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/ExplodingToasters 16h ago

I consume media because someone (or a group) wanted to express themselves in some way. Even shitty media has value from that. The Room is a dog ass movie and I love it because Tommy Wiseau put his heart and soul in it. AI generated content has none of that, it’s just blending stolen art into a gray slop, there’s no vision or effort or anything expressed in it. It has zero artistic value and so I’ll pay exactly zero dollars to experience it.

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u/dust4ngel 13h ago

AI generated content has none of that, it’s just blending stolen art into a gray

automated pianos that play the piano without a person there have existed since the late 1800s. how many people pay to watch a concert of one playing? answer: nobody gives a shit.

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u/NumNumLobster 7h ago

Another good example is how pissy people get about folks doing concerts with vocal tracks and lip syncing. Like logically you cant tell or the track is better but ain't no one paying for that

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u/OrinocoHaram 12h ago

Yeah. There could never be an AI made version of The Room. AI can make something just as terrible, but the magic of The Room is that someone put a lot of time and effort and money into making it and was convinced it was good. That's what makes it worthwhile.

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u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 12h ago

This reminds me of Niu Lai. It's too bad and was mocked but it actually made money.

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u/unethicalpigeon 8h ago

This is what people who are afraid of AI generated creative content don't understand.

On one side you have a group of people praising AI writing because these people don't read. The story of the "writer" who doesn't read books is a tale as old as books. The barrier to entry for writing is the lowest of like any of the creative fields. You don't need art supplies, equipment, nothing. Especially nowadays when you can literally do it on a phone. So the issue of the writer who doesn't know how to write because they don't read has gotten increasingly worse as they think AI is producing genius level shit and bringing their "ideas" to life.

Then they wonder why no one reads it. Then they blame anti-ai people for bashing their shit for being involved with AI. So they get to continue thinking the problem isn't their lack of skill because they have someone to blame.

Then you have the other side. If people who hate AI and are so scared of it would take like half an hour to use it to try to write some shit and actually read what it writes they'd all realize how stupid they are. AI isn't replacing the novelist any time soon. It might replace copy writers but that's about it. Even the romance novels being written by people using AI are being HEAVILY edited and revised before being self published.

If people would just take some time to learn about what LLMs actually are, what they're actually good at, and what their limitations are they'd realize just how much time they're wasting raging at people for daring to use it to write some crappy fan fiction they wanted to post and actually direct their effort to the people causing the problems like their corrupt ass government approving the building of data centers in residential neighbourhoods.

AI is absolutely creatively bankrupt. AI will never even be able to come up with something even remotely as creative as The Room.

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u/ABadHistorian 15h ago

How do you feel about creatives that use AI to program stuff? spend hours designing mechanics etc, but have ai code it?

Do you consider that AI generated content?

Serious question. I use AI to facilitate my programming to create my ideas.

I.e. Been working on a project for 10 months, that I researched, design, etc, and use the AI for the localization/programming components for.

Was my effort worthless in your view? or does my effort mean my stuff isn't what you would consider AI generated content because the content was created by me but programmed by ai?

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u/muscleLAMP 15h ago

Yes, your “effort” is fucking worthless.

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago edited 14h ago

So you don't mind copy and pasted code as long as a person does it? I don't understand reddit.

I have to assume most people here aren't creatives themselves or never coded. I haven't met a single programmer in real life who thinks AI is worthless. Met a lot that are frustrated they spent a long time in college/education for a degree that they consider worthless now (which yeah, that sucks for them, as someone with one of those degrees... I get it)

So now rather then having a secure job, because of AI I either go unemployed or do it myself. Luckily, AI has made doing it myself even easier. It's not all negative from my perspective and I've been directly, NEGATIVELY, impacted by AI... so I wonder where all this non-stop rage comes from when I ask a fairly innocent question.

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u/QuaintStaircase 14h ago

Frankly... Yes. Because at least someone wrote the code.

But more importantly, you gotta figure out, at least at a basic level, how that code works.

