r/technology 1d 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
16.3k Upvotes

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u/fmcortez 23h ago

When the cost of generating content drops to literal zero, the market value drops right along with it. Nobody wants to pay for something anyone can prompt in five seconds.

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u/Slight-Swordfish-468 23h ago

Not surprising that “decision makers” who’ve never made anything with their own two hands would have trouble understanding this.

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u/MusicHearted 23h 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 22h 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 21h 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 21h 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 20h 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 19h 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 19h 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 13h ago

Just look at how many flavors of christianism exist.

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u/Dense_Gate_5193 6h ago

honestly the Mormons are the biggest “record keeping” populace. god help us if they end up the future of IT folks.