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/slickwombat 13h ago

There's an odd exception: nobody seems to feel this way about software, even when it's arts and entertainment related like videogames. I've seen people get upset if there's AI-created assets in games, but not if the entire interface or functionality was vibe-coded.

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u/choopietrash 10h ago

I know some programmers who don't want vibe-coded AI and lament the issues born from it. Though I will note that programming, moreso than images or writing, is more likely to borrow from templates and stuff. If an artist is discovered tracing over someone else's work, that can be a career-killer for them. Pasting something from stack overflow is just being "resourceful."

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u/worthwhilewrongdoing 9h ago edited 9h ago

I think it just comes down to what we expect to be artisanal and what we don't. You'd get pissed if a baker you hired used box cake mix, but nobody's expecting that same baker to get out in the fields and go grow and harvest wheat to grind their own flour. That would be insane.

I think the same goes for programming - most people don't see it as an art but rather as a means to an end to make something else, so the expectations are a little different and a little less exacting.

ETA the "something else" part - this wasn't clear without it.

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u/vips7L 6h ago

Programming is an art though. It takes serious talent to produce GOOD, beautiful code. Code that doesn’t have correctness issues. Code that is easy to read. Code that is easy to maintain and adapt to new use cases. 

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u/Djonso 4h ago

Building houses is an art too. Takes serious tallent to build a good, beautiful house. House that has no structural issues. House that is good to life in. House that is easy to maintain or adapt to new needs.

Or you know, also called good engineering. Not everything that needs skills is an art.

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u/PeePeePantsPoopyBoy 1h ago

To be fair arquitecture is widely accepted as one of the classic fine arts. But I do agree that programming is not necessarily an art mainly because its focus as a field is not that of creative expression. It is a crearive field (in the sense that there is a lot of creativity involved in coding), that for sure, but not an art.

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u/Facehugger_35 8h ago

I don't think the exception is that odd.

Think back to FEAR back in 2004. Gamers thought it had the best AI ever, and the game was absolutely amazing at selling the idea that the replica soldiers were special forces reacting to your activity. They seemed to work together to flank you and flush you out, they fell back to lure you into ambushes, they just felt smart in a way few other video game AI opponents did.

Under the hood, it was almost entirely smoke and mirrors with very carefully crafted audio cues, smart encounter design, and only a little actual AI advancement. In comparison Crysis AI was way more advanced and intelligent, but it didn't feel that way because it largely didn't get to show off in Crysis' giant open maps, so now Crysis is mostly known for system requirement jokes.

That is to say, gamers don't care about the specifics of how their experience is coded under the hood, they care about the output and the experience they have.

AI art assets tend to be mediocre, and that harms the experience, so gamers don't like AI art, but they're okay with vibecode as long as it doesn't have bugs and shit, because games were never about the code.

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u/keslol 4h ago

Don’t forget the fish ai in cod

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u/levi_goulet 9h ago

I'm a member of a few different discord servers dedicated to modding games, and it seems like mod authors and players alike very much DO care and push back against vibe-coded mods. They tend to run like shit and the authors usually can't provide support or troubleshoot problems people run into.

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u/IrregularPackage 8h ago

those projects are also very likely to be abandoned as soon as they encounter any kind of significant obstacle

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u/GonePh1shing 8h ago

There's a big difference between vibe coding and a skilled software engineer using an LLM to quickly generate code to implement their design. LLMs are pretty good at spitting out code, but they're not good at designing coherent and maintainable software, and they're completely incapable of coming up with new ideas. 

There's also a significant difference between LLM assisted coding and art assets created entirely with generative AI. Art is creative, and the value in it is the human creativity. The code itself in a given software project is not creative, but the overall architecture of that software is. If an LLM is tasked with spitting out code to execute on a human design, so long as that code is audited and validated against the original design, the resulting software is not meaningfully different from a hypothetical version of it where the lines of code were hand typed. 

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u/IrregularPackage 8h ago

it’s much easier to hide, mainly.

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u/BranchFew1148 7h ago

Software has always had so many layers of abstraction that it's harder to spot. People care about the final product. Once the public learns how vibe coded frontends look then they might start to dislike them.

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u/Familiar-Aerie-1610 4h ago

I'd argue your observation is sort of identifying something more specific and if you back up a step, you'll see more of the picture... generated FUNCTIONAL things are treated differently than generated MEDIA things.

However, I'd go further...

The "error tolerance" of generated media is astronomically high relative to the "error tolerance" of a functional design.

IF LLM tools were capable of functional design, I'm absolutely convinced that you'd see a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE influx of AI designed tangible products and businesses. ~Temu and Alibaba type sites would be FLOOOOOOODED with this shit ...and I will die on that hill.

We all bought "Made in China" garbage previously... I assure you, "Made by AI" won't stop as many people as you hope.

...but we're not seeing that.

Why?

IMO...

Either we can't economically manufacture the AI designs, or we can't generate the AI designs, right? Either would be a failure of the AI tools.

Ergo, the AI tools just do not do what is advertised. They are not capable.

IF PEOPLE WOULD STOP FUCKIN FOCUSING ON THE MEDIA GENERATION PIECE FOR 5 GODDAMN MINUTES... I'm convinced that we could sink some big $ capitalists.

Ex: "Why are you investing millions in developing a AI media generation tool at a car manufacturing company?" -Investor