It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it’s replicable at scale, or that it’s even producing the same quality as the product they’ve actually been selling.
I think that’s well said. The shit that comes out of these things is often “good enough” and until there’s real reckonings with that not actually being good enough, it’s gonna keep going.
I’m waiting on (almost hoping for one sooner rather than later) a large systemic failure that nobody can ignore. Like stock market collapse due to AI agent fuckery or a bridge failure because the engineer just asked ChatGPT to hallucinate a bridge and assume it was good enough.
If not, I wonder if we’ll just have a slow degeneration until nothing makes sense and there’s trash piles everywhere.
Go away, 'baitin
If anything it might get a lot of non-technical managers found out.
Compare AI to clothing. Clothing did this shift decades ago. It actually did it twice.
My grandma once put it like this: “In the 60s, no TV presenter would be ok with showing up with an ill-fitting suit. Nowadays that’s normal.”
We collectively descided to move away from perfectly-fitting tailored clothes to ill-fitting mass-produced off-the-shelf clothing because it’s way cheaper.
And then there was the second shift from off-the-shelf clothing using quality materials to off-the-shelf clothing using shit materials, and as a society we too accepted that. More trash for badly-fitting fast fashion.
I fear AI will do much of the same. We already saw AI translation, and its predecessor algorithmic translation, replace human translators in areas where it doesn’t matter that much. Amazon listings in non-English languages have been an utter mess for a long time, but now we are getting the same translation mess on the home pages of major brands (e.g. Samsung or Google). It’s “good enough” to not harm sales, so we now have auto-translation instead of a quality human translation.
The same is happening right now with music, apps, games, websites, Youtube videos and so on.
Is any of that on-par with quality content created by quality professionals? No, by far not. But it’s “good enough” for most people.
I think a good example of this happened at my kid’s school’s summer party. They always have a segment there where they let the kids sing and/or dance to a bunch of songs. Usually it’s some pop music.
This time they had one AI generated song that was about the last school year of the departing class. It mentioned people and activities that were relevant to the kids. It talked about the school camp they had that year and about going skiing together.
Was it good music? Hell no. It kept mixing styles switching between hard rock, reggae, movie trailer and a few other undefinable styles every few lines, it didn’t manage to keep a consistent tone or anything. Musically, it was certainly the worst song of the day and certainly not something that anyone with some understanding of music would want to listen to again. Any decent musician would have been able to create something much better.
But the school doesn’t have the budget to hire a musician for something as irrelevant as a song for the school’s summer party, so this was the best song specifically composed for this school ever. It was the only one so far. And the kids really liked having their experiences memoralized in a song, no matter how bad it was.
I’m kinda ambivalent on AI. I hate it when it degrades the quality of something that we should have gotten in better quality anyway. I hate it when it’s used to fire people who could have done a better job.
I don’t think it’s all that bad when it enables people who could have never created what they wanted without it, and who would have never hired someone to do it for them anyway. Without AI, the school would have just not done that song.
“The one time I can use my voice to speak up, I will add my voice to the echo chamber that says nothing”
Wow, he must be very proud
I hope you read the fine print, ya turd
What’s the fine print?
I’m a big fan of his, but I’m also not sure he’s the right person to judge what a mentally healthy, well-adjusted individual should act like.
He seems mentally perfectly healthy. Weird is not unhealthy!
Weird is totally healthy. You know what’s not healthy? Being normal. That’s fucking weird.
I’m always shocked to hear him speak about stuff because he sounds so perfectly well-adjusted, empathetic, and normal. lol that’ll show us to judge someone who makes an ascii game all night every night and has plywood over his window so he can sleep all day!
Well he’s managed to turn what he likes into a career and is financially stable, so I think he’s doing fine.
“It just reminds me of like a fucking Dead Kennedys song or something. It’s just the same old shit. I mean, they laid off my dad from the sewage treatment plant because they didn’t understand what his job was, and he was the computer guy there, and then they don’t have a company anymore, so it’s like it’s the same shit.”
Tarn nails it as usual.
Tarn is a national treasure and he must be protected at all costs
definitely of the highest quality
Tarn seems like such a genuine, nice guy. He gets it.
