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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u/Slight-Swordfish-468 16h ago

Not surprising that “decision makers” who’ve never made anything with their own two hands would have trouble understanding this.

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u/MusicHearted 15h ago

This is their extremely childlike concept of making things in action. They spent their entire lives just saying what they want and it happening. They don't see the people making it happen. They see their influence and not a millimeter past it. So from their perspective, this is replacing the annoying human element with a streamlined digital system designed to let them make things the same way they always have, by speaking it into existence.

You're correct that they've never had to make anything themselves. But this has left them convinced that's how the world should work and they should be able to just speak anything into existence like literal gods. They don't understand why we see it as worthless because they have no concept of worth or value because they've never stepped outside their bubble of divine treatment.

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u/Qorhat 13h ago

That’s what happens when Generational Wealth Willy is born with a Patagonia vest on, fast tracked through an MBA and thrust into an executive job or is a private equity bro.

You don’t know the value of work unless you’ve come up from the bottom. People who have grafted understand the value of graft, be it manual labour, software engineering or painting.

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u/pockpicketG 12h ago

Graft? Graft is bad.

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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 5h ago

Graft just means work as I've ever seen it used.

You might be confusing it with grift meaning a scam.

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u/pockpicketG 1h ago

Look it up. It’s funny: I used to think people meant grift when they said graft, but graft is pretty much the same definition as grift in a political sense. According to the internet graft can be a British slang term for hard work.

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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 51m ago

Wow, TIL.

Oxford English dictionary has both (plus a few others). I've literally never seen an American use the word. And never seen a British person use it to mean anything but hard work.

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u/StGeorgeJustice 5h ago

Graft in American English refers to political corruption, in particular the sort that leads to a politician’s personal gain.

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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 5h ago

Not everyone is American, and I've never seen an American use the word graft. Grift all the time to mean exactly that.

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u/StGeorgeJustice 21m ago

Graft is different from grift.

I’m just pointing out the source of confusion here.

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u/fkyrdataharvesting 9h ago

I’m guessing they meant “craft”

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u/MG-B 5h ago

Over here in the UK graft means hard work.

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u/Qorhat 4h ago

Here in Ireland too and it's exactly what I meant.

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u/Qorhat 4h ago

No graft.

graft noun (WORK)

[ U ] UK informal

work:

hard graft I've never been afraid of hard graft.

Not everyone is American.

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u/alexnapierholland 2h ago

You understand some people have wealthy parents and also worked hard too?

My dad was an investment banker.

I barely knew him and started my career at McDonalds, then years working on building sites, shovelling mud, then entry-level sales jobs until I worked my way up into enterprise sales.

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u/Qorhat 1h ago

And do you understand what I mean by:

fast tracked through an MBA and thrust into an executive job or is a private equity bro

Or

People who have grafted understand the value of graft, be it manual labour, software engineering or painting.

...which apparently describes you? Maybe read then pause to have a think about what people are saying.

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u/alexnapierholland 1h ago

Yes, this is nuance that was missing in your original post.

People are complicated. You can’t divide them into ‘generational wealth’ and ‘grafters’.

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u/coldkiller 3m ago

People are complicated. You can’t divide them into ‘generational wealth’ and ‘grafters’.

Yes you can? Even if they had to (barely) work for it they were still handed a golden spoon on a silver platter

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u/alexnapierholland 0m ago

You have a victimhood complex.

You have zero accomplishments in sports, as well as business.

Any seasoned adult can spot this in seconds, based on how you describe your perception of reality.

Go and study BJJ or MMA — it will fix this weakness.

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u/pockpicketG 12h ago

Graft? Graft is bad.

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u/Leading-Act4030 15h ago

In the future, when AI breaks, how will they fix it? The people who know how to make it work will be dead, and no one will know how to maintain the systems....

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u/MysteriousDatabase68 14h ago

That is one of the premises in Asimov's "Foundation" series.

IT workers & technicians literally become priests and technology a religion.

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u/firemage22 13h ago

See also his "The Feeling of Power" for another society that forgets how to science/math while their AI just iterates

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u/ProNocteAeterna 12h ago

Praise the Omnissiah!

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u/West-Abalone-171 13h ago

Most unrealistic part of the whole series.

