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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

121–130 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#121
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

It doesn't cost less to get the thing you actually want in the end anyway, no one in their right mind would actually launch with the founder's AI-produced assets because they'd be laughed out of the market immediately. They're placeholders at best, so you're still going to need to get a professional to do them eventually.

Prototypes being launched as products is so common it’s an industry cliche.

Having those prototypes be AI generated is just a new twist.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#122
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How frequently is a technical moat the thing that makes a business successful, relative to other moats?

I mean, if taxi companies could build their own Uber in house I’m sure they’d love to and at least take some customers from Uber itself. A lot of startups are middlemen with snazzy UIs. Middlemen won’t be in as much use in a post AI world, same as devs won’t be as needed (devs are middlemen to working software) or artists (middlemen to art assets)

But it's not technical, it's due to uber having spent incredible amounts of money into marketing.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#123
post #116

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Funny how everyone is just okay with the basis for all this art being stolen art by actual humans. Zero sense of ethics.

Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#124

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

I enjoy using AI generated art for my presentations.

I chuckled seeing it in the first presentation of the conference. By the end of the conference, it was numbingly banal.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#125

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Easy entry not equals getting rich.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#126
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how everyone is just okay with the basis for all this art being stolen art by actual humans. Zero sense of ethics.

Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.

I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point.. I listen to my own AI generated music now like 90% of the time.

Interesting. For me knowing that any form of entertainment has been generated by AI is a massive turn-off. In particular, I could never imagine paying for AI-generated music or TV-shows.

Do you value self expression? I literally mean creating music for MYSELF. I don't really care if anyone else "values" it. I like to listen to it and I enjoy spending an evening(or maybe 10 minutes if it is just a silly idea) to create a song. But this means my incentive to "buy" music is greatly decreased. This is the trend I think we'll see increasing in the near future.

Examples:

https://suno.com/s/0gnj4aGD4jgVcpqs

https://suno.com/s/D2JItANn5gmDLtxU

https://suno.com/s/j4M7gTAVGfD9aone

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#128
post #57
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

> With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art Imagery AI does not produce art. Not that it matters to anyone but artists and art enjoyers.

When pedantry pays the bills this will be a helpful mindset.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#129

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat.

It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#130
post #112

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

This is what the people actually studying this say:

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

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