This has been cooking for a while, like since the alarms started getting sounded about an AI bubble; but I had a dream recently where the AI bubble popped, and we were all happy, and the industry really did bottom out, but then peter goddamned thiel ends up basically owning the entire market share, then buys up artistic supplychains and stores and shuts them down entirely to force people on the slop machine.
and reflecting on it, that’s when i kinda came to the conclusion: that’s a real ass possibility.
I think of the 2000s dot com bubble, levelled the landscape, and the companies that survived and the ones that emerged in its wake had staying power, and dominate the technological social landscape to a frankly dangerous degree
the money behind this AI shit is immense, and some of these guys are deranged enough to just force the matter, like who could even contest this?
I’d love to get talked down from this position if it’s more unreasonable than i think but… yeah im kinda anxious about it now.
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What are artistic supply chains?
peter goddamned thiel ends up basically owning the entire market share, then buys up artistic supplychains and stores and shuts them down entirely to force people on the slop machine
I don’t think this is a reasonable concern. People draw on their iPads, is Peter Thiel just gonna buy Apple? He can’t just buy out every pencil manufacturer or every source of paint either. Even if he did, new ones would pop up immediately because the demand would still be there. There’s a ton of capital in art supplies as well, those guys won’t just let Peter Thiel kill their industry.
right now the bubble is being funded by certain businesses with strong fundamentals and massive cash reserves, so i wouldn’t worry about it. even if it pops and the economy goes to shitter, most businesses should be unaffected i hope.
it’s already as worse it can be so it can only either stay the same or get better. always be hopeful.
Art is self expression, people have made artworks using their own piss and whatever they find around them, despite the big bourgeois scum delusions there’s still a lot they can’t control and despite their absolute best they can’t quite take all forms of self expression. Can they make it more difficult? They absolutely will and are, no prophetic visions of the future needed, but not take it entirely. On the other end things like digital art and sculpting are gatekept already by high knowledge requirements as well as financial ones, so your nightmare already exists in our world, playing out in a much quieter way and it has been art became a skill under exploitative economic systems. Films recognized are generally those by big media, not people with an iphone on youtube, though there are exceptions to the rule.
AI as run in the west has a huge infrastructure and material cost I don’t think will be able to sustain that too long, as materials are needed like rare earth metals that can only be gathered so fast, AI slop is still discernable easily as AI slop, that’s not going to change for a min. There’s already a huge entry cost to getting into this stuff to begin with, so another example of the dream at play. I also strongly suspect infrastructure is weakening to the point I don’t even know how much longer we’ll have the internet in its current form, the near future is going to be a shitty ID gated device-locked walled garden of AI slop and ads that goes down every 2s and costs 10 times as much.
I’m anxious about it from a job aspect, one of my jobs is data rating.
Seeing the people embrace the slop is more bewildering. I saw AI generated star wars short about General Grevious’s space shuttle crash. And the comments where full of the usual suspects saying “if disney doesn’t want to make star wars movies anymore then we will make our own with AI :)”.
It looked like utter shit with no story except what we all know from reading wookiepedia. But they don’t care because all this pop culture is slop anyway and they detest anything slightly different from a 1930s serial.
Maybe I am having a
moment, but don’t we already have cameras, drawing tablets, scanners, krita, gimp, kdenlive, hydrogen, audacious, blender3D etc. for making new non-slop anyway? A Bezos-Theil trade federation blocking physical art supplies seems really unlikely anyway and people have made more with less.The issue is that they practically own our attention with extremely low effort addictive apps where people devote hours to video clips they don’t even enjoy. Alot more people can and should make real art in the face of this.
But also if there is to be an American AI winner, it’s likely going to be an inefficient peronist style arrangement that wrecks havocks in communities with data centers destroying the air, depleting the water supply and small modular nuclear reactors being built everywhere with reduced safety standards. Best of all there will be no jobs from this once the construction is completed. The american suburban experience was already unviable but this will push it over the edge. Our role as communist isn’t the lament this collapse but to prepare people for it and work towards something much better.
idk I think being
is completely appropriate.Playing devil’s avocado though, it is scary and intimidating to post art and other creative work online, especially if you’ve never shared anything like that before. Sometimes I’ve felt quite vulnerable and anxious about whether something I’ve made will be appreciated, ignored or straight up laughed at.
