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

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

#251

Post by DrewADesign » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #196

DrewADesign wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions. Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.

Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc. But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality o…

Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.

What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.

Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.

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

#252

Post by ben_w » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

grues-dinner wrote: post #160

jcelerier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into. For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a consci…

Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable.

For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing next to him was pointing a handheld scanner at his belly which revealed he was pregnant with a cat.

Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no recollection of what it was selling.

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

#253

Post by trinsic2 » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

mallowdram wrote: post #250

trinsic2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very thought out reply on the nuances around this. Thanks for generating insight on this topic. I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics. Also the idea of breaking windows to generate more income reminds me of the kind of services we have in modern society. It's like many of the larger encomic players focus on "things be broke", or "Breaking Things" to drive income which defeats the purpose…

These are mistaken arguments. The automation of imagination is not imagination. Efficiency at this stage is total entropy. The point of AI is to make anything seemingly specific and render it arbitrary to the point of pure generalization (which is generic). Remember that images only appear to be specific, that's their illusion that CS took for granted. There appears to be links between images in the absent, but that…

> Efficiency at this stage is total entropy.

Im not sure I understand your point, or how your point is different from the parent?

Edit: I see you updated the post, I read through the comment thread of this topic and Im still at a loss on how this is related to my reply to the parent. I might be missing context.

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

#254

Post by catlifeonmars » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #97

catlifeonmars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what I said. But ok. Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physicall…

> That’s not what I said. But ok. This is what you did say > Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Like - how the f ck would you know? Even more so, why the f ck does your ignorance and inability to think of possibilities, or fully grasp the nature of anything make you think that that sort of comment is remotely appropriate. You have the uniquely fortunate position to never be able to realise how…

> Your response is you don’t understand it so nobody else should.

Ah I see. I misinterpreted the _you_ in this sentence (to mean me).

My main points still stand though:

1. weather is well understood to exhibit chaotic behavior (in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense) 2. there is an upper bound to accurate (edit: precise) weather forecasting the farther you predict into the future

As an aside, there was no need to get personal. I wasn’t the downvoter but that is very likely why the comment got flagged.

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

#255

Post by mallowdram » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #253

mallowdram wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are mistaken arguments. The automation of imagination is not imagination. Efficiency at this stage is total entropy. The point of AI is to make anything seemingly specific and render it arbitrary to the point of pure generalization (which is generic). Remember that images only appear to be specific, that's their illusion that CS took for granted. There appears to be links between images in the absent, but that…

> Efficiency at this stage is total entropy. Im not sure I understand your point, or how your point is different from the parent? Edit: I see you updated the post, I read through the comment thread of this topic and Im still at a loss on how this is related to my reply to the parent. I might be missing context.

There is no benefit to AI, not one bit, the barrier to entry grows steeper, rather than is accessed. These are not "hobbies" but robotic copies.

This is demented btw, this take: >>Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!

CS never examines the initial conditions to entry, it takes short-cuts around the initial conditions and treats imagination as a fait accompli of automation. It's an achilles heel.

edit: none of these arguments are valid, focusing on metrics, the broken window problem. These are downstream of AI's mistaken bypassing of initial conditions. Consider the idea of automating arbitrary units as failed technology, and then examining all of the conditions downstream of AI. AI was never a solution, but a cheap/expensive (its paradox) bypassing of the initial conditions. It makes automation appear to be a hobby. A factory of widgets that mirages as creativity. That is AMAZING as it is sequestered in the initial arbitrariness of language!

How did engineering schools since the 1950s not notice, understand, investigate the base units of information; whether they had any relationship direct or otherwise to thought, creativity, imagination? That's the crux.

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

#256

Post by iamacyborg » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:20 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #206

iamacyborg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

>is actually a net positive result for those disciplines. This is an argument based in Luddism. Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time. With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was. There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitabi…

> There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability.

What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.

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

#257

Post by iamacyborg » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

squigz wrote: post #185

iamacyborg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labo…

Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more peop…

> In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people

The problem is that folks seem to be confused between artistic expression and actually good art. Let alone companies like Spotify cynically creating “art” so that they can take even more of the pie away from the actual artists.

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

#258

Post by ben_w » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #228

Eisenstein wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that music made from samples is not original?

I could see that remixes are partially original. But you're not even doing the remixing; the LLMs are.

Indeed.

Text rather than music, but same argument applies: Based on what I've seen Charlie Stross blog on the topic of why he doesn't self publish/the value-add of a publisher, any creativity on the part of the prompter* of an LLM is analogous to the creativity on the part of a publisher, not on the part of an author.

* at least for users who don't just use AI output to get past writer's block; there's lots of different ways to use AI

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

#259

Post by DrewADesign » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

benoau wrote: post #195

DrewADesign wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.

Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands. Would we be better off? I doubt it.

Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?

It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usable than if it was cobbled together with default bootstrap widgets, which is how it would have been done 2+ years ago. If an app needs a designer enough to not be feasible without one, AI isn’t going to replace the designer in that process. It just makes the author feel cool.

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

#260

Post by davidw » Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #204

amelius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like building a rocket that can relocate us to another planet when shit hits the fan?

Note to self: playing devil's advocate is not without risk of downvotes.

I think in this case you're actually advocating for "the devil" - that man is not using his money or voice for a better society, to put it mildly.

I mean just a few days ago, we got "the left is the party of murder" - super helpful in terms of turning down the heat in the US. And of course that was without knowing what we now know about that situation...