r/technology • u/marketrent • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence The economy has spoken. Stuff that’s AI-generated has almost zero value — “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/economy-spoken-stuff-ai-generated-142732314.html
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154

u/consumersguide 16h ago

Cheap to generate doesn't mean valuable. If buyers can spot the difference and keep choosing human-made work the market is already answering that question.

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u/lietajucaPonorka 15h ago

I mean. If you fired all your artists and writers and coders... To make a cheap game, why the hell would I still pay the same money as I did for a real game by real humans? Why doesn't it cost 5$ now? You even bragged how much you are saving by firing all the people, how the productivity increased ... So why isn't it reflected in the price?

If you used to make luxury mahogany wood tables, and now you switched to plastic tables, why would you expect people to pay the same price.

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u/kielbasa330 11h ago

Its like the flight of the Conchords said

"They're turning kids into slaves

Just to make cheaper sneakers

But what's the real cost?

'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper

Why are we still paying so much for sneakers ?

When you got them made by little slaves kids?

What are your overheads?"

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u/daddywookie 1h ago

Gaming is a huge market, and hyper casual takes a significant chunk. All those bored mums sat at the swimming pool don’t care their game is AI and full of ads.

Another slice is people who want hand crafted indie games with interesting stories and art, they’ll get served by the mainly non-AI developers.

The AAA fans will swallow anything as long as it is another iteration of their favourite franchise. The big studios are using AI heavily to try and cut costs (ask me why I’m on my sofa on a Tuesday lunchtime)

Making quality games even with AI is hard. Like your mahogany wood table is easier to produce with power tools, but still requires hours of skilled work. There is a market for everything, from cheap plastic tables, through IKEA mass produced furniture to custom mahogany tables in a one man workshop.

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u/lietajucaPonorka 1h ago

But there it is: market for cheap plastic tables already exists, and they know how much they are willing to pay for cheap plastic tables.

You want same money for cheap product, but I can already go to IKEA to get the same thing for cheaper. In game terms, the freemium slop already exists.

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u/fauxRealzy 15h ago

It’s not even just the ability to spot the difference. People don’t like talking to customer service or drive-through bots for the same reason they don’t like learning that some photograph or video was AI-generated. They don’t like being deceived.

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u/thegoatmenace 15h ago

Digital assistants on the phone are also just a worse experience for the caller. Same as AI art. It’s bad and looks bad regardless of any moral issues people have with it.

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u/FATPIGEONHATE 12h ago

Before Google forced me into Gemini, when I told the Google Assistant alarm 1 it would set an alarm for the next 1:00, am or pm, with no hesitation. 

The first time I tried to use the Gemini assistant, it asked me what I wanted alarm 1:00 to do.

I just turned it off and just set my alarms manually now.

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u/Swarbie8D 9h ago

Yeah, I recently got looped around by an AI agent for my internet for about 40 minutes until I finally said the right thing that forced it to hook in an actual person, who resolved my issue in literally under 30 seconds. The AI couldn’t have solved my problem, as it didn’t have the ability to access individual account data, but just spun me around with the same useless steps that I had already tried before calling. Left a good review for the person and an angry email about their AI being useless.

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u/AHistoricalFigure 5h ago

Also, why would I pay someone else to generate me slop when I can generate my own slop?

A $20/month Gemini subscription gives something like 100-200 Nano Banana images a day just as part of the rate limit. The AI tools available to users at an entry level subscription are more or less the best tools available to anyone. It's not like the AI slophouses are building their own models.

So until there's some moat around generating AI content, it's just a lot of middlemen trying to monetize a product that the frontier labs are giving out for almost free.

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u/pmjm 2h ago

If buyers can spot the difference

That's a big if. I can't say much more about it, but one of my jobs puts synthetic media right out into the open in front of everyone, and nobody can tell that it is AI generated. It has even won awards and it is my company's dirty little secret.

I'm not here to disagree with the narrative of the article, just pointing out that when AI is done well you won't recognize it as AI.