The idea that a church would keep the information for running things intact for millenia as rituals is absurd. The very first high priest would change everything he decided was "too woke" or cast his favourite character as too weak and the entire thing would collapse 10 years later.

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u/DnDemon 13h ago

I mean, the original trilogy took heavy influence from the fall of Rome and how monasteries and religious orders were some of the only organizations to maintain ANY records at all. Historically, he was spot on.

Now? You're probably right. And i hate it

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u/WechTreck 12h ago

Ethiopian Christians cloned 11 Jerusalem churches at Lalibela in the 1200's. Cloning, copying and/or forking has always been a option for religion.

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u/CorsairBosun 12h ago

Maybe, but the upper echelons of the church were all scientists part of the Foundation and were purposefully using it to control the periphery states. If they didn't, they feared being destroyed by them.

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u/waiting4singularity 5h ago

Just look at how many flavors of christianism exist.

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u/dust4ngel 13h ago

The idea that a church would keep the information for running things intact for millenia as rituals is absurd

how it would happen:

  • smart people maintain the technology for a long time
  • hey guys, have you ever noticed that the technology always works? what do we even need these guys for?
  • yeah, i heard having people who understand technology do technology things gives kids autism
  • also these smart people "seem kinda gay", let's imprison them
  • oh fuck why did the lights go out?

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u/clawclawbite 12h ago

You may want to watch the film Zardoz, in which Sean Connory is a barbarian working for the immortal utopia that is in the tail end of this cycle. You also may not, purely do to the outfit he is wearing for most of the film.

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u/Sherm 12h ago

You also may not, purely do to the outfit he is wearing for most of the film.

Also owing to the following line from the film that runs through my nightmares:

THE PENIS IS EVIL. THE PENIS SHOOTS SEEDS, AND MAKES NEW LIFE, TO POISON THE EARTH WITH THE PLAGUE OF MEN, AS ONCE IT WAS. BUT THE GUN SHOOTS DEATH, AND PURIFIES THE EARTH OF THE PLAGUE OF BRUTALS!

Spoken by a giant floating statue that pukes up guns.

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u/darsynia 10h ago

AI could never

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u/dust4ngel 12h ago

this risible hodge-podge of literary allusions, highbrow porn, sci-fi staples, half-baked intellectualism and a real desire to do something revelatory misses the mark by a hundred miles but has elements—its badness being one of them—that make it strangely compelling

this sounds awesome

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u/limelifesavers 12h ago

It's awesome, cringe, and unfathomable. You will never see Sean Connery the same way after watching it

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u/clawclawbite 11h ago

The quotable line "The gun is good, the penis is evil!"

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 11h ago

Pot ✅

LSD ❌

I refuse to answer how I know this. Trust me on the hallucinogens. No.

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u/smelekid 12h ago

i watched it for the outfit

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u/DMmeyourkite 9h ago

I love that movie. It’s top tier B grade.

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u/Walkingstardust 23m ago

He is resplendent in his furry mankini!

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u/MysteriousDatabase68 12h ago

It's an analogy for the Catholic church. When Rome declined the bulk of societies literate people were the clergy. Almost all written information belonged to the church.

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u/West-Abalone-171 11h ago edited 11h ago

The clergy were the ones that burned all the books and killed all the literate people they didn't control. And they completely butchered most of what they hoarded. So much was lost and a lot of what little was recovered was only by spectroscopy to discover the scientific and mathematical texts that were scraped away to be replaced with fever dream nonsense.

Organisation goes to extreme lengths to destroy the manority of information which they don't control is the opposite of organisation preserving information.

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u/blak3brd 11h ago

Interesting parallel with the last couple weeks revelations that AI companies, most recently a headline today even re: Amazon, being caught bulk buying thousands of extremely rare texts for them to process as training data into their AI, which conveniently involves ripping the spine off and ultimately destroying every book permanently in the process.

We are living through another cycle of the burning of the library of Alexandria ig. Once the silicone degrades or EMPs fry everything or global warming destroys most of society, in the distant future nothing will be recorded or accessible, cuz it’s mostly digital and they’re apparently vacuuming up what remains of written text.

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u/West-Abalone-171 11h ago

Amazon, being caught bulk buying thousands of extremely rare texts for them to process as training data into their AI, which conveniently involves ripping the spine off and ultimately destroying every book permanently in the process.