I’ve heard all over the place that there’s a growing cohort of young people who deeply believe “I can’t do that/I don’t know how” about anything new and unfamiliar (learned helplessness.) There’s also the recognised problem of people judging their own worth on what they perceive about other people online.
I wonder if factors like these have conditioned a lot of people to avoid failure and fear of humiliation to the point where they effectively “can’t” learn how to express themselves creatively.
After burning myself out at work I’ve struggled with so many things that don’t seem rational and which I know from experience I should be able to do. It is frequently upsetting and frustrating and confusing. Rarely a conscious resistance, subjectively it feels like brain damage.
From that perspective I can accept the possibility that a lot of people experience a deeply ingrained avoidant reaction to creating and sharing things that leave them open to criticism or rejection. For those people, I suspect generative content creation is a rational and appealing alternative.
Posting generative content is a lot safer by comparison. The generative model provides a layer of plausible deniability and ego shielding, similar to people can build an impulsive habit of expressing themselves through ironic detachment. Rather than taking direct responsibility or ownership and being vulnerable, there’s a disconnect between the poster/creator’s self identity / sense of worth and the product they are presenting to be judged and consumed. If the generative content they post is well received then they get to enjoy that positive reception and if the content is rejected it’s nothing to take personally because the chatbot made it.
I’m just speculating of course. Even if my intuition about this is accurate it’s still an unhealthy solution which masks the issue and, if the studies I’ve skimmed are accurate, will also accelerate skill deterioration. It also seems to lead to users misidentifying what they’re doing as work, or as artistic creation.
I guess it takes some of the smug out of my sails if I try to imagine the likely social factors that make posting AI slop more appealing than learning to create and express themselves.
But AI stuff just looks like a meme template from 10 years ago. Only now it’s now it shortform video that makes your brain go
. It will become increasingly cringey in time too.It wasn’t like we where in a renaissance up to 2021. Almost everything was super deriative or was some fetishic take on something else as well. Social media and monetisation had set a catastrophic foundation for this. Those who make something original will always be few and far between and will always be exceptions to the rule.
A amateur writing, painting, drawing for themselves shouldn’t feel pressure to publish or share. We should learn to appreciate hiding in plain sight again and not submitting everything for scrutiny. And maybe should be for your own pleasure. Might be better for people to produce their own crap for hours then watching hundreds of brain roitting clips in that time. There is rarely ever an idea that is good on it’s own merrits without years of scrutiny, collobration and yeah gatekeeping to get there.
AI is so hated that I have to wonder if comments like that are just bots for AI investors. Narrative control is very powerful and it’s scary because it works.
Is AI hated? Pretty much everyone I know in the real world uses it regularly. I don’t think anyone particularly loves it either, most just see it as a tool like any other as far as their day-to-day interaction with it goes.
Only really seen virulent hate for it online. Even my IRL artist friends are pretty blasé.
Seriously hope so. Already feels like an alien invasion with friends using studio gibli profile pics and co-workers sending AI slop.
That’s what you’re afraid off?
I’m afraid about not getting a job. I’m 2 months away from bankrupcy and my wife is “illegal”, if I dont get cash quick they might ship her to fucking south sudan or something
This isn’t a pissing contest.
yeah re-reading i see it can come across as dismissive. It wasn’t my attention
On the other hand, it’s a bubble, most of the victims will be the people not finding jobs, the tech industry afterward seems like a distant problem
Art survived the dark ages. It will survive Peter Thiel.
Now, forgive my foolish and generally uneducated opinion, but we could have said the same thing about crypto currency a few years ago, right? The amount of infrastructure wasn’t quite there in crypto compared to AI but it’s a hype based, useless tech riding off speculative value with seemingly no actual use, relative to the hype it got. Why should we expect “AI” to be any different? Is it really going to “collapse” or is it just going to fade into the background as techbros find some other obnoxious, useless fad tech to get distracted by like a toddler looking at jingling keys?
Why should we expect “AI” to be any different?
The difference in scale is enormous. There was talk about shoving crypto and blockchains into everything, but it never actually manifested. AI is being shoved into everything as we speak. Barely anyone in the real world actually interacted with cryptocurrency in any way, while the same cannot be said for generative AI. Crypto was all talk, AI is actually a thing that is happening, and the amount of money in it makes crypto look like a joke.
