The main consumer of generative AI technology is the manufacturer of "AI-powered" products: the AI "author" or the AI "artist" is exactly the same as the company replacing their customer support line or their search results with AI.
They're not doing it for themselves! They want to resell it to you
You will never hear from the people who want AI writing or AI art or AI customer support or AI search results *for themselves* - because they already got it and they are happy.
The people trying to convince you that their AI slop is indistinguishable from the genuine article are doing *marketing.*
If it was TRUE then it wouldn't need marketing. It would be self-evident. Companies would suddenly report cost savings without anybody on the consumer side noticing that anything happened.
No one had to say "hosting our shit in the cloud is just as good as on-premise servers." It was obvious!
The cloud had a ready market: companies with irregular workloads who needed to be able to rent someone else's computer.
The market for AI is much trickier because a slop machine is only valuable if you can get people to buy that slop from you. Which is impossible as long as there are alternatives.
Now, there will always be a market for content margarine machines among the people who truly do not understand the difference.
But they need to justify their investment so they turn to people who are slightly less slop than them, and say look at this Content that I produced. Don't you like it?
ehhh lots of orgs really do stick with shitty old processes and systems/tech and wait for someone to sell them something better
I'm not talking about COBOL, but things like old computer systems that don't even have support for new product specs so the new stuff is handled by hand
There are legitimate reasons for that too; for example the costs of the refactoring, or security (Bloomberg only started moving their data to cloud storage ~2019 because they didn't trust it). A lot of effort went into explaining the cost-benefit ratio.
i despise genai and i agree with your general sentiment but this hyperbole is a ballooning a bit much. the top 3 cloud hyperscalers employ tens of thousands of people whose entire job is to sell the cloud. they have done so for over a decade. cloud does not sell itself.
And my first use of Android's Gemini resulted in it refusing to turn itself off, giving me an interminable spiel about Google policy, and interrupting my response at the first hint of a comma, for another corporate rant.
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They're not doing it for themselves! They want to resell it to you
The people trying to convince you that their AI slop is indistinguishable from the genuine article are doing *marketing.*
No one had to say "hosting our shit in the cloud is just as good as on-premise servers." It was obvious!
The market for AI is much trickier because a slop machine is only valuable if you can get people to buy that slop from you. Which is impossible as long as there are alternatives.
Nvidia makes GPUs, and convinces OpenAI to pay for them. OpenAI needs to make back their investment, by means of slop machine subscriptions.
So OpenAI hype masters find people who are indistinguishable from slop and say: buy our thing that makes Content margarine.
But they need to justify their investment so they turn to people who are slightly less slop than them, and say look at this Content that I produced. Don't you like it?
I'm not talking about COBOL, but things like old computer systems that don't even have support for new product specs so the new stuff is handled by hand
But, as you say, at least there was benefit.
however, the AI stuff is far and away beyond that general space into scam territory
not even pushing "bad fit" solutions, but demanding people keep using it until they find a use for it
it's downright abusive