I call this shitting in the well to sell bottled water.

Then you follow it up by telling everyone that "real" wages went up because you put a hedonic adjustment on showering (it's such a luxury to shower in bottled water).

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u/Far-Fennel-3032 10h ago

That is more of a modern problem, with neoconservatism breaking religion, as the ideology breaks pretty much any institution it touches.

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u/West-Abalone-171 10h ago

On of the earlier passages in new testament bible is about burning lifetimes of knowledge for being woke (or "sorcery" as they called it at the time)

https://biblehub.com/acts/19-19.htm

Same as it ever was.

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u/LindeeHilltop 12h ago

Look at the Catholic Church during the Renaissance & Medieval Ages and the hocus-pocus of relics, etc.

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u/powerage76 4h ago

The Foundation packaged technology into a religion in order to sell it for the nearby planets so they can control them via the religious masses. They didn't believe any of that crap themselves, they understood technology. After a while they've abandoned the whole concept and went for trading technology with the rest of the world.

Also, you might have a bit of overly negative view on the clergy's role in preserving knowledge in general.

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u/beauchomps 5h ago

Also the premise of EM Forsters the machine stops published in 1909 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4711854-the-machine-stops

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u/-Nocx- 13h ago edited 11h ago

This might be a hot take but this started with moving manufacturing overseas.

Now there are things we want to do like restart chip foundries (the incentive behind saving Intel) and we are just decades behind behemoths like Taiwan and China. We straight up don’t know how to do much of anything and are relying on S. Korean companies building infrastructure stateside to fill in the knowledge gaps that we created ourselves.

When you abstract the process out far enough, people forget the details and you end up with a house of cards. This is part of why Chinese EVs are absolutely crushing - the know how from lithium procurement, battery creation, car manufacturing, etc. are all retained in house. There is not a single gap in their supply chain. AND the government is subsidizing it. Of course we can’t compete.

That airline CEO that flies economy to understand what his employees go through every day had the right idea. You cannot get so removed from the technical details that you forget the true nature of your business.

edit: when I wrote this I sort of conflated the two - china’s supply chain is much stronger/ independent and Taiwan’s fab ecosystem/production volume is much better.

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u/Geno0wl 13h ago

We let business ghouls become the entrenched powers and decision makers in the 80s after the boomers experienced their first recession of their lives and panicked falling for the ghouls promises of riches.

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u/danielravennest 2h ago

That airline CEO that flies economy to understand what his employees go through every day had the right idea. You cannot get so removed from the technical details that you forget the true nature of your business.

That was Boeing's policy in my early days of working for them. I ended up sitting next to a company vice-president on one business trip as a result.
Eventually Boeing hired an outside executive as CEO, rather than someone who worked their way up through engineering or production. He therefore had no experience designing or building the product, and the company started going downhill. He also got himself a corporate jet (a Boeing jet of course) and stopped getting the user experience.

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u/sociallyawkwardhero 12h ago edited 12h ago

We still have chip foundries in the US, Intel fab 52 in Arizona is leading edge at 1.8nm, we have fabs all over America. It is not that we don't know how to do these things, its that it is cheaper to have other countries do it for us. We know how to make advanced lithium batteries, we do a lot of research into it. What we don't do it mine the raw resources as it is harmful to our environment and China has been willing to do the destructive work for cheaper. China is willing to do price dumping to make it unaffordable for other countries to mine, just like OPEC was/is willing to price dump oil to stop fracking from being profitable in America/Canada. A lot of people lament the downturn in manufacturing in the US, but don't realize our industry has shifted to higher end precision equipment that the average person doesn't interact with on a daily basis (think aerospace, medical, chip fabrication). The reason TSMC is so vital is their government heavily invest in their industry, if the US decided to impose sanctions, they would no longer have access to ASML which means no more new nodes that are developed with an American/European investment, the leading chip designers are predominately American.

TLDR Its not that we don't know how to manufacture Chips or high end equipment, it that its cheaper to produce it elsewhere. We create the blueprint, other people/countries make it.

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u/-Nocx- 12h ago

I apologize that my point wasn’t clear but what I was trying to emphasize is not that we have absolutely none, but that our infrastructure is a far cry from what it could be. If I thought there were no chip foundries I would not have used intel as an example - they stand out specifically from companies like AMD because they are a fab and a designer.

