4 ms·

Meh the internet was already ruined by over-commercialisation (eg Google, Facebook, tiktok, Microsoft etc). Or for a much better term, enshittification. There i

Meh the internet was already ruined by over-commercialisation (eg Google, Facebook, tiktok, Microsoft etc). Or for a much better term, enshittification. There isn't much room left to make it worse. AI is just pointing out the shitpile of junk it had already become and making it more noticeable because it's all glossy and new, rather than just slowly deteriorating over time like the regular Google and YouTube. However, the bottom line of this YouTube video is not really about the internet at all. It's about artists which are being driven out of the market by skilless people using AI trained on those artists' work. This is a good point. And also, a worry. What's going to happen to the next generations of AI? Once there's no actual artists left AI will be trained on other crappy AI output and worsen as a result. This is also the case for LLMs as the sources of LLM training are being flooded with LLM output.

EGreg 2y ago
Every time I see anything negative about AI posted on HN, I expect someone to show up and say “no big deal, everything that’s becoming garbage was already garbage on the internet and in the real world, AI just xyz, and scale is irrelevant, nothing to see here”. I almost want to collect these replies and look at them years later LOL Yes yes, before AI every site was flooded with weird copies of a photo and song, and not labeled as AI. I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Well, no. I do agree that AI is a net negative the way it's being applied now. I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the negative effect of AI, I just think we shouldn't underestimate how bad the internet already was the last few years. In fact this site is one of the last few beacons of light in that cesspool as far as I'm concerned. I just mean the internet had already started its inevitable decline. The problem with AI is that it can enshittify a lot further than that. But the path was already set with or without AI. > I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts. Yeah because that's exactly what reddit, twitter, stackoverflow already were. Tons and tons of low-effort karmawhoring. This was really already the case before AI. I already turned my back on all of those because it became too much. AI will make it much worse but i don't think it's the root cause. It's an enabler, a tool but not the cause. The biggest issue is the enshittification model behind the big sites that incentivices this behaviour. After all, if there's nothing to be gained nobody would do it. The problem is people want to do these insane things. We can make AI "responsible" all we want but we'll never solve that until we remove this incentive. Personally I also think AI is a net negative the way it's used now, though i can see a few niche usecases where it can really make life better. For example it can really translate much better due to context understanding. It can summarise. It can eventually probably help with deadly boring excel work (though right now Microsoft copilot really sucks at its excel functionality)
- squigz 2y ago
  > every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts. This is quite the claim. Certainly doesn't seem to align with my experience. Do you have a source?
  - EGreg 2y ago
    I was being sarcastic, but this claim is made by people downplaying the problems with AI
scotty79 2y ago
Remember how electronic synthetizers ended musicians? Any idiot could "play" guitar without even knowing how to hold it.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I don't think that's the same thing. One still needs skill to play one (though it's a keyboard skill rather than a strings one) and they don't even really sound like a guitar. I've actually tried it because I can't play a real guitar due to the finger pressure needed to push the strings. But learning to play a keyboard is not easy either and I simply have no talent for music. With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result. I know it's not really generating. It's more like a smart copy paste combinator. But it's very low effort for the operator. As a result it's not really even their work as they hardly took part in creating it. It's already leading to a huge amount of low effort mediocre content flooding the market that real artists will have to compete with. This was the point made in the video.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result. With photography, no skills are needed; you just point the camera and take a picture. Right?
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      No. But if you had an assistant to take the photo, you wouldn't need those skills. Generative AI is more like that. You could use Dall-E 3 for this scenario (it's quite good at it actually).
      - EGreg 2y ago
        But now the art is in telling the assistant your words! In the future, we'll be outsourcing all our work to smart agents. I have already been outsourcing most of my own work, money generation, and money spending to Elon Musk. He mostly does a good job working for me. So I can focus on what I want instead.

EGreg 2y ago

Every time I see anything negative about AI posted on HN, I expect someone to show up and say “no big deal, everything that’s becoming garbage was already garbage on the internet and in the real world, AI just xyz, and scale is irrelevant, nothing to see here”. I almost want to collect these replies and look at them years later LOL Yes yes, before AI every site was flooded with weird copies of a photo and song, and not labeled as AI. I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts.

wkat4242 2y ago
Well, no. I do agree that AI is a net negative the way it's being applied now. I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the negative effect of AI, I just think we shouldn't underestimate how bad the internet already was the last few years. In fact this site is one of the last few beacons of light in that cesspool as far as I'm concerned. I just mean the internet had already started its inevitable decline. The problem with AI is that it can enshittify a lot further than that. But the path was already set with or without AI. > I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts. Yeah because that's exactly what reddit, twitter, stackoverflow already were. Tons and tons of low-effort karmawhoring. This was really already the case before AI. I already turned my back on all of those because it became too much. AI will make it much worse but i don't think it's the root cause. It's an enabler, a tool but not the cause. The biggest issue is the enshittification model behind the big sites that incentivices this behaviour. After all, if there's nothing to be gained nobody would do it. The problem is people want to do these insane things. We can make AI "responsible" all we want but we'll never solve that until we remove this incentive. Personally I also think AI is a net negative the way it's used now, though i can see a few niche usecases where it can really make life better. For example it can really translate much better due to context understanding. It can summarise. It can eventually probably help with deadly boring excel work (though right now Microsoft copilot really sucks at its excel functionality)
squigz 2y ago
> every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts. This is quite the claim. Certainly doesn't seem to align with my experience. Do you have a source?
- EGreg 2y ago
  I was being sarcastic, but this claim is made by people downplaying the problems with AI

scotty79 2y ago

Remember how electronic synthetizers ended musicians? Any idiot could "play" guitar without even knowing how to hold it.

wkat4242 2y ago
I don't think that's the same thing. One still needs skill to play one (though it's a keyboard skill rather than a strings one) and they don't even really sound like a guitar. I've actually tried it because I can't play a real guitar due to the finger pressure needed to push the strings. But learning to play a keyboard is not easy either and I simply have no talent for music. With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result. I know it's not really generating. It's more like a smart copy paste combinator. But it's very low effort for the operator. As a result it's not really even their work as they hardly took part in creating it. It's already leading to a huge amount of low effort mediocre content flooding the market that real artists will have to compete with. This was the point made in the video.
- squigz 2y ago
  > With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result. With photography, no skills are needed; you just point the camera and take a picture. Right?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    No. But if you had an assistant to take the photo, you wouldn't need those skills. Generative AI is more like that. You could use Dall-E 3 for this scenario (it's quite good at it actually).
    - EGreg 2y ago
      But now the art is in telling the assistant your words! In the future, we'll be outsourcing all our work to smart agents. I have already been outsourcing most of my own work, money generation, and money spending to Elon Musk. He mostly does a good job working for me. So I can focus on what I want instead.