It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that the quality SUCKS. I’m frustrated with AI blogspam because it doesn’t in any way help me figure out whatever I’m researching. It’s such low quality. What I want and need is higher quality primary sources — in depth research, investigation, presented in an engaging way. Or with movies and shows, I want something genuine. With a genuine story that feels real, characters that feel real and motivated.

AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.

I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.

Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.

So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.

As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.

▲

palmotea 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap.

I'm not sure if they actually think that. I think it's more likely it's some combination of 1) saying what they need to say based on their goals (I need to sell this, therefore I will say it's good and it's something you should want) and 2) a contempt for their audience (I'm a clever guy and I can make those suckers do what I want).

▲

OptionOfT 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is, for us normal consumers AI only has downsides. AI blogspam is made to serve you ads and make you buy stuff.

AI posts / comments on Reddit are made to make you buy stuff.

AI videos are made to keep you engaged, and then serve you ads which at the end make you buy stuff.

Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.

	▲	palmotea 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $. AI enthusiasts need to anticipate that. We're in the VC subsidy phase, but the hammer will drop sooner or later. If you think ads are bad on Google and Facebook now, just imagine a Google that has to spend 100x more on compute to service your requests.
	▲	t-writescode 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean, it gives product recommendations when you ask it to, so it's already doing that, I'm sure. It might not be making money by giving specific recommendations; but I bet it's at least getting money off Amazon referral links.

▲

le-mark 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.

▲

o11c 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Remember that even ELIZA fooled people.

That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.

▲

jordanb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.

▲

lotyrin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.

This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.

I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).

▲

somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]

Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

	▲	palmotea 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.
	▲	jordanb 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does. https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151 Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary. So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.
	▲	SoftTalker 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.
	▲	lotyrin 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.

▲

raincole 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.

Every single time {something more convenient} got invented, the supports of the {older, less convenient thing} would criticize it to death.

Oil painting was considered serious art now. Probably the most serious medium in traditional art schools. But at Michelangelo's time he insisted to use fresco because he believed oil was "an art for women and for leisurely and idle people like Fra Sebastiano."[0]

[0]: https://www.studiointernational.com/michelangelo-and-sebasti...

▲

xp84 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ironically, AI blogspam, because it’s disingenuous and because Google’s PageRank has been fully defeated by spam (and Search ruined further by Google’s ads) in general, has ruined the web for research. It means that you are usually better off now asking a flagship model your research questions. Let it search and provide sources. You can always tell it the sorts of sources you consider reliable.