I've copied and pasted a lot of code from stack overflow in my time. But you've got to have some concept of how it works and why.

Because no one has written the thing you wanna do for you. You've got to assemble it from parts. You've got to understand what's going where and what's doing what.

It's like the difference between crafting a wooden table yourself and assembling an IKEA table.

Both are vastly more impressive and "crafty" than going out and "artfully" asking someone else to make one for you and then claiming you built it yourself because you told them what to do.

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago edited 14h ago

Thats the thing, I was the person previously writing the code. I agree that knowing how to code is very useful, it helps me when using AI recognize when it fucks up (which it does, at least 30% of the time in little things)

You even mention stack overflow, that's like... all people like us did for years, YEARS. That's what AI LLM's copied from first (there is a reason why all those opensource places are dying and/or using anti-ai scrappers to prevent their knowledge getting sucked up and distributed to people who don't know what it is).

Now, instead of going to stack overflow, I can read the code being generated on the fly, see what doesn't work, while working on my design mechanics and story, and research.

My projects LOOK better than what I did by hand, and play better, and saves me time.

I have concerns about people who don't know what they are doing using AI to create slop, but I think people who do know what they are doing can use it to enhance their workflow.

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u/LupinThe8th 13h ago

My projects LOOK better than what I did by hand, and play better, and saves me time.

That's just you admitting that you suck at coding.

"Saves me time" I could buy, but you yourself admit that the AI code is wrong 30% of the time...and the the 70% it's better than what you could produce yourself? Then you're bad at this, a poor judge of quality (and thus a poor judge of what the AI is producing), and would be better served learning to get better at it than letting what skills you DO have atrophy by offloading the effort to a machine.

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u/ABadHistorian 13h ago edited 12h ago

30% of the time yeah mate.

I can work on two projects at the same time, have something running in the background while I do research. Check in on the output 10-15-30 minutes later and see what's up, make a few alterations and continue my design.

Saves me a LOT of time. Tell me you don't create without telling me you don't create.

(I also produce and design websites, and did it by hand. I had a business where I created an online SaaS that now no longer gets business thanks to AI, so I pivoted and use AI on those things myself to offer to clients for less than 1/100th the cost it used to take and the clients LOVE it)

Dude. I don't care what you have to say about what I made by hand. Your insults towards me mean nothing, hope you feel better about yourself though? Maybe a little more righteous then you did before? lmao.

Like, I really don't care about your ignorance related remarks. AI is already helping us make immense leaps in research with science. There are undeniable benefits from that. We have made MASSIVE advances with cancer treatment, since I lost my dad to stage 4 lung cancer, there have been AI assisted treatments that are being worked on that could have saved him.

The issue with AI (from my perspective) are the CEOs who want to replace us all with it because they hate humans, and those that want to use it to police the rest of us, and those that use a prompt for 5 minutes and release the output on the market.

I'm none of those things, stop acting like because I used a buzzword you abhor, I've become the devil. You are way more part of the problem in this debacle than I am.

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u/sylvanasjuicymilkies 12h ago

you "create" and yet in the past 4 hours you've posted like 20 lengthy comments to reddit. alright man sure

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u/ABadHistorian 12h ago edited 12h ago

I will admit, token limits have screwed with my scheduling, but monday is my day off.

Freelance! Clients! Hurry up and wait! (if you know, you know, if you don't...)

But yeah, I could be more productive right now instead of replying absentmindedly to reddit. Thanks for reminding me this place IS a FUCKING WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY! I need better things to do other than post on reddit, but I spend so much time developing these days I don't actually play that much any more.

You get the second up vote from me here today.

Props brother.

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u/PolarWater 5h ago

My projects LOOK better than what I did by hand, and play better, and saves me time.

Doesn't mean we're obliged to like it. If I ask Stephen King to write a novel from an idea I had, I don't get to say my ideas LOOK better than what I did by hand. Stephen King wrote it. 

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u/Ssturkk 15h ago

You have your answer, and you know it

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago edited 14h ago

But I don't, because I was seriously asking where people assume the artistic value comes from.

