Fuck AI

I don’t know about “help”, but generative AI will essentially vanish. It’s wildly unprofitable and GPUs are an asset with short shelf lives and depreciating value. When VC funds dry up and the bubble pops, data centers will be turned off and gutted to try and recover what little money the owners can get. That means all of the stuff that’s impossible to self host will disappear unlikely to ever return and no one with money will want to invest in the technology for a very long time if ever again. Stuff like video generation, image generation, vibe coding, all of it is way too token heavy to be self hosted.

Non-text AI slop will probably go away for a long time, maybe forever and that’s pretty good. The problem is that the entire tech industry is over leveraged in AI and VC money is running out. AI was something like 40% of the US gdp last year. When that goes away, the results will be calamitous. VC is tied up in AI and AI based startups that are unable to sell, private equity is tied up in AI and tons of small business with little to no growth, and the tech industry employs tons of people who get paid well and are a large part of keeping the service economy growing. Without AI the economy is gonna crash and take out huge chunks of all of these things and many, many people are going to lose their jobs.

It will help erase the notion that any of these companies are too big to fail and thus above the law and beyond regulation.

Even if bubbles burst these tools will go nowhere.

These tools can and should be regulated like everything else. Laws and regulations don't make things impossible, they simply disincentivize bad behavior by putting a real cost (money, time, or in some cases, life itself) on them.

I think we have finally reached a point where nobody in their right mind would try to argue that training generative AI to create an infinite supply of slop should be considered "fair use", even under existing laws. And so a big part of making AI more fair and functional within our existing society would be to simply have it follow existing laws. For example:

• If you want to train an AI to make art using an anime studio's art as training data, you must get (and probably pay a lot of money for) an explicit license to do so.
• If you want to train an AI to speak using some famous actors voice as training data, you must get (and pay for) an explicit license to do so.
• And the same thing for music, for written words, for code, etc...

Illegally trained models will, of course, still exist out there on the net. But using those will no longer be considered legal or legitimate in the business world, and could open people/corporations up to serious legal liability.

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.

You are not alone in this, and yeah, it can be very disheartening. It's entirely possible we may be entering a new cultural dark are where art and human creativity are not valued by the masses. Like Nietzche saying "god is dead", part of me truly believes that "art is dead", replaced by palatable corporate AI slop.

However... the death of art and culture among the masses doesn't mean that we have to be devoid of art and culture as individuals. We have the ability to make caring about art and culture a core part of our own philosophy. We have the agency to create our own subculture where cool people continue to be rewarded for making interesting human works. We can, and should, still embrace humanity.

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'm not sure many of the people on reddit are even people these days. How many posts and comments over there are probably written by bots? And even among the real people on reddit, how many of them even have opinions that are worth a shit? Would we listen to these people if we ran into them on the street? In many cases, probably not...

I do recommend touching grass, creating your own physical and digital media library, self-hosting your own services, and embracing traditional arts again. Buy a watercolor set, learn to play an instrument, broaden your horizons outside of the digital realm.

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.

As a programmer myself, I can resonate with this a lot.

At the same time, technology isn't to blame for our current situation, corporate greed is. Machine learning has existed in theory and practice for decades. The big innovation of today's AI is theft. Like the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating everything in sight without consent for the benefit of the corporate machine.

But technology can also help us fight back.

Open source software allows us to put the power of technology into the hands of everyday people for free. The fediverse allows us to regain control over the internet and the means of communication. And even things like AI could theoretically be used to undermine corporate software (for example, AI-assisted decompilation of binaries) and even existing AI models (for example, increasingly sophisticated AI data poisoning techniques).

This fight is nowhere close to being over. We still need you on our side.

OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a month. Nobody wants to buy or consumer slop content. The novelty of all of this stuff is beginning to fade for most people. Legal questions have still not been fully answered. And technology can be used against corporations, too.

Using generative AI (GenAI) here as the term to differentiate from analytic AI

Once the bubble pops, the flow of venture capital funds will dry up. Once those funds dry up, the GenAI companies will need to charge users to cover the costs. Almost no individual is willing to pay for GenAI, since the output is such poor quality. Almost all GenAI companies will go out of business. The few that consolidate & survive will charge quite a bit, since the inference costs of GenAI are so high, let alone the training costs of new models. This will cause a drop-off in usage from individuals since it will not be profitable to create slop content on social media platforms.

The AI bubble is the probability of financial failure for massive overinvestment in datacenters, and memory scarcity while it happens. It is not a question of whether the whole AI cat can be put back in the bag, followed by everyone forgetting tools. The frenzy in fact encourages more tools even if there is an associated financial collapse from overinvestment.

AI products aside, im pretty sure the bubble popping will make things way worse. From my limited understanding, the economy (US at least) is not doing well but is being propped up by various things, the AI bubble being the largest. I predict that when it pops, we'll be entering a recession and we'll all be worse off once that happens

First, I'd like to talk about what we all hope will be the results of the burst bubble.

