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The AI Content Flippening
- slowmovintarget 3y agoFor those only interested in the definition of the new nonsense word: > "content flippening” — an event horizon when the majority of content you choose to consume is primarily AI generated/augmented rather than primarily human/manually produced I hope it isn't contagious... the word, that is. The proper word is threshold.
- krapp 3y agoI guess it's going to be the new "enshittification."
- dvh 3y agoIn the future the data from the pre-ai era will be treated like old steel from before the nuclear tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- eastbound 3y agoI’d certainly pay to have websites from pre-SEO era. In fact, I do: I buy books, recipes for example. But I hear soon books will be generated…
- htrp 3y agoI think there was a story yesterday with amazon limiting authors to 3 new book publications a day.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThe future is now. And it sucks.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoIIRC nuclear tainted steel is less of a concern in modern times. Perhaps AI content will become so normal and people so accustomed to spotting it that today's concern will become a footnote.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hooverd 3y agoFlippening is a word to yeet from your lexicon.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- slowmovintarget 3y agoUrge to create new programming language named "yeet" rising...
- itishappy 3y agohttps://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/struct.Yeet.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/struct.Yeet.html https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/96374 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/96374
- shwaj 3y agoI dunno, flippening seems as cromulent as most other neologisms.
- hooverd 3y agoOk, personally, I just don't like -ening neologisms. More like crappening!
- shwaj 3y agoCrappening is likewise cromulent, although I can see why you might prefer encrapifying.
- swyx 3y agocant help but notice that HN seems to like negative neologisms ("enshittification", "crappening") than positive ones. I would hope for a more technoptimistic, or at least technoneutral, crowd here.
- dgacmu 3y agoThe term was originally used to refer to the hypothetical time when the market cap of ethereum flipped to be higher than that of Bitcoin. (It was a little annoying then too).
- swyx 3y agoyes - i want to be clear that i'm not a crypto shill or anything but I do think the term evokes a landmark change that signals the end of a previously unchallenged dominance. hence repurposing it for this. i genuinely listen to HN Recap and PG Essays every single day now and if you asked me a year ago if I'd have any AI generated podcasts as part of my daily rotation I would have laughed at you. in the meantime - the human podcasting industry is in decline. Spotify is shutting down their stuff (good riddance). NPR laid off a bunch of their people. Rogan and All-In have gone mostly political. etc etc. it is going to be hard to beat machines at staying on topic and probably mostly ad free because of how cheap and consistent they can be. seems reasonable to draw the lines out and ask when and if AI content takes over... I like thought provoking questions like that, even if, like eth > btc, it never actually comes to pass. It's a thought exercise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jprete 3y ago> As swyx observed, the “content flippening” — an event horizon when the majority of content you choose to consume is primarily AI generated/augmented rather than primarily human/manually produced — has now gone from unthinkable to possible. This is pure self-promotional advertising copy. Did anyone who thought about this for more than ten seconds believe such an event was "unthinkable"?
- mkaic 3y agoI think a very large majority of people would have deemed it unthinkable 100 years ago.
- lukev 3y agoI still think it's unthinkable. "Consuming content" is fundamentally an act of communication. If there isn't another entity with intelligence and intent to communicate with, I'm not really interested. Although the author gives themself an escape hatch with "augmented" because it seems extremely evident that almost everything will have some small level of "AI" input (arguably it already does... spellcheckers have been around for quite a while.) I very much believe LMMs are a tremendously important technology with a dizzying array of applications... but generating "content" for human consumption is pretty much last on my list. I already can't read all the books or watch all the excellent movies made by humans!
- electrondood 3y ago"Consuming content" is fundamentally an act of boredom and addiction to novel stimuli, in increasingly shorter and shorter forms. Just as the current generation of youth have much shorter attention spans because of growing up with endless scrolling feeds of bullshit, the next generation will consume AI-generated drivel for no reason other than it's novel.
- lukev 3y agoI was being charitable and interpreting it as referring to any type of media usage. Agreed that the race to the bottom of low-quality stimulus content is a (probably separate) problem, since that trend was well underway long before generative AI.
- howon92 3y agoThanks for the interview! All I think about these days is how I would build a moat in the AI space and was excited to learn what Youssef thought. This is a summary of that topic from the interview. Do you guys think this will actually help them build a moat around their product? --- - Youssef argued their moat is focusing on the specific use case of podcasting and building a product tailored to that, rather than just being a wrapper around underlying TTS APIs. - While the APIs exist and can serve many use cases, they aren't specifically built to serve podcasting optimally like Wondercraft is. - By being opinionated in their approach and selecting the best TTS engine for podcasting, Wondercraft aims to provide a better experience than what could be achieved through generic engines alone. - They are building out templates and defaults tailored to different podcast styles (e.g. interview format) to simplify the process. - Network effects from high podcast download volumes on platforms can also contribute to the moat by establishing Wondercraft as the go-to tool in the space. - First-mover advantage in a new niche like AI-generated podcasting gives them time to refine their product before competitors emerge focusing on the same use case. - Customization options and integration with other tools/workflows could deepen customers' investment in Wondercraft's platform over time.
- colesantiago 3y agoWhat moat is there if Facebook, Google, Amazon, StabilityAI, OpenAI, Apple and Spotify does all of what Wondercraft does?