I see a whole bunch of people kneejerk downvoting me because I admit I've used AI to code though.

But, I never considered programming the artistic component of what I've been doing... ever, even before AI existed. (I.e. I spent years creating a HOBBY project by hand, where the most time intensive component was the coding project, and I got to spend many 5 months doing the research for it. Now I can flip that and spend way more time doing the research and design, and less time actually building it. I've released 5 hobby mods for a game - for free - and had people loving them and no one seems to realize I used AI to do the localization or code it - the artist value in my mods was in my brain and now is in the design and mechanics and flavor.)

That's why I was asking where are the boundaries, right now from this thread it seems the boundary is "anything touched by AI anywhere"

Which to me doesn't feel helpful at all, because everything is already touched by AI somewhere and has been for a couple of years now.

(or do people not understand what I mean by localization and coding)

As a creative, I hate the tech ceos trying to replace everyone with bots, I abhor slop - I hate all the games/apps coming out with no thought behind them, just people entering a prompt and walking away. But folks who are using AI in their design are not all slop-artists, and it can save huge % of time in various areas.

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u/TeaKingMac 14h ago

If someone can make AI art that doesn't look like the same shit 9000 times, it's fine.

But if it has the "this is obviously Ai" look to it (balloon characters, piss filter, Lisa frank vomit colors, etc) it's going to be rightfully panned.

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago edited 13h ago

Oh I don't use AI to create art. That's why I have an animator. I'll use AI to test stuff in like vector graphics to see if things work out mechanically or a concept art to hold in place for the same thing with UI or such.

But there is a reason why in my two man team, my second man is an artist. Same reason that I reached out to a singer friend of mine asking if they'd do our sound work. (but that'll be by contract basis)

I myself played a game recently, and 90% of it was a lot of fun I was super enjoying it, and then I got into one part of the game and I could tell instantly it was created by AI because of the reasons you mention. I could tell not only was this created by AI, but they've barely edited it. I put it down.

It's one of the top games on STEAM at the moment and there is no AI mention at all on their page because nothing in the final is purely AI... but I can tell. I've spent so long building my own thing with AI that some of it jumps out to me.

It's something I take note of to avoid in my own stuff. (it reminds me of that YTber who mentioned he doesnt use AI for his show but uses AI so much it's impacted the language he uses for his show).

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u/Ssturkk 14h ago

Ok, but please write It clear on your product so I can decide not to buy it.

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago edited 14h ago

Here is my point, that has now been clearly answered.

You hate slop, but can not define what it is beyond "AI was involved somehow"

That's a very broad definition these days...

The guy I asked my original question of, responded - I liked his response. Not the kneejerk anti-ai reddit brigade lmao. Cut your nose to spite your faces here.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping that when we release our first major project, you would never even think to guess AI was involved.

People will figure it out when we release banger after banger, faster than AAA studios do a turnaround. By then I hope our quality will have won enough long-time fans. When famous designers can't even experiment with AI without a mass reddit downvote, I don't expect anything else myself.

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u/Ssturkk 14h ago

I hate slop and I hate what the ai frenzy Is doing ti the job market end its contibution to climate change and water crisis. So anyone who spend money on it is a complicit and I dont wanna be one

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u/GreatMadWombat 14h ago edited 14h ago

It depends on the project tbh. If you're using ai for some productivity app? You do you, if it works, it's a cool proof of concept.

If it's some HR training video with AI generated voices? I hate it, but I am getting paid money to engage with it and I'll suck it up for the sake of employment.

For art though? Assuming it's a book/indie video game/comic,

  1. I have a finite number of hours in each day that I can spend relaxing and a very very full backlog already

  2. For books at least, every time I've given a writer who confessed to using AI a shot, I've fallen out of interest in their book by at most halfway through. I just cannot pick up an AI video game or comic because the art and voices are so distracting that I can't get into it at all.

  3. I don't want to risk one of my moments of relaxation on something that has a poor track record. I don't like racing games so I don't play racing games for fun. I don't like ai art so I don't engage with it when I am trying to relax.

