| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 days ago |
| The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time. |
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| ▲ | fulafel 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| It all started going wrong with the printing press. |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions. Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes. | | |
| ▲ | fulafel 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc. But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative... | | |
| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again. | | |
| ▲ | fulafel 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It was the other way around. See eg https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-a... - "In 1843 alone 14,000 new works were published in Germany, close to the publication rate today in per capita terms." .. "Publishers knew that once a manuscript was out in public it could be cheaply copied by other printing press owners, so instead they sought out new manuscripts in pursuit of a first mover advantage on publishing. In addition, they created fancy special editions for wealthy customers to differentiate their product from what other printers could easily copy with mass market paperbacks." | | |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift. What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect. Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect. |
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| ▲ | oblio 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Scale matters. We're probably producing 100x content than we were making in the 1990s and 1 billion x more than in the 1690s. We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x. | | | |
| ▲ | uncircle 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Rousseau speaks of this. | |
| ▲ | palmotea 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >> The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time. > It all started going wrong with the printing press. Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop. |
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| ▲ | benoau 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands. Would we be better off? I doubt it. |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count? It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usable than if it was cobbled together with default bootstrap widgets, which is how it would have been done 2+ years ago. If an app needs a designer enough to not be feasible without one, AI isn’t going to replace the designer in that process. It just makes the author feel cool. | | |
| ▲ | benoau 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count? Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one. Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go on a long sidequest to acquire that knowledge. | | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You think vibe coding web apps, and by proxy most other coding, will pay anything more than whatever the cheapest developer in Vietnam is willing to charge for it? I definitely don’t think so. AI is killing the labor market for all of these skills. Right now it can only actually replace the lowest end of both fields, but as people upskill trying to outrun it (and then those above them, and then those above them,) and the tools get better, most of the market will get flooded and all of our pay will drop off a cliff. If ideas are so cheap to execute that anyone can do it, and everything is apparently fair use if you pass it through an NN somehow, then anyone can copy it, just as easily, and that will be a FAR more profitable business model. If that’s true, then once again, the only people with successful products are the ones that have the money for giant marketing expenditures. So pretty much exactly like today except a fraction as many people get paid to do it. I haven’t spoken to a single developer that doesn’t believe they’re too special to have to worry about that. There’s going to be a lot of people that think they’re in the top 5% of coders at their totally safe company that suddenly realize door dash is their best bet for income. The idea that having more web apps is always a benefit to people assumes a never-ending demand for more web apps. The economy and job market aren’t jibing with that assessment at the moment. Fewer people getting paid for this stuff is just going to mean that the people on top will just get paid more. |
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