I'd take this more seriously if it wasn't regularly punctuated by disgusting little slop images

Fully automated luxury communism etc etc.

  The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.

That is a gross mischaracterization of the bot situation, dropping absolute loads of essential nuance on the ground for a simple "50/50" number. Sorry if that sounds pedantic, but I find this to be insanely important; if you think fake news is bad now, wait until literally any other human might just be a bot so you can dismiss their points and/or perspective out of hand.

>Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated.

Traffic != AI generated content.

I call it "Drinking your own piss." America is drinking its own piss.

>There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

This isn't even close to true and it's kind of the central thesis of this article.

Saudi Aramco has consistently been a $2tn company in the oil market.

Walmart is a $1tn-ish company focusing on a fraction of US retail.

It also ignores the idea that the economy is not zero sum and companies create their own market/economic value all the time.

Turn One (companies use AI and fire workers), Turn Two (fired workers lack income and consumption slows to a trickle), and Turn Three (the companies using AI discover they just collectively killed their customer base).

That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.

Two issues:

What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.

The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).

Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.

So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.

Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,

Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,

Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,

Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.

The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?

We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.

This starts with a claim that last year over half the content on the internet was created by AI, and links to a source. The source makes no such claim, rather, over half of internet traffic is from bots. Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.

I stopped reading at that point.

> It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop.

AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?

Am I a bot?