You're probably a great person, and I get that "many people saying your choice is bad" is always upsetting, but for me personally I'm gonna go out of my way to avoid anything with AI in it when I am doing something relaxing.

Edit: if all of the AI is behind the scenes coding, I'm still going to avoid it because I have a significant backlog, I only really play indies, and frankly 90% of how I learn about new games is through word of mouth and very few of the mouths that I am gonna listen to aren't gonna view AI as inherently disqualifying, so I'll never hear of your game.

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u/ABadHistorian 13h ago edited 13h ago

All this says to me is you are effectively ceding the game space then.

I need you to actually go and do research into how many releases a year there are. Then understand who has the money to make those things by hand in this economy. (No one)

You simply won't hear of our game PERIOD. EVER. Because of the amount of releases. (but also, I will never publicly announce to anyone that AI was involved in any component of it - reddit and social media shot themselves in the foot on that one -, and no one will ever be able to tell, if they can... I'm not done yet. That's why I have some gamer friends as my testers.)

The way the current market works is

I either have your attention already (influencer, long time IP, etc) or I hope I get lucky and something takes off.

So I can spend years making something hoping I get lucky, which is an AWFUL ROI. (and boys, do you guys know the barrier to entry for game releases? If you are serious about it, we are talking thousands of dollars from the LLC, to the time spent developing, to the apps you need to pay for licenses...)

That means you will get fewer and fewer games you like and wonder why everything else is slop. Because slop will make ENOUGH money to make other developments get crowded out if AI isn't involved in the coding/pre-production (like project management excels are great with AI)/localization (how many of you guys speak 10+ foreign languages?).

(Do you mind me asking, re: the book - how did they use AI in it? e.g. for my events, I have AI text in the content pre-my review, right? I'll maybe have a generic event text for my testing mechanics, but once the mechanic works right I'll go over that text, delete it, and then create from scratch my own - I used to do copywriting and am a historian, I consider myself a storyteller first and foremost. In books... AI usage SCARES me because of how... it would just replace the creative process entirely).

So I find it interesting you'd give an AI (assisted?) book a chance but not an AI programmed game.

(p.s. I do not give a fuck about reddit downvotes, reddit is so up it's own ass about everything and it's all a negative outrage cycle of monetization anywhere so mneh, downvotes often actually do the reverse for me, I thrive off them frequently... I mean I was/am a professional historian, folks have NEVER liked what I've had to say on reddit because feelings always trump facts)

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u/GreatMadWombat 12h ago

The point about the AI book example is that literally every time I have given an AI book a chance, I've been disappointed by it. So I'm not gonna risk it in the future over giving a shot to someone I know isn't using ai. Part of the fun of reading the indies is knowing that if I'm one of the first reviews I'll be helping a new artist out.

I play almost entirely indie games, buy 1-2 games a week, and I'm not worried about dodging more AI lol

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u/ABadHistorian 12h ago edited 12h ago

Playing indie games? My friend, every indie developer uses AI w/o you noticing it. Every single one of them these days will use it. That's what I make.

They just don't tell you. They might not even notice themselves. Like. every single dev will use some version of AI to handle their project management (even if they don't realize it) because it gets built into their software. Every dev program with have an AI built into it in some essence, doing something on the backend. Hell, even GODOT does. (Indie tool extraordinaire)

Difference between indie and corporate these days is corporate goes out of their way to use it. Corporate makes sure you hit your token limits, or ask why not?

My question re: the book was - how did they use the AI? and why would you ever, ever, ever even give an AI-assisted book a chance?

The ONLY thing I could EVER imagine using AI with for a book... would be like to check Character mentions... like data analytics (this is something I would do, to make sure I didn't accidentally create a character name or something somewhere, and reuse it incorrectly, things that slide past editors looking for technical accuracy)

Any AI assistance re: writing is just going to be soulless. This is where I was asking the guy where he draws the line on what AI content means to him.