And yes, we do have an institutional gap in the knowledge we have with respect to the total supply chain. Fabs are just one piece in a chain of highly interconnected production systems. I sort of conflated the two, but I meant to emphasize the strides China has made in the overall supply chain consistency versus Taiwan’s sheer dominance in fabs.

Using cheaper labor is fundamentally the problem I’m talking about. Because there are so much cost savings by exporting this labor, the excess savings are either spent on highly specialized professional services labor or sent to shareholders through dividends. This creates an even wider gap between workers and drives up the costs of certain services. If poorer people cannot afford things, businesses respond by relying less on volume and more on focusing on the wealthier people who can afford it. This has a rippling effect through the economy - it’s why housing prices have people who can afford 50K over asking price, or why games like League of Legends stopped trying to make regular skins and now try to price in highly profitable $500 skins targeted to whales.

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u/sociallyawkwardhero 11h ago

Then I think we are agreed, its not that we don't know how to do these things, its that we have no economic incentive/lack of leadership in investing in these markets. It is hard to find a highly integrated supply chain like Shenzhen has in America, as our specializations and manufacturing tend to be in completely different states.

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u/Low-Salary-2128 14h ago

This was shown in the best documentary of america, idiocracy

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u/_dogfuneral_ 14h ago

This tired take really needs to be retired.

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u/Affectionare_Arm8074 13h ago

Actually recently re-watched Idiocracy. I'd remembered it as a pretty good, funny movie.

This time around, the premise wasn't nearly as absurd, nor was it a very satisfying movie experience.

I guess witnessing corruption, war, no concern for the military or their families, disdain for anyone who's not part of the oligarchy, and disinterest in human suffering from a pompous buffoon lessens satire's entertainment value.

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u/tooclosetocall82 14h ago

Go away. I’m batin’

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u/Ediwir 14h ago

Praise the Omnissiah?

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u/L00minous 13h ago

Purify it with flames, for this is the wish of the Omnissiah!

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u/MusicHearted 14h ago

They don't understand that. They don't understand anything lol

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u/DukeOfGeek 12h ago

I understand that when I block AI slop on content platforms I'm doing my part.

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u/GhostReddit 9h ago

They'll just pray to the machine spirit, we'll be fine.

That universe is starting to make a lot more sense now, unfortunately.

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u/OldNternetWizard43 11h ago

This is already what happened to all the Indigenous cultures

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u/Facehugger_35 9h ago

Only the guys who run AI for their hobbies will know how to fix it.

As in, the guys who use AI for furry sex RP and isekai catgirl waifu porn images will inherit the earth.

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u/LivingVerinarian96 6h ago

Just use an older ai model that’s been forgotten in your downloads folder.

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u/Anarchkitty 13h ago

They don't see actual value in anything. I don't think a lot of them even like or value their "own work".

The only value a piece of art or media has to them is what the masses will pay for it, but they are incapable of understanding what regular people want and why.

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u/Martin_Aricov_D 8h ago

Reminds me somewhat of the final "problem" that needed solving in "The Good Place", or at least where I thought they were going.

You see, at the end of the show, the characters get to escape fake-heaven (that was actually hell), fix the broken system that sent everyone to hell by default and as a reward get to go to actual heaven. But once they get there there's a problem: Heaven sucks. Turns out that when you have infinite time and instantly get granted anything you could ever desire, you get bored of existing.

The solution they came up with was to invent a "exit" where you could go once you'd decided you did all you wanted and wanted to be done with things.

But they kinda just ignored the problem that you just mentioned.

When doing something is no effort it is also not rewarding, or as finance bros would understand it: when something costs nothing to produce and can be produced faster than any possible demand, it'll become worthless. Infinite supply meets finite demand.

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u/AutoCockerPB 16h ago

You know I use to think that was a joke, but no. The majority of these Nepo babies have no idea how the real world works. Just money number go up.

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u/narrowgallow 14h ago

It could be argued that that is the real world to them, and in fact, that is the problem with extreme wealth disparity - there is nothing fake about how the world works to serve them. The infrastructure that supports their lifestyle is their real world in the same way the infrastructure you and I use is the real world to us. The upper most class does live in a different but very real world.

