10 ms·

Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon

134 points by georgehill 4y ago

drita 4y ago
While not surprising in the least, it is quite sad that all these schemes seemingly always come down to selling courses or affiliate links.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  This is where the most money is made; the structure is now and has always been before (at least since I have been old enough to notice it for the past 30+ years): 1. Make a product that gets some traction (make some noise, get some fake or real income) 2. Write, make videos, courses and products around and about how 1 became such a success and how someone can repeat this in 5 easy steps (which are pretty generic) and sell this for no, not $547, not $257, but a one time low of $167. Number 2 vastly overtakes 1 in revenue immediately, but you need more 1 products to fuel the (sometimes snake oil) business of 2. So every new hype, you make a 1 product, use your list from the previous 2 product to make traction for 1 and repeat the cycle. Make 100k to a few million$ every cycle and keep an eye on ‘the next thing’ to make sure you are ready and early. Many ‘open startups’ made (much) more money selling these 2 course/book products than what their startup actually tries to do. People want to make money doing nothing, not buy a subscription to your revolutionary ai powered todo app.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  The old cliche is still as true as it ever was: the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell tents and shovels.
  - KineticLensman 4y ago
    Whisky and wheelbarrows
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Shovels are actually useful though.
JauntTrooper 4y ago
It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam. Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I wonder if we’ll move back to small static online communities (as were popular 2 or so decades ago). PhpBB boards with tens of regulars all of whom you recognize.
  - clintavo 4y ago
    I think this is already happening. HN might be a sort of example, but other communities I’m in are much smaller
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      HN is already way larger than that. There is nobody on HN who knows everybody else either by nickname or IRL or any combination. It's 'mostly anonymous' with 'mostly people I don't know or recognize at all'.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      HN is only this way because of a focus on moderation to keep the place of going off the rails. HN itself has one of the best moderators I've seen that's been able to keep out of petty arguments that tend to infect and ruin forums. It's not something easily scalable at all. Part of the problem with being on a site like HN is we see everyone here bitching and groaning about how much 'big web' sucks and how we should get away with it, while missing that most of us here are also visiting that same big web with a few billion other people every day. I'll believe twitter/FB/etc is dying when I watch them turn off their servers for the last time.
      - epistemer 4y ago
        I don't think the lack of user pictures can be underestimated. No pictures and great moderation is basically the opposite of Instagram and I think exactly why real discussion takes place on here.
eric4smith 4y ago
Hustle bros were there since the beginning of time. Think about that. Every new thing for thousands of years someone always jumped on it for short term $$$ gain. The hustle bros have a firm place in the ecosystem and the internet has just put a magnifying glass on the movement and made the hustle faster and easier. Don’t hate the player (or the game), for they are as old as time.
- lizzardbraind 4y ago
  >There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. >The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer? >And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. - Terry Pratchett, The Truth
- groby_b 4y ago
  "for they are as old as time" really isn't a justification for not disliking the player or the game. Shit is also around since the beginning of time, and we still generally avoid rolling in it.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Its the naturalistic fallacy. Murder has also been around since the beginning of time...
- api 4y ago
  Dysentery is as old as time too.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  You can hate the player and the game. It’s not old as time. Capitalism and our current economic model as we know it isn’t as old as time. Yes there were always hustlers and con artists, but they’re not exactly well revered. Jumping into a space and f*king it up for short term game doesn’t deserve respect?
asddubs 4y ago
Reminds me of the excellent folding ideas video on these sort of scams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw In the video he talks about a course (which is a scam) selling a different scam of getting a ghostwriter to write a crappy book, getting someone else to record it, and then publishing it to audible to make money. which seemingly did work for a short period of time but no longer does. I guess this is the same sort of thing, except cutting out the ghostwriter.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Now various language models can do all those steps
  - wavefunction 4y ago
    I don't want to listen to unskilled voice-actors read a book to me. I definitely don't want some super awkward software voice that can't interpret the text to provide emotional color to their inflection. And this is not something I think is easily solvable by a 2023 AI startup.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      They're not trying to make something you want, they're trying to make something you'll buy.
    - asddubs 4y ago
      that's why it's a scam. I think the original thing was that audible would give bonuses for publishing books (it's mentioned in the video, but it's been a couple weeks since I watched it), so you would basically just make shitty books to get bonuses. of course this no longer works, and now there's also much more competition, so your crappy grift books aren't actually going to get you any meaningful amount of money, but the point is just to sell people a grift they can do that seems like it could work
kmeisthax 4y ago
I've already seen several videos talking about how you can use DALL-E or Midjourney to generate really samey-looking AI art and sell posters of it. This kills the whole art market by burying it under spam. Doesn't matter if you're drawing everything traditionally, using digital tools, or spending hours in front of Stable Diffusion to get it to spit out the image exactly the way you want. Your work will be buried under millions of hustlebros' spam images.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  My wife and I buy paintings. We either buy them from the artist or from galleries what we like. I don't really see how hustlebro spam images have any effect. I can see how CafePress type websites might be affected but at least for my taste I'm not worried!
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    For people who already have stable incomes from art through these channels, they're probably fine. For artists who need to get started, now they have a much harder time getting to that stable income channel.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Art, like technology, is not a great business to go into if you expect things to remain as they are.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        Its also a bad business to go in if you expect to make buck without being highly skilled. Obvious artists are more extreme, but try getting a job as an aspiring programmer with no degree or experience who is just starting to learn to program. I imagine it would be about as bleak as being an aspiring artist.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      I don't think the world owes aspiring artists a living. Yeah, life sucks, i wish we all lived in a star trek world without money, but in the mean time here we are.
