All of us are waiting for the bubble to burst but will it actually affect anything? I think AI has already done so much irreversible damage to Interest & Society(Kinda). I have seen YouTube channels with 100K subs who create AI Slops(Music, Short stupid essay), Xhitter account which have more than 100K followers which pump out good enough art. Even if bubbles burst these tools will go nowhere. Every day I wake up I feel much shittier. I need to puke. I am seeing everything I love getting ruined by soulless bot or greedy humans who don't love art/music/story etc. I am sounding like a boomer but I am in my early 20s actually. I go to reddit there are Pro AI people laughing at us calling us Luddite or "Decel". I have no hope most of you guys are old folk. I want to leave this fast paced world & go do farming at my hometown. Reading Books made by humans and watching some movies made by humans in a week without caring about this whole hellhole. I was so passionate about computer engineering I really loved technology. I was one of the early adopters of Gen AI who loved Midjounery because it was new & looked kinda magical to me now it looks like the most dystopian shit human yet created. I now resent my degree. I am a replaceable human who has no value. Human evolutioned much just to be replaced by some bots so I can do more slavery for corpo lords who believe that capital is ever growing like a cancer cell.
In a sort of funny irony, you've more or less arrived at the same reason my mom voted for Trump. She's an accelerationist that wants to crash it all because she thinks the world is too stick to survive and would rather get whatever comes next than what we have now.
As for the bubble, ROI isn't coming for a while, but no one wants to be left behind as an early adopter, which takes training, which takes time and contractors and suddenly you've spun up economic buoyancy here and there. But the way both generative AI and genuine machine learning are being used across huge parts of the economy, it's simply not going to be a standard bubble.
Standard bubbles, TL;DR, are when everyone runs to invest in a single industry or type of thing until there's no one left to invest in it, and investments are producing returns. Gen AI systems aren't like that at all. Their inputs are massive, they have yet to enshitify and start including ads, and some people actually do get real use out of them. So unlike a single invesmtnet (Beanie Babies, fiberoptic line, etc.), there's GPUs, data centers, power generation, water, nuclear SSMs, and more on the backend, that are actually providing bottlenecks that prevent the typical bubble runup from happening so quickly. IMO, anyway.
IIRC, we've already seen the collapse of the frothy churn of "startups" that were all custom GPTs in wrappers and "vibecoded [insert bullshit here]", as that's a fucking stupid thing to pay for. Everyone trying to middle-man some large model can't keep up with how quickly they adapt to keep their wrapper in place, and vibecoding something you don't understand leads to bad products. All LLM output needs a human to validate it. The best it can ever be, is something it learned from humans.
And so what? Well the attention economy, fortunately, was bloated and carcinogenic already and the AI slop is going to inflate it until it dies under its own weight. The trend of authenticity as value will be huge for anyone that can afford it. Humans talking about the things they make were already all over, get ready for that to go up 20 fold.
Then you'll get a bifuraction of the attention economy. Bespoke, human-only Patreon-style online spaces where it's all about how you do things all rustic and old timey. Then everyone else that can't or doesn't care to tell what's slop and what's not, flooded by slop 24/7.
Makes me wish I had the money to go buy some summer camp and have adults go there and be one of those Digital Detox places where humans hang out and make memories. Make me a wallet! Go jump in the lake! Eat this french bread pizza! That'll be $22,000, please!
Well I hate to tell you I kinda feel like now your mom. I really want everything to crash but deep down I know it will bring more pain & suffering. So, I will not hope for that.
Oh no, I get it 100%. We've sailed right on past the point of no return. You give treatment to someone that's dying, not a bloated corpse found after a year in a storm drain. No use in CPR anymore.
But, we do need to remember that transition times like this are normal throughout human history. The World Order we all grew up with is 3-4 generations old. Fuck, can you imagine living between 1916 and 1945? What tendentiously shitty time to be alive. WWI and II. Flu Pandemic. The Great Depression. Invention of the black light. JFC. I also want to just get it all over with. But that's not how this works. We all have to live through this. And we can find our little places out of the way to hunker down.