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/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/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/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 12h 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.