AI’s business model is starting to look like a snake eating its own tail: scrape human work, replace the humans who make it, flood the web with synthetic sludge, then wonder why there’s less quality data to train on. Silicon Valley calls it disruption. Everyone else might call it burning the furniture to heat the house.

Best thing you could probably do at this point is make slop and pass it off as real work.

Burning the furniture to heat the house is such a good analogy, wow.

Shitting the nest is a more abrasive analogy for when you really mean it.

I’ve heard shitting on your own doorstep. Doesn’t fit as nicely as the furniture analogy though IMO 😆

I think “Shitting where you eat” works a little better, given they’re shitting all over the internet, which is where their training data comes from

Edit: Spelling

Pretty sure some of that furniture was structural

Load-bearing, some might say

Hey, at least it’ll be warm for a hot minute!

Sure we destroyed the planet, but for a while there we provided great shareholder value.

I’ve heard it as sell the car to buy gasoline

Also very accurate 😄

An old one is “eating your seed corn”. In other words eating the seeds you need to plant the next crop to survive now guaranteeing you will starve next season.

Wow, also really good 😅

I cant recall the source (I think it was a Telegraph article) but it only took current AIs 7 “rounds” to confuse its data amongst each other and it was 11 or 12 before it becomes completely corrupted. The testers basically used ChatGPT, Grok etc etc to search each other and they just had massive brain farts at the 7th round of questioning.

Oh yeah, the AI companies realized this from the start, maybe not that it would happen this quickly, but that it would happen.

This is why they are hyping AI up further now, as they want to squeeze the final drop of blood from the stone.

The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

Do people just read summaries?

What are people so busy doing these days?

Also that’s not true for me, when ai summarises something or gives me stats I usually click on the links to read more

You underestimate how many people have just forgone the usage of search engines. Most people these days just go to their preferred AI site or app and just take at face value whatever slop it spits out. No one reads or verifies anymore. It would be something if they were using that “saved time” on something productive but alas it’s just to go back to doom scrolling or something else just as meaningless. It’s depressing :/

Do you have any data to back up that claim? I have the same feeling with some people, but I wouldn’t go as far as stating this as general truth for most.

I think it’s intentional. It’s a royal pain in the ass to search for anything now. I’m resorting to using old hard drives to find old memes and software.

It wouldn’t surprise me that companies collaborate to get rid of things. I still can’t find the original iShit meme from 2006.

Introducing the iShit; It looks so good, you won’t even notice the smell.

Search engines have been corrupted by SEO garbage and ads presented as legitimate search results. Calling an ad “sponsored” is disingenuous at best. Using LLMs instead of searching is a logical progression. Slightly related to that are the people that search and just read the LLM summary at the top.

I’ve heard from marketing people that they’re starting to publish blog spam to try and steer people’s LLM conversations, so I think even the current LLM usage will eventually be even worse than search is currently.

Search results also really suck these days. It’s pages upon pages of SEO slop.

I agree, they don’t read summaries, they stop at headlines.

Consider the news articles lately about restaurants using AI-generated pictures of their food. It takes only the briefest glance at the picture to see and think “Holy fucking shit, that looks fucking revolting.”

But they post, and sometimes even print these pictures. Which indicates that they’re not even giving that one, brief glance at the output.

To be fair they used to have those menus done by specialized “design agencies” that didn’t give a shit and they didn’t really look at the output. All they’re seeing is that the design agency now costs nothing. I think the bitter lesson is that there are tasks where quality really doesn’t matter and never did.

I used to work for a company that had a built-in AI summary in their search engine.

1: We were required to click the links that got printed out in the summaries. 2: That rule also applied to our helpline with worse consequences.

I’d occasionally call our helpline when I couldn’t figure something out/wanted a second opinion on a judgment call. The amount of times I got told “The AI said-” yes but WHAT DO THE DOCS SAY??? I don’t care what the digital meat grinder that tells me to break the law once an hours says!

All to say, yeah, people don’t click through on those links. I’d wager most people who use it don’t

People have rarely ever read past the first paragraph of an article. Even during newspaper times.

I’