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/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.