- howon92 3y agoWell that’s my question. Adobe did exactly that to eliminate many companies and projects over night with Firefly
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swyx 3y agogreat summary and recap. I'll make sure Youssef sees and comments to give you direct thoughts.
- keiferski 3y agoI don’t really buy the narrative that people will be only consuming AI content in the future. Maybe the content will be optimized and edited by AI, but there’s a reason that hosts like Joe Rogan are popular: because people like people. No one wants to listen to two robots having a conversation. I think instead we’ll see an advantage for content creators that are charismatic and have brands built around their personality.
- lostmsu 3y agoWhy do you think any of this would never get done by AI?
- keiferski 3y agoHow soon do you think AI will be able to livestream a conversation between 2-5 participants and mimic their personalities, tics, and unpredictable conversational topics so well that they pass as humans? Edit: let’s assume this becomes possible in a century. Easy solution: a verification system that ensures that the official Joe Rogan Show is authenticated by the real Joe Rogan. No one will care about a computer copy version.
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoQ1 of 2024, unironically
- paulryanrogers 3y agoThere's already an AI generated, fake episode of Rogan's show: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=meu0CoYv3z8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=meu0CoYv3z8
- swyx 3y agohi HN! excited to share this interview with Wondercraft, certainly one of the youngest startups we've had on the pod — but we think you might be interested because their Launch HN went over so well with you all (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37088087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37088087) . I also enjoy HN Recap every day and was excited to dig into the behind the scenes. as a content creator I am also very intrigued by the idea that this AI podcaster is beating me at my own game with less effort, and that I'm actually enjoying listening to his podcasts despite them being mostly AI generated. hope you enjoy!
- falsenapkin 3y ago> Every AI Engineer parent we know of is already hacking together bedtime story generator apps for their kids I was looking for a gift for my toddler niece recently as a 30+ man who has never really looked for kids things before. Going over the shelves at a local shop, I found a book I had forgotten about for probably 25 years now. I teared up a bit thinking about my childhood bedroom and the nightly story time with my mom reading this among other books. When I visited my sister, she asked me to do story time with her daughter and I was clueless but happy to. I asked her to pick out a story to read and she dug into her shelves pulling out more stories I had not thought about in ages and even recognized a couple of them were the worn books from my own shelves, books that our mom had read to my sister first and likely took home from the library she worked at when they had become too worn. The book she settled on was one I was unfamiliar with (Miss Rumphius) but as I read it I realized it was describing a somewhat fictionalized version of a story known to some Mainers about how we ended up with such a population of lupines. It was surreal seeing all the illustrations of coastal Maine towns (I live in one, my sister is far from here) and then realizing the story the book was telling. I look forward to the day she's old enough that I can bring her to lupines growing out in a town like that and make that connection with her. It pains me to read quotes like the above. To think there will be kids who won't have shared human experiences of bedtime stories because their parents put them on some infinitely generating AI nonsense. Maybe I'm yelling at clouds, maybe I'm a luddite, maybe kids love and benefit from new stories every time. I dunno. I'm no child psychologist but I have noticed kids often like to consume the same thing repeatedly as well, we watched the same episode of Mickey Mouse like 4 times and then spent the rest of the day acting out a specific component of the episode. I'm trying to keep an open mind but a lot of this sounds like destruction of culture in pursuit of "new" but why?
- swyx 3y agoand i'm sure the generation before us bemoans the destruction of culture in the face of youtube and tiktok and instagram and whatnot. my baby sister grew up on teletubbies, which i regarded as vile trash inferior to my sesame street. she turned out more than fine - its quite safe to say she's better socially adjusted than I am. i think humanity will always have some shared myths and legends that we'll all like to share and i'm certainly hoping that lives on. but there's a lot of room for net new. and you just need to see the delight in a kids' face once - when you incorporate a suggestion by them into a story, or a drawing, or literally whatever - to want to give that joy to them again and again. theres room for net new, and room for shared history. not zero sum here.
- RetroTechie 3y ago"The effects could be generationally skewed as well. Every AI Engineer parent we know of is already hacking together bedtime story generator apps for their kids" That's just sad. From my childhood I remember a (big!) book called something like "1001 Tales from the Orient". Think Aladdin & the wonder lamp, and many stories from similar (ancient) sources. There were a few such books around the house. More fairytales than my sister's & my childhood lasted. Great bedtime stuff. And then people would go for AI generated content? Which most likely draws from books like this. Or Disney stuff, which in turn draws from similar sources. But all mixed up in weird, non-traceable ways. Why would you feed your kids such crap, when those originals are up for grabs, free or costing pennies? Fairytales are fine as they are. They don't become better by mixing up in random ways like food colorants in a cake recipe!
- chrismatheson 3y agoAs a parent I have looked into this precisely because there is so much autogenerated crap. With some form of AI by my side I can author my own content to a (hopefully and subjectively) higher standard. I can tailor stories to my Childs life events or school curriculum, I can include characters based on real world friends, aquantences, pets etc. Im currently working on something along the lines of "Detective Rosies & faithful canine sidekick Rufus, the mystery of the broken lamp at grandmas" trying to use this type of stuff to help them feel closer to relations who live far away. Tools are all about how you use them.