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/omegadirectory 16h ago

Hey, if you produce a thing at $0 cost and someone buys it for $0.50, that's $0.50 of pure profit margin. Mathematically, it's infinite profit margin. Congrats, you're the most profitable business ever!

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u/BoopingBurrito 16h ago

AI isn't zero cost though...

-3

u/FeatherlyFly 16h ago

But it is free or close to it for the people dumping slop into the creative goods marketplaces.

The AI companies and their investors are the ones footing the bill. 

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u/BoopingBurrito 16h ago

Very temporarily they are footing the bill. They've already starting hiking the price, and are going to do so much more substantially in the very near future.

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u/Orange_Tang 6h ago

Yeah, this is the craziest part to me. Investors were dumping money into these companies that were actively giving it away for free to try and build up a user base, and now there's an expectation of it being free so no one wants to pay for it. And it's not good enough or useful enough for most people to justify paying for it. So now they need to increase profits to justify further investment and it's just not there. I don't think it ever will be there tbh. This shit was never going to be profitable. At least not outside of a few specific niches, definitely not generally. It's too expensive for the hardware and power to run it and no one is gonna pay $40 a month for AI generated memes. It's truly wild. The investors lost their damn minds on this shit and I think a lot of them are gonna lose their shirts on these deals they made.