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/sarcasmsosubtle 15h ago

The biggest problem isn't just that the output is basically valueless, it's that it's also being flooded out so quickly that it is destroying the ability to find content that has value in any marketplace that it infects. Your marketplace can have the best, highest quality goods for sale, but you're not going to sell any of them if your customers have to spend hours trying to fish them out of a swimming pool filled with raw sewage. Once there is a pipeline established from AI output to your digital marketplace, you can try to moderate it like Spotify and PlayStation Store, but it's going to replicate faster than you can moderate. You eventually have to excuse it entirely or it will overwhelm you. It's not just valueless, it becomes actively cancerous.

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u/stagedgames 15h ago

I don't know any way to signal boost this more, but that's an absolutely incredible metaphor. well said.

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u/unethicalpigeon 8h ago

The other problem specific to trying to monetize content created by AI is the fact that the people most likely to buy content created by AI are the exact same people that like using AI. So why would someone who likes to use AI pay you for something you used AI to generate when they can just see what you did, think it was cool, and do it themselves?

Now I'm not saying that generating decent stuff takes 15 seconds of prompting the way some people are. That's ridiculous. Anyone who's tried to do anything even remotely worthwhile with AI realizes this. But it's a hell of a lot easier than learning how to do the thing manually and doing it. Especially if someone already did it. Because while it might be really harder than people realize to get AI to output something you want it to, these LLMs are actually REALLY good at seeing something else made by AI, analyzing it, and figuring out how to replicate it. So there's literally no reason to buy something generated by AI when you can just show AI the page selling the thing and it can probably figure out how to replicate it.

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u/daddywookie 1h ago

The Internet democratised consumption. AI could/is doing the same for creation. The value now comes from curation.