trieste92 4y ago
Weird that I've never heard the phrase "hustle bro" before but know exactly who they're talking about before even reading
- raincole 4y ago
  I still quite don't get it. What are hustle bros exactly? Just people who chase short-term money?
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
    The subtitle of the article begins with: > The world of financial influencers promise viewers they can use ChatGPT to make big bucks with no effort. So financial influencers
  - JonathanFly 4y ago
    >I still quite don't get it. What are hustle bros exactly? Just people who chase short-term money? The YouTube thumbnails in the article might help. Before ChatGPT these videos would be about drop shipping and NFTs. https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:3840x2160/1200x675/filters:focal(1920x1080:1921x1081):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24403689/youtube_chatgpt_thumbnail_gore.jpg https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:3840x2160/1200x675/...
- 127 4y ago
  The bro addition is mostly sexist anti-male anti-community terminology designed to boost social signaling and communicate the orthodoxy's disapproval. Also holier-than-thou social psychology. Kind of serious, kind of joking here. Also a sign of the times where people who want to make money often get funneled into these types of very bleak pyramid games.
  - jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
    The bro addition is mostly because the people doing this are overwhelmingly bros.
  - 4y ago
sublinear 4y ago
... who cares? The quality is objectively crap and the AI is not going to get much better. We've definitely hit the point of diminishing returns. What could possibly be next for generated content? It's not going to magically develop actual creativity emerging from mere statistical plagiarism. We're afraid of the literal average of everything? Even as real human artists inevitably create cool new stuff, does it really matter that a bot can imitate the style later? Also, if a "hustle bro" (dumbest word of the year?) can do it, why not everyone's dog too? This is just more pointless fearmongering. The covid years are over and this nerve doesn't respond anymore. They need to let it go already.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  How are you so sure that this is as good as the AI will get?
  - sublinear 4y ago
    How are you so sure it will get better? AI has never been creative. It's only imitated existing work. Where is the creativity supposed to come from?
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      https://twitter.com/Calvinn_Hobbes/status/1309115486894989312 https://twitter.com/Calvinn_Hobbes/status/130911548689498931...
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I'm sure around 1920 or so you could have said "Computers have never ____" and you could put pretty much anything in that blank. Now the number of things that fit in that blank has shrunk significantly. If you do not believe the human mind is magic then there is very little that cannot go in that blank.
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        You don’t need to go back to the 1920s for that. I heard multiple experts in the 1980s say that if a computer can beat top Go players, surely they are intelligent like humans at that point. We keep moving the goalpost, but indeed that expectation for filling the blank goes up and yet it gets filled (and overshot by great stretches) a few years later.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I still have some hope as I see some group of people started to tackle this space in different angle. Stop approximation as a product, wrap approximation around logic and output the exact result. ChatGPT or Avatar AI is literally approximation as a product.
jay-barronville 4y ago
It’s been incredibly annoying seeing so many new grifters pop up seemingly out of nowhere as “AI experts” and the like, promising (and even guaranteeing) random folks that they’ll make millions jumping on this bandwagon. It reminds me of how insufferable so much of the get-rich-quick crypto content was in 2017 and then in 2020/2021 (even as a crypto believer myself). Make no mistake, GPT-3, ChatGPT, etc. will, for sure, mint a new generation of millionaires, but it very likely won’t be the random folks sitting on their couch eating ice cream while watching some random grifter’s content on YouTube. At best, the grifters will make lots of money selling courses (as usual) while the folks buying the courses will maybe break even. The real money will be made by the creative entrepreneurs and out-of-the-box thinkers who can come up with innovative uses of these technologies.
- waboremo 4y ago
  A non-tech one that was consistently pushed for a very long time and made a huge re-debut on tiktok (when it was popularized in the US) was dropshipping. Just like you said, some people definitely got richer; Shopify, Amazon, and Alibaba to name some. Companies that built tools around dropshipping profited as well. The big names people throw around for why the idea is totally going to make them rich, those people got richer too. Everyone else was slapped in the face with the reality that a lot of the big numbers they were fooled by were revenue, and just made someone who doesn't even dropship anymore $349 richer.
  - jay-barronville 4y ago
    Yup. I’m very familiar with the dropshipping shenanigans. Let’s just say I have some family members who were 1,000% convinced they’d be multimillionaires from that and are now back working their working-class jobs, mortgage and all, no millions . . .
  - jay-barronville 4y ago
    I remember watching an exposé of one guy in particular (I honestly can’t remember his name — it’s been years). He couldn’t prove that he had ever successfully dropshipped anything at all, yet he had raked in hundreds of thousands of $ via courses teaching folks how to dropship. Hilarious. I couldn’t tell if he was just a genius or if everyone paying for his courses were idiots . . .
Apocryphon 4y ago
The funny thing is, about a decade ago in 2011, there was a trend in the art world called "zombie formalism", which was "a trend for market-friendly abstract painting that took the dead formalist aesthetics of mid-century abstract expressionists and brought them halfway back to life." It lasted for four years apparently. Since then, an even wider movement that can be dubbed "zombie figuration" has taken up the art world in the last few years: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-bad-figurative-painting/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-bad-figurati... https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles%2Fdownward-spiral-taste-figures-images https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles%2Fdownward-spiral-t... So it seems like many popular art scenes were somewhat engaging in creating their own deluge of derivative, samey art, even before this ensuing AI wave.
rchaud 4y ago
What are the odds that a year or so ago, the influencers that are AI-pilled today were similarly all-in on Web3 and NFTs?
spaceman_2020 4y ago
As a former hustle bro, I can tell you that the only way to make money with AI is to either create an AI tool yourself, or spam.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GianFabien 4y ago
Won't Chat-GPT, DALL-E, etc stop being free if so many people flood it with masses of requests? Either they start charging to use these AI resources or embed advertising content - further polluting the quality of the generated output. As the granddaddy of hustlers, P.T. Barnum observed "there's a sucker born every minute".