I think first and foremost we want to believe that when this bubble bursts (the sooner the better) the slop train will derail and the companies pushing it will be wounded if not outright die from the catastrophic shock to their bottom line.

I think we also hope that things will go back to a semblance of what they were before. Nobody should really be blind to the fact that there was a lot of slop on social media before the advent of Generative AI. Bots were still becoming more and more prevalent (mostly for the purposes of selling things or scamming people). Algorithms were still addictive and data privacy was in the toilet with data brokerage firms siphoning up anything they could to make money off users.

There are two problems. The first is the AI exacerbated a lot of problems that were already prevalent and making the internet and the world worse. Those problems aren't going to go away or be fixed just because the bubble bursts.

But the main problem is that our economy (at least in the US) is currently being carried on the back of two main Industries. One is the new AI industry and that has usurped the economic power of the people (who buy goods and services). The other is the military industrial complex and AI is trying really hard right now to sink it's teeth deep into that honey pot because it has something you and I plebian consumers don't have. That's where the money is.

So when the bubble bursts we'll still have the enshittied internet bearing down on us, and we'll have an economy in shambles.

I think we all hope prices will come down for things we want to consume. Electronics, media etc. But that's unlikely. We know that it won't happen because in recent history this has happened before. The price of everything increases with the shortages in 2020 and the following years of the pandemic. Those prices haven't lowered significantly since then. Companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep them high because the line must go up.

Now for what you can do.

Invest in a safe commodity. Gold, silver, European bonds, that kind of thing. (I know this is not possible for most people).

Remove as much AI slop and other nonsense from your life. Don't consume it. Don't interact with it. Encourage other people to do the same.

If you have to interact with AI (for work or school or whatever), do it to the max. Do not pay for the privilege. Make it as costly for the company providing the AI as humanly possible.

Choose to spend your money at places (if you can) that you want to see survive the crash. Local places you like going to. Businesses you want to support. Use your word of mouth to suggest them to others.

You say you're into technology and engineering. Keep learning. Keep your skills sharp. Don't let AI rob you of your ability to reason and think and problem solve. The AI is nothing without us. It produces nothing without us. It innovates nothing without us. It can't exist without us. That's why these companies are pushing it so hard in so many products regardless of whether it's useful or not. They need us to keep producing content. They need us to keep innovating and creating.

I know that it's not easy to see the end of this as anything but a crashoot.

I know it's hard to prepare for the worst while keeping your mental health protected.

I know the feeling of being so hopeful for the new technologies of the world only to have that hope and excitement thrown back in your face while tech bros try to replace you at every turn.

But you aren't just a replaceable cog. They keep trying to massage and coerce and recruit people like us to use their crap because we're important. If we weren't they wouldn't try.

You have skills. You have training. You have enough common sense to be able to look around you and see the problems. That will always be valuable. Even though they're trying to downplay that value at every turn because they are greedy fucks who just want to scoop money into their own coffers.

Don't give up.

Even if bubbles burst these tools will go nowhere

If the bubble bursts, it will no longer be profitable to shove AI into everything. AI might not "go away" but why would people who are in it for the money continue using it if there's no money in it?

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".

So what? Stop going to reddit if it bothers you (but also stop using reddit if it doesn't bother you).

I have no hope most of you guys are old folk.

Did you just call me old?

If you think youtube videos or twitter accounts had soul and weren't already ruined by corporate advertising, then you need to get real. Literally nothing has changed. There was nothing of value there for a very long time.

You're in your early 20s so enshittified corporate media is probably all you've ever experienced. Try to find some popular youtube videos from the 2000s to see the difference (remember that there were zero ads autoplaying or sponsors mentioned during the video). Here's an example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2I294xoqGcE. Or read up on what the internet was like in the 90s and early 00s. People used to just do things because they liked it and thought it was fun, instead of to become an influencer with sponsors or go viral or pander to subscribers. Back when "the algorithm" was what people chose to tell each other about and search engines were designed to help you find exactly the content you were looking for, because you were searching for it while your friend described it to you.

Corporations are using AI to automate the jobs of influencers and content-creators, because influencers and content-creators work for corporations. They're extra costs that can be cut and replaced with machines.

The burst is mainly an economic thing. It'll destroy a lot of "value". Your retirement fund, etc. Like when the real-estate bubble popped.

It won't change much about the technology. Maybe as a secondary effect. But I guess we still had real-estate after that bubble popped... So... ?!

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!

I am a replaceable human who has no value.

Come on, homie. You have value. It might not be much on the capitalist scale, but it's massive on a social level. You gotta resist letting this miserable evil system define you. Find your own value.

On the other hand I can see how it's hard to "find your own value" when you're impoverished. But that's all the more reason to resist a system that feeds off impoverishment.

Someone made an argument that we are already an oligopoly. If that's true we probably have at least 20 years of stagnation ahead of us. Meaning the AI bubble won't burst because those that hold the levers of power just won't let it.

I am not suicidal BTW and also sorry for wall of the text. Peace

I don't think anyone will be held to account, so no one who needs to learn anything will. The same decision makers who took us down this path will keep being decision makers.