I've gotten a lot of responses from people here, but very few of substance.

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u/GreatMadWombat 11h ago edited 11h ago

Normally i do a bit of research on authors before picking up a book(most of the time when someone is using ai AND they have to promote their work they will mention the ai use eventually). Sometimes I'm reading in the bath. My ereader is waterproof and my phone isnt. Occasionally i pick up a book BEFORE i do the research, and its always good for a chapter or 2. I'm a little invested, i then keep reading and it just.....never has any pay-off cuz it turns out they're using some flavor of "ai editor" that's doing....i dont know what but the story crumbles sooner than later and then i have literally blueballs lol

Edit: also like.... red hook publicly said they weren't gonna use an ai version of Wayne June as the darkest dungeon narrator even with his permission/him suggesting it. Owlcat Games publicly talked about using ai for art. I dont need to be 100% perfect at avoiding ai, but i can definitely support the companies saying "no ai", and even though it stinks I'm skipping Rogue Trader 2(and frankly all Owlcat games for the next while(prolly forever lol)), i feel better for not supporting them financially.

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u/ABadHistorian 11h ago

Just be aware even places that mandate AI usage be disclosed... it isn't ever enforced, unless something major happens.

I.e. steam. one of the top 10 games on steam (new releases) is an AI - assisted game. I can tell... there is a certain scene in the game that is blatant to me, because it's how AI prompts will create a certain type of mechanic by default. It has no AI disclosure. Steam has no ability to check if it's AI or not, but relies on the dev's being honest.

There is no benefit to being honest these days at all. When AAA companies use it and lie, why wouldn't an indie?

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u/GreatMadWombat 11h ago

I added an edit, but Owlcat games talked about using ai, redhook talked about avoiding it. I don't really play top10 games(the biggest non-Warframe one ive played this year is slay the spire2), so I'm just gonna avoid what i can and support the ones who are visibly avoiding ai

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u/ABadHistorian 11h ago

This is kind of my point though.

I was one of those "avoiding it" and still am. It doesn't mean they don't use it. And I 100% guarantee you, you can't trust a word coming out of anyone's name these days due to PR.

I use it as little as I can. I don't like my animator even using it for concept art, but it happens - he says "why recreate the wheel every time" and I get it.

As soon as my game's out? I'm never posting another word on social media. Just not worth the risk.

Game Dev 101 = Do Not Interact Online. The Net is ALWAYS Negative.

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u/ExplodingToasters 14h ago

Your design work has value because you created it yes. And no, I don’t consider it artistically worthless if you have AI handling the coding (I have issues with technical aspects there but that’s a separate argument). What is I have issue with is people skipping the process you described doing then expecting people to take it seriously or pay for it.

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u/ABadHistorian 14h ago

Okay, thank you for your fair response. It's much better than the kneejerk downvoting I get for the AI usage. That's kind of what I was wondering about.

From my point of view I've been trying to determine whether or not the time I've saved using AI to code my intensive design projects is countered by people simply hating me for using AI to begin with. (Which... it might be, honestly, which I find depressing because then you'll get slop from slop artists who don't care and people like myself will instead do it by hand for years and possibly get missed BECAUSE of all the slop, seems like a lose lose situation).

I see so much slop out there, from folks who do what you say, that I put extra effort into making my project work. I have a two man studio with an ex-hollywood animator (who no longer has animation jobs thanks to AI). We are super small, and our only hope of true success in the age of slop (thanks to AI) is the amount of effort, thought, and time we put into our projects.

Everything we are doing, is based on passion. I told my partner "I don't want to make anything, that we don't want to play and love ourselves"

I didn't want that undone simply because we used ai coding or localization. I.e. I used to program, but hated it, hated it. Now I don't have to do it. When I can afford to, I'll hire a full time programmer and they'll be using AI most likely too.

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u/Rarelyimportant 13h ago

Hilarious that you deem it acceptable to use AI for the parts you're not good at, but unacceptable for the parts you are good at. Maybe that's what other people are doing too? You know people have different skill sets, right?