134 points by georgehill 4y ago

While not surprising in the least, it is quite sad that all these schemes seemingly always come down to selling courses or affiliate links.

tluyben2 4y ago
This is where the most money is made; the structure is now and has always been before (at least since I have been old enough to notice it for the past 30+ years): 1. Make a product that gets some traction (make some noise, get some fake or real income) 2. Write, make videos, courses and products around and about how 1 became such a success and how someone can repeat this in 5 easy steps (which are pretty generic) and sell this for no, not $547, not $257, but a one time low of $167. Number 2 vastly overtakes 1 in revenue immediately, but you need more 1 products to fuel the (sometimes snake oil) business of 2. So every new hype, you make a 1 product, use your list from the previous 2 product to make traction for 1 and repeat the cycle. Make 100k to a few million$ every cycle and keep an eye on ‘the next thing’ to make sure you are ready and early. Many ‘open startups’ made (much) more money selling these 2 course/book products than what their startup actually tries to do. People want to make money doing nothing, not buy a subscription to your revolutionary ai powered todo app.
CamperBob2 4y ago
The old cliche is still as true as it ever was: the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell tents and shovels.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Whisky and wheelbarrows
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Shovels are actually useful though.

JauntTrooper 4y ago

It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam. Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.

bee_rider 4y ago
I wonder if we’ll move back to small static online communities (as were popular 2 or so decades ago). PhpBB boards with tens of regulars all of whom you recognize.
- clintavo 4y ago
  I think this is already happening. HN might be a sort of example, but other communities I’m in are much smaller
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    HN is already way larger than that. There is nobody on HN who knows everybody else either by nickname or IRL or any combination. It's 'mostly anonymous' with 'mostly people I don't know or recognize at all'.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    HN is only this way because of a focus on moderation to keep the place of going off the rails. HN itself has one of the best moderators I've seen that's been able to keep out of petty arguments that tend to infect and ruin forums. It's not something easily scalable at all. Part of the problem with being on a site like HN is we see everyone here bitching and groaning about how much 'big web' sucks and how we should get away with it, while missing that most of us here are also visiting that same big web with a few billion other people every day. I'll believe twitter/FB/etc is dying when I watch them turn off their servers for the last time.
    - epistemer 4y ago
      I don't think the lack of user pictures can be underestimated. No pictures and great moderation is basically the opposite of Instagram and I think exactly why real discussion takes place on here.

