What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.

I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1].

This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.

But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306

No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor.

Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones.

(I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)

AI will probably pass that test. But art is about experience and communicating more subtle things that we humans experience. AI will not be out in society being a person and gaining experience to train on. So if we're not writing it somewhere for it to regurgitate... It will always feel lacking in the subtlety of a real human writer. It depends on us creating content with context in order to mimic someone that can create those stories.

EDIT: As in, it can make really good derivative works. But it will always lag behind a human that has been in real life situations of the time and experienced being a human throughout them. It won't be able to hit the subtle notes that we crave in art.

Today’s models are tuned to output the average quality of their corpus.

This could change with varying results.

What is average quality? For some it’s a massive upgrade. For others it’s a step down. For the experienced it’s seeing through it.

[flagged]

> The issue with AI art is that it lacks intentional content. I think people like art because it is a sort of conversation between the creator and the viewer.

Intent is in the eye of the beholder.

I think they are evolving differently. Some very old cgi holds up because they invested a lot of money to make it so. Then they tried to make it cheaper and people started complaining because the output was worse than all prior options.

I think the first HP movie was more magical than the latter ones as they felt too "Marvel CGI" for me.

Marvel movies have become tiresome for me, too much CGI that does not tell any interesting story. Old animated Disney movies are more rewatchable.

The equivalent is the massive cost of CGI and LLMs in comparison to the lackluster end result.

Now they just make the whole scene dark and you can't see anything. Saves money on CGI though.

It's missing random flaws. Often the noise has patternd as a result of the diffusion or generation process.

Yeah if you look at many of the top content creators, their appeal often has very little to do with production value, and is deliberately low tech and informal.

I guess AI tools can eventually become more human-like in terms of demeanor, mood, facial expressions, personality, etc. but this is a long long way from a photorealistic video.

The wonder of Bach goes much deeper than just the aesthetic qualities of his music. His genius almost forces one to reckon with his historical context and wonder, how did he do it? Why did he do it? What made it all possible? Then there is the incredible influence that he had. It is easy to forget that music theory as we know it today was not formalized in his day. The computer programs that simulate the kind of music he made are based on that theory that he understood intuitively and wove into his music and was later revealed through diligent study. Everyone who studies Bach learns something profound and can feel both a kinship for his humanity and also an alienation from his seemingly impossible genius. He is one of the most mysterious figures in human history and one could easily spend their entire life primarily studying just his music (and that of his descendants). From that perspective, computer generated music in his style is just a leaf on the tree, but Bach himself is the seed.

> These people haven't suffered from the fact that mass production of media is cheap, they've benefited from it.

Maybe? This really depends on your value system. Every moment that you are focused on how you look on camera and trying to optimize an extractive algorithm is a moment you aren't focused on creating the best music that you can in that moment. If the goal is maximizing profit to ensure survival, perhaps they are thriving. Put another way, if these people were free to create music in any context, would they choose content creation on social media? I know I wouldn't, but I also am sympathetic to the economic imperatives.

I am a Bach fiend and the problem is BWV 1 to 1080.

Why would I listen to algorithmic Bach compositions when there are so many of Bach's own work I have never listened to?

Even if you did get bored of all JS music, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach has over 1000 works himself.

There are also many genius baroque music composers outside the Bach family.

This is true of any composer really. Any classical composer that the average person has heard of has an immense catalog of works compared to modern recording artists.

I would say I have probably not even listened to half the works of all my favorite composers because it is such a huge amount of music. There is no need for some kind of classical music style LORA.

That's interesting, because after ElevenLabs launched their music generation I decided I really quite want to spent some time to have it generate background tracks for me to have on while working.

I don't know the name of any of the artists whose music I listened to over the last week because it does not matter to me. What mattered was that it was unobtrusive and fit my general mood. So I have a handful of starting points that I stream music "similar to". I never care about looking up the tracks, or albums, or artists.

I'm sure lots of people think like you, but I also think you underestimate how many contexts there are where people just don't care.

Authenticity and sincerity are very important. When you can fake those, you've got it made.

Totally agree. Nolan is a perfectionists though, so I don’t think he could let himself go for broke on the actual boom boom

It's kinda hilarious to see "simple task ... like translation". If you are familiar with the history of the field, or if you remember what automated translation looked like even just 15 years ago, it should be obvious that it's not simple at all.

If it were simple, we wouldn't need neural nets for it - we'd just code the algorithm directly. Or, at least, we'd be able to explain exactly how they work by looking at the weights. But now that we have our Babelfish, we still don't know how it really works in details. This is ipso facto evidence that the task is very much not simple.

I use AI as a tool to make digital art but I don't make "AI Art".

Imperfection is not the problem with "AI Art". The problem is that it is really hard to not get the models to produce the same visual motifs and cliches. People can spot AI art so easy because of the motifs.

I think midjourney took this to another level with their human feedback. It became harder and harder to not produce the same visual motifs in the images to the point it is basically useless for me now.

> any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct

I hope you're right, but when I think about all those lawyers caught submitting unproofread LLM output to a judge... I'm not sure humankind is wise enough to avoid the slopification.

Isn't "But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills." only true if the false positive rate of the verifier is not much higher than the failure rate of the AI? At some point it's like asking a human to double check a calculator

> But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct.

The usual solution is to specify one language as binding, with that language taking priority if there turns out to be discrepancies between the multiple version.

You might still need humans in the loop for many things, but it can still have a profound effect if the work that used to be done by ten people can now be done by two or three. In the sectors that you mention, legal, graphic design, translation, that might be a conservative estimate.

There are bound to be all kinds of complicated sociopolitical effects, and as you say there is a backlash against obvious AI slop, but what about when teams of humans working with AI become more skillful at hiding that?

This is not inherent to AI, but how the AI models were recently trained (by preference agreement of many random users). Look for the latest Krea / Black Forest Labs paper on AI style. The "AI look" can be removed.

Songs right now are terrible. For the videos, things are going to be very different once people can create full movies in their computers. Many will have access to the ability to create movies, and a few will be very good, and this will likely change many things. Btw this stupid "AI look" is only transient and is nowhere needed. It will be fixed, and AI images/videos generation will be impossible to stop.

Ive made a ton of songs I enjoy with suno. Theyre not the greatest, but theyre definitely not the worst either.

I mean, test after test have shown that the vast, vast majority of humans are woefully unable to distinguish good AI art made by SOTA models from human art, and in many/most cases actively prefer it.

Maybe you’re a gentleman of such discerningly superior taste that you can always manage to identify the spark of human creativity that eludes the rest of us. Or maybe you’ve just told yourself you hate it and therefore you say you always do. I dunno.

Of course, your opinion may be subject to selection bias (i.e., you are only judging the art that you became aware was AI generated).

As someone whose native language isn't English, I disagree. SOTA models are scary good at translations, at least for some languages. They do make mistakes, but at this point it's the kind of mistake that someone who is non-native but still highly proficient in the language might make - very subtle word order issues or word choices that betray that the translator is still thinking in another language (which for LLMs almost always tends to be English because of its dominance in the training set).

I also disagree that it's "not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality". I have translated large chunks of books into languages I know, and the results are often better than what commercial translators do.

>This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea

We've come a long ways to that goal. The amount of work both economic and domestic that humans do has dropped dramatically.

And it's very similar to "slaves will do all the work" which was actually possible but never happened.

There are a number of reasons you might not be able to.

Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.

Turning your mind to something doesn’t automatically lead to producing high quality synthetic analysis?

It doesn’t even seem relevant how good you are at step 1 for something so many steps later.