Damn remember the metaverse and NFTs? That seems like a lifetime ago now. Decades be happening in weeks.
Agreed. So far this tech hasn’t found a purpose which generates more value than it consumes, but the US economy is basically floating on a bubble of fake money generated through circular dealing between a handful of companies.
It is highly likely that there will be “a correction” and as always when markets crash or economies go into recession, wealth and power get transferred to the usual suspects.
If I understand correctly, we should expect this.
Capitalism doesn’t work in reality in the long run and inevitably the contradictions inherent to it become evident and observable as things like circular trade predicated on the promise of record breaking future profits becoming more valuable than everything else, companies consolidating into monopolies and vertical monopolies, entire industries losing the demand side to their supply as money leaves the citizens hands and stops circulating, etc.
So even if the bubble somehow doesn’t burst, or manages to deflate gracefully, the whole state of affairs is a symptom of a sick system that approaches failure again and again in new and exciting ways. Again, with each crisis that is endured, wealth is consolidated in the hands of the capitalists.
I figure either the thing you’re worried about happens or we abandon capitalism and the cult of the unregulated free market. Or both, one after the other.
I’m very anxious too, but more about the short to medium term implications on quality of life, consolidation of power, etc.
It seems to me that the major competing interests in the capitalist power struggle (finance, tech, governments) are acting as though they are terrified and desperate to clamp down on people, their ability to share ideas freely and the space to offer and consider serious critiques of what we have and ideas of what we could have instead.
Eventually capitalism ends, regardless. We want that, I think, mostly.
Capitalism has to end because infinite growth is impossible. However, what replaces it without active organization is likely going to be whatever those at the top of the dogpile set up as an alternative, which will likely be some sort of quasi-feudalism.
I think a big difference between the dot com bubble and this one is that
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AI is very expensive, so anything that sticks around will be for very specialized use cases.
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there’s more competition in other countries, especially China
I really don’t think whoever ends up with the lion’s share of AI tech will quite have the insidious level of power over the world as the winners of the dot com bubble.
i think of everything ai stands to replace and the relative economic power it represents though, and it’s really small compared to the tech industry; i can see Certain Types Of Assholes, and they’re all like, in AI right now, going for taking the choice to not away.
It won’t matter if anyone of them is a big enough asshole and has the ability to do it, and by monetary value, some of the people deepest into AI with the most to lose are absolutely that kind of asshole.
i think of everything ai stands to replace
The reason it’s a bubble is that it has failed to really replace anything, though. It’s not useful for its intended purpose, companies keep finding that they have to hire back people they laid off because the AI is bad.
You’re underestimating how expensive AI is. These GPUs cost thousands of dollars per unit and only last 3 years. The government would have to give huge subsidies to the AI industry for it to remain where it is now. I think that might actually cause a revolution in America if that were to happen. Absolutely no one would tolerate that.
And probably overestimating how useful generative models are. A lot of what is being sold (and bought) is not fit for purpose and will not deliver the promised gains in efficiency and surplus value.
A stunning amount of discourse around generative models is essentially fiction. AI companies are actively spinning the biggest and most exciting story possible to entrench the idea that this tech is super powerful.
The same AI companies employ or fund the NGOs of the loudest voices warning about the dangers of AI, but again those dangers are a fiction built within the boundaries of the AI boosting narrative.
The hustle bros are just happy to be included and are riding the hype train hoping it represents similar opportunity to scalp profit as crypto currency did and (while the illusion lasted) NFT were expected to.
The media do human interest pieces warning about harmful impacts of LLMs. Given their non existent domain knowledge they miss probable compounding factors that lead to these harmful outcomes and in lieu of those complexities once again these serve to amplify the significance of generative tech.
Government bureaucrats and politicians are no more knowledgeable and just as prone to buying slickly packaged bullshit. The AI companies are (or were) themselves encouraging regulation of their brand new industry. They use the apocalyptic warnings pushed by their AI-is-dangerous pet critics to argue that if the existing companies in the space aren’t gifted a legally enforced cartel, then it poses a national security risk on the scale of untracked nuclear weapon production.