eric4smith 4y ago

Hustle bros were there since the beginning of time. Think about that. Every new thing for thousands of years someone always jumped on it for short term $$$ gain. The hustle bros have a firm place in the ecosystem and the internet has just put a magnifying glass on the movement and made the hustle faster and easier. Don’t hate the player (or the game), for they are as old as time.

lizzardbraind 4y ago
>There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. >The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer? >And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. - Terry Pratchett, The Truth
groby_b 4y ago
"for they are as old as time" really isn't a justification for not disliking the player or the game. Shit is also around since the beginning of time, and we still generally avoid rolling in it.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Its the naturalistic fallacy. Murder has also been around since the beginning of time...
api 4y ago
Dysentery is as old as time too.
vineyardmike 4y ago
You can hate the player and the game. It’s not old as time. Capitalism and our current economic model as we know it isn’t as old as time. Yes there were always hustlers and con artists, but they’re not exactly well revered. Jumping into a space and f*king it up for short term game doesn’t deserve respect?

asddubs 4y ago

Reminds me of the excellent folding ideas video on these sort of scams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw In the video he talks about a course (which is a scam) selling a different scam of getting a ghostwriter to write a crappy book, getting someone else to record it, and then publishing it to audible to make money. which seemingly did work for a short period of time but no longer does. I guess this is the same sort of thing, except cutting out the ghostwriter.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Now various language models can do all those steps
- wavefunction 4y ago
  I don't want to listen to unskilled voice-actors read a book to me. I definitely don't want some super awkward software voice that can't interpret the text to provide emotional color to their inflection. And this is not something I think is easily solvable by a 2023 AI startup.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    They're not trying to make something you want, they're trying to make something you'll buy.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    that's why it's a scam. I think the original thing was that audible would give bonuses for publishing books (it's mentioned in the video, but it's been a couple weeks since I watched it), so you would basically just make shitty books to get bonuses. of course this no longer works, and now there's also much more competition, so your crappy grift books aren't actually going to get you any meaningful amount of money, but the point is just to sell people a grift they can do that seems like it could work

kmeisthax 4y ago

I've already seen several videos talking about how you can use DALL-E or Midjourney to generate really samey-looking AI art and sell posters of it. This kills the whole art market by burying it under spam. Doesn't matter if you're drawing everything traditionally, using digital tools, or spending hours in front of Stable Diffusion to get it to spit out the image exactly the way you want. Your work will be buried under millions of hustlebros' spam images.

williamcotton 4y ago
My wife and I buy paintings. We either buy them from the artist or from galleries what we like. I don't really see how hustlebro spam images have any effect. I can see how CafePress type websites might be affected but at least for my taste I'm not worried!
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  For people who already have stable incomes from art through these channels, they're probably fine. For artists who need to get started, now they have a much harder time getting to that stable income channel.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Art, like technology, is not a great business to go into if you expect things to remain as they are.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Its also a bad business to go in if you expect to make buck without being highly skilled. Obvious artists are more extreme, but try getting a job as an aspiring programmer with no degree or experience who is just starting to learn to program. I imagine it would be about as bleak as being an aspiring artist.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I don't think the world owes aspiring artists a living. Yeah, life sucks, i wish we all lived in a star trek world without money, but in the mean time here we are.

trieste92 4y ago

Weird that I've never heard the phrase "hustle bro" before but know exactly who they're talking about before even reading

raincole 4y ago
I still quite don't get it. What are hustle bros exactly? Just people who chase short-term money?
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
  The subtitle of the article begins with: > The world of financial influencers promise viewers they can use ChatGPT to make big bucks with no effort. So financial influencers
- JonathanFly 4y ago
  >I still quite don't get it. What are hustle bros exactly? Just people who chase short-term money? The YouTube thumbnails in the article might help. Before ChatGPT these videos would be about drop shipping and NFTs. https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:3840x2160/1200x675/filters:focal(1920x1080:1921x1081):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24403689/youtube_chatgpt_thumbnail_gore.jpg https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:3840x2160/1200x675/...
127 4y ago
The bro addition is mostly sexist anti-male anti-community terminology designed to boost social signaling and communicate the orthodoxy's disapproval. Also holier-than-thou social psychology. Kind of serious, kind of joking here. Also a sign of the times where people who want to make money often get funneled into these types of very bleak pyramid games.
- jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
  The bro addition is mostly because the people doing this are overwhelmingly bros.
- 4y ago

sublinear 4y ago

... who cares? The quality is objectively crap and the AI is not going to get much better. We've definitely hit the point of diminishing returns. What could possibly be next for generated content? It's not going to magically develop actual creativity emerging from mere statistical plagiarism. We're afraid of the literal average of everything? Even as real human artists inevitably create cool new stuff, does it really matter that a bot can imitate the style later? Also, if a "hustle bro" (dumbest word of the year?) can do it, why not everyone's dog too? This is just more pointless fearmongering. The covid years are over and this nerve doesn't respond anymore. They need to let it go already.

