Positioning System instead of the people who realized they could wardrive around to create maps and extract a new kind of value that would never have existed without them. Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
My thinking here is coming from the paper "From Entropy to Epiplexity"[1] which partly discussed why you can train on synthetic data: it's the structure of the data that enables learning, not just the amount of "information". Authors of images and videos may have worked just as hard as authors of text training sets, but they didn't contribute to AI as much because there just wasn't the same kind of structure to discover there. It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
> This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence.
This presumes it's binary.
> Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
Yes, I think a lot more than 1 person deserves credit for years of painstaking research.
> It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
You're naively assuming the structure is accidental.
I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to make up for this difference. This works very well with internal competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some extra fear due to the bad job market.
I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas.
I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.
I’ve noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop.
I don’t think it’s exclusive to startups or tech either, it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant growth, and when there are real technological improvements you can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.
> it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore
This doesn't sound right to me. We are currently getting smacked upside the head by an enormous technological innovation. I believe that, even within the framework of capitalism, this problem has social and political roots. The "robber baron" period late 19th century America has strong similarities to what we are seeing today, and technological stagnation was not the cause.
When are we throwing anti-trust at the robber barons? That's the real question.
And as of now, we are not having "technological innovation". We found a new jackhammer and are tearing up the entire house experimenting with it. Maybe when the "shiny new thing" effect wears off we'll get true innovation. But as of now people are just getting paid to show off jackhammers.
