3 ms·

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We sho

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

graemep 4mo ago
> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.
- an0malous 4mo ago
  I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC company, I was explicitly told to stop working on vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily change a user’s email address through unprotected admin endpoints. Ten years ago I would’ve gotten a raise for this. We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
  - vinyl7 4mo ago
    > We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore. I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.
    - graemep 4mo ago
      Its short termism. its the same throughout the west and beyond. The markets want returns on a one or two year period, not long term investment. Executive pay is almost always tied to short term profits and share prices.
      - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
        Yeah, it's the perversion of capitalism known as publicly traded companies. Once you start noticing private companies (like some restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees better and serve their customers better than the publicly traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend. Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do "capitalism".
        graemep 4mo ago
        Someone who is trying to build a business they can sell when they retire, or that they might leave to their kids, thinks on a completely different time scale. Smaller businesses are also run more by personal judgement and relationships than by rules and procedures.
    - soraminazuki 4mo ago
      [dead]
jazz9k 4mo ago
This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads. I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.
- foobarbecue 4mo ago
  I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows details of something you know well -- a place you've been, out a hobby or sport you do. I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawaiian-waves-surf-dream-i-wall-decor-set-metal-cbup6901.html https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai... I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf. More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.
- pc86 4mo ago
  I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't. There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
  - watwut 4mo ago
    > There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh. Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying. The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.
vrganj 4mo ago
The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs. Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.
- pc86 4mo ago
  This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
  - vrganj 4mo ago
    > Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
    - pc86 4mo ago
      You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
      - vrganj 4mo ago
        To quote the article: > Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
      - philipwhiuk 4mo ago
        The job of software engineering is more or less literally to automate every other job. If there are no software engineers it's because everything is or has been automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still software engineering to do and your argument collapses.
avaer 4mo ago
The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag. AI is really good at making things that look like they work. This is a steelman of your argument.
- onraglanroad 4mo ago
  Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.
  - ldng 4mo ago
    Right. But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?
    - jason_oster 4mo ago
      They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.
      - ldng 4mo ago
        It took a VERY VERY long time for these replacement products to appear.
  - sarchertech 4mo ago
    My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.
    - jason_oster 4mo ago
archagon 4mo ago
Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend. For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice. Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun. Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).

graemep 4mo ago

> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.

an0malous 4mo ago
I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC company, I was explicitly told to stop working on vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily change a user’s email address through unprotected admin endpoints. Ten years ago I would’ve gotten a raise for this. We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
- vinyl7 4mo ago
  > We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore. I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.
  - graemep 4mo ago
    Its short termism. its the same throughout the west and beyond. The markets want returns on a one or two year period, not long term investment. Executive pay is almost always tied to short term profits and share prices.
    - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
      Yeah, it's the perversion of capitalism known as publicly traded companies. Once you start noticing private companies (like some restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees better and serve their customers better than the publicly traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend. Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do "capitalism".
      - graemep 4mo ago
        Someone who is trying to build a business they can sell when they retire, or that they might leave to their kids, thinks on a completely different time scale. Smaller businesses are also run more by personal judgement and relationships than by rules and procedures.
  - soraminazuki 4mo ago
    [dead]

jazz9k 4mo ago

This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads. I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.

foobarbecue 4mo ago
I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows details of something you know well -- a place you've been, out a hobby or sport you do. I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawaiian-waves-surf-dream-i-wall-decor-set-metal-cbup6901.html https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai... I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf. More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.
pc86 4mo ago
I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't. There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
- watwut 4mo ago
  > There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh. Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying. The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.

vrganj 4mo ago

The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs. Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.

pc86 4mo ago
This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
- vrganj 4mo ago
  > Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
  - pc86 4mo ago
    You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
    - vrganj 4mo ago
      To quote the article: > Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
    - philipwhiuk 4mo ago
      The job of software engineering is more or less literally to automate every other job. If there are no software engineers it's because everything is or has been automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still software engineering to do and your argument collapses.

avaer 4mo ago

The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag. AI is really good at making things that look like they work. This is a steelman of your argument.

onraglanroad 4mo ago
Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.
- ldng 4mo ago
  Right. But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?
  - jason_oster 4mo ago
    They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.
    - ldng 4mo ago
      It took a VERY VERY long time for these replacement products to appear.
- sarchertech 4mo ago
  My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.
  - jason_oster 4mo ago

archagon 4mo ago

Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend. For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.

mschuster91 4mo ago
> Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice. Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun. Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.

bigstrat2003 4mo ago

> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly. How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).