When that gambit failed the same manufactured sense of urgency (and the coincidental slump in US productivity) helped sell LLM research and development as a new arms race, securing massive capital investment that enabled the circular deals that instantly inflated the value of these companies to the “too big to fail” scale.
I declare it all bullshit. I’ve seen self deluded CEOs survive for years selling promises and vapor. This is startup grifting writ large.
None of this is intended to be copium, wealth is already being transferred from public to private hands and regardless of the specific series of events and their conclusion, capitalist leeches will find ways to exert more power and control over the rest of us.
And as capital starts to lose interest in LLMs, it looks like quantum computing is lining up to be the next speculative hype bubble. We’ve seen this before, we’ll see it again, this isn’t new. The emperor has no clothes.
Tens* of thousands of dollars per unit, actually
Oh and they drink an absurd amount of power to do the compute required for AI algorithms, too, and then have to be cooled besides (which is very much non-trivial; those things spew a ton of heat and have to be packed pretty close together for maximum space efficiency)
100%, it’s an insanely expensive business. The cost to use a cutting edge LLM will be forced into the range of hundreds of dollars a month.
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There is also the chance it won’t pop. It might correct a bit, but not pop.
AI even in its current state is fundamentally necessary to a huge amount of people today, and this figure is only growing. Most people, especially in the West, are profoundly unintelligent, uncurious, and incapable of critical thought. AI is genuinely revolutionary for them, and they would gladly pay a subscription baked into everything to have it (which would sustain the costs).
Ask anyone under the age of 20 a question and their immediate response is “let me ask ChatGPT”
The market is desperate for AI, and will almost certainly pay a premium for it once current free models become unsustainable.
This is why I bet on China, instead of against AI. Figure out how to personally benefit from the rise of China and the fall of America, and let material analysis figure out the rest.
AI is genuinely revolutionary for them, and they would gladly pay a subscription baked into everything to have it (which would sustain the costs).
That’s the neat part: No, it wouldn’t. When they eventually want to make money, OpenAI won’t be able to just offer a flatrate subscription to its users, they would still have to impose severe restrictions on how much you can use it. The power users who currently pay the biggest monthly subscription (like $200/month) are bleeding OpenAI dry because of the unique scaling issue that LLMs have. Usually for software companies, your operating costs don’t drastically increase depending on how much your customers are using the product, but with LLMs they do. There’s no way it will be financially viable for people who use ChatGPT to create spam bots on twitter to continue doing so once every tweet costs them money, so most of them will stop. As for casual users, the difference between “free” and “not free” is massive. A huge amount of people will just go back to googling stuff. Kids will still use it to cheat at school, but instead of every kid asking ChatGPT to do their homework there’s gonna be 2 or 3 kids in class who “have ChatGPT” and they’re gonna let you generate it on their phone.
It’s not gonna go away for good, but its usage is going to fall off a cliff once its appropriately priced.
Chinese people use AI the same as anywhere else.
how to personally benefit from the rise of China and the fall of America
That’s a more difficult question than it seems, no?
How do you bet on China? Is there an index fund? Betting on companies can be risky cuz they can be taken by CPC
I was reading about this yesterday.
TLDR yes there are ETFs for Chinese companies.
Chinese companies use a structure called Variable Interest Entities (VIEs) to list on foreign exchanges. The government in China regulates foreign ownership of Chinese business in a bunch of sectors and are considered (at least by the US) to be significantly owned or controlled by the Chinese government. I don’t think this use of VIEs necessarily implies government ownership, its more about the fact these companies have other entities invested and influencing decision making in ways that might otherwise make them inappropriate for listing on the market - unlike regular publicly listed companies, there are one or more additional interested parties other than a board of directors and shareholders. I think. I’m not an economist.
Rather than selling shares (of ownership) they offer contracts which promise a share of generated profit. They’re considered risky compared to stocks and bonds because, as you pointed out, the government can do anything with the company, the VIE structure makes the underlying company’s operations opaque and you don’t necessarily get transparency about who else might have a controlling interest in the company.
So yea you can buy VIE shares directly or an index fund can buy them and then you can buy the ETF.
I searched for “chinese vie etf” and found a bunch listed on US and other exchanges.
I wonder what would happen to them if China decided to completely ban VIEs, since they are fairly controversial apparently.