Apocryphon 4y ago
How are you so sure that this is as good as the AI will get?
- sublinear 4y ago
  How are you so sure it will get better? AI has never been creative. It's only imitated existing work. Where is the creativity supposed to come from?
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/Calvinn_Hobbes/status/1309115486894989312 https://twitter.com/Calvinn_Hobbes/status/130911548689498931...
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I'm sure around 1920 or so you could have said "Computers have never ____" and you could put pretty much anything in that blank. Now the number of things that fit in that blank has shrunk significantly. If you do not believe the human mind is magic then there is very little that cannot go in that blank.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      You don’t need to go back to the 1920s for that. I heard multiple experts in the 1980s say that if a computer can beat top Go players, surely they are intelligent like humans at that point. We keep moving the goalpost, but indeed that expectation for filling the blank goes up and yet it gets filled (and overshot by great stretches) a few years later.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

I still have some hope as I see some group of people started to tackle this space in different angle. Stop approximation as a product, wrap approximation around logic and output the exact result. ChatGPT or Avatar AI is literally approximation as a product.

jay-barronville 4y ago

It’s been incredibly annoying seeing so many new grifters pop up seemingly out of nowhere as “AI experts” and the like, promising (and even guaranteeing) random folks that they’ll make millions jumping on this bandwagon. It reminds me of how insufferable so much of the get-rich-quick crypto content was in 2017 and then in 2020/2021 (even as a crypto believer myself). Make no mistake, GPT-3, ChatGPT, etc. will, for sure, mint a new generation of millionaires, but it very likely won’t be the random folks sitting on their couch eating ice cream while watching some random grifter’s content on YouTube. At best, the grifters will make lots of money selling courses (as usual) while the folks buying the courses will maybe break even. The real money will be made by the creative entrepreneurs and out-of-the-box thinkers who can come up with innovative uses of these technologies.

waboremo 4y ago
A non-tech one that was consistently pushed for a very long time and made a huge re-debut on tiktok (when it was popularized in the US) was dropshipping. Just like you said, some people definitely got richer; Shopify, Amazon, and Alibaba to name some. Companies that built tools around dropshipping profited as well. The big names people throw around for why the idea is totally going to make them rich, those people got richer too. Everyone else was slapped in the face with the reality that a lot of the big numbers they were fooled by were revenue, and just made someone who doesn't even dropship anymore $349 richer.
- jay-barronville 4y ago
  Yup. I’m very familiar with the dropshipping shenanigans. Let’s just say I have some family members who were 1,000% convinced they’d be multimillionaires from that and are now back working their working-class jobs, mortgage and all, no millions . . .
- jay-barronville 4y ago
  I remember watching an exposé of one guy in particular (I honestly can’t remember his name — it’s been years). He couldn’t prove that he had ever successfully dropshipped anything at all, yet he had raked in hundreds of thousands of $ via courses teaching folks how to dropship. Hilarious. I couldn’t tell if he was just a genius or if everyone paying for his courses were idiots . . .

Apocryphon 4y ago

The funny thing is, about a decade ago in 2011, there was a trend in the art world called "zombie formalism", which was "a trend for market-friendly abstract painting that took the dead formalist aesthetics of mid-century abstract expressionists and brought them halfway back to life." It lasted for four years apparently. Since then, an even wider movement that can be dubbed "zombie figuration" has taken up the art world in the last few years: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-bad-figurative-painting/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-bad-figurati... https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles%2Fdownward-spiral-taste-figures-images https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles%2Fdownward-spiral-t... So it seems like many popular art scenes were somewhat engaging in creating their own deluge of derivative, samey art, even before this ensuing AI wave.

rchaud 4y ago

What are the odds that a year or so ago, the influencers that are AI-pilled today were similarly all-in on Web3 and NFTs?

spaceman_2020 4y ago

As a former hustle bro, I can tell you that the only way to make money with AI is to either create an AI tool yourself, or spam.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GianFabien 4y ago

Won't Chat-GPT, DALL-E, etc stop being free if so many people flood it with masses of requests? Either they start charging to use these AI resources or embed advertising content - further polluting the quality of the generated output. As the granddaddy of hustlers, P.T. Barnum observed "there's a sucker born every minute".