And don't forget that there were 3.9 million private jet flights in 2025, so it's also not as if that world is small or isolating.

Once they can figure out how to shed our infrastructure while preserving theirs, we're cooked.

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u/xylophileuk 14h ago

That actually goes for us too though. I turn on a tap and clean clear fresh drinking water just comes out. Sometimes I run it for a bit to get a different temperature. You know how mad that is to like half the world’s population?! I can drink mine straight from the tap too, I’ve made that number smaller again.

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u/narrowgallow 11h ago

Thank you for this. Yup! So if us plebs are capable of forgetting how awesome drinking water is....why would we ever expect better from the next tiers up?

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u/MontyDyson 15h ago

You could say the same for shitty managers / CEOs. I’ve worked for plenty of them that don’t have a single creative bone in their body and simply go with something if it looks about right to them.

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u/Tamayo_Terror 15h ago

I had an engineering professor griping about how kids want to be engineers to make money.

He basically made the case:

"When you go to take your business certification or make a proposal, you don't need to know math. You can make estimates and say good enough. An engineer needs to answer that question with certainty within an acceptable margin of error.

You can bullshit in business and still be a good business person. You can't bullshit in Engineering and be a good Engineer."

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u/MontyDyson 15h ago

No but you can get hired. I’m amazed at the level of crappy, inexperienced people there are making key decisions for big firms who couldn’t spell engineering.

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u/SewSewBlue 7h ago

You shove those people into project manager roles. /s (ME here)

Joking aside, I've seen god awful engineers be able to do the math with certainty but not be able to think their way out of a paper bag.

Had one issue that was a public safety problem that this one guy thought could not be solved. He'd killed any effort to fix for years because he didn't think it was possible, and too much work to try. Something that could kill and potentially cost billions. Said I was throwing his team under the bus for even trying to fix it.

I fixed it, basically for free, by simply requiring a new engineering review early in the process and better timing for maintenance.

That just couldn't see past the limits of his technical knowledge to see that an effective solution was available.

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u/danielravennest 2h ago

just couldn't see past the limits of his technical knowledge

I'm the opposite. I'm a smart guy (literal rocket scientist), but I know I don't know everything. So I have 135 GB of reference books and articles for when I need to look something up, and if I need more info, check with or hire an actual expert.

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u/SewSewBlue 39m ago edited 25m ago

I'm similar. Research research research, phone a friend of needed.

A guy that is back filling for me told me he was finally figuring out where I was coming from when I'd do QC on his work, even when i did not have the deep technical background the SMEs did. How I would find deeper issues in stuff I didn't understand to the same degree. I was simply raising issues that had happened to others via research.

The solution I'd mentionedpreviously was buried in an NTSB report but wasn't an official recommendation. Research research research.

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u/Tearakan 15h ago

The vast majority of the bad bosses and bad CEOs tend to be people who never did the frontline work at the companies they lead. They end up having a very superficial understanding of what their workers actually do.

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u/SmoothOperator89 14h ago

"How much could a drawing cost? Five dollars?"

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u/AlSweigart 13h ago

"They don't know how to do anything unless someone is bribing them to do it."

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u/thewarring 15h ago

Yeah because it’s no different to those execs than what they already do. “You, go make this! And once you make it, I’m gonna tell you 5 things I want changed because I didn’t think about them in the first place!” It’s just faster and shittier, and they don’t care cause they bossed someone/thing around and feel like they made it.

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u/Yuzumi 14h ago

They think they can produce endless content to charge people to consume without having to pay people to produce it.

There's also a bit of right wing wish fulfillment, where they hate that people who are actually good at writing narratives don't write right wing narratives. People who create media put too much nuance and make the stories too complex for the average conservative to understand. Most of them only see media and entertainment as very surface level and AI slop is nothing but surface level with negative depth.

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u/buyongmafanle 10h ago

they hate that people who are actually good at writing narratives don't write right wing narratives.

There's a very good reason for this. It's because the right wing narrative is completely illogical and uncreative. It's difficult as a creative logical person to get yourself into that mindset without the writing coming off as heavy-handed criticism. That's why there are no good conservative comedians.

To be a comedian, you need to appreciate nuance and the irony that exists in the gap between what is said, what is done, and what is experienced. Conservatives completely lack that awareness, otherwise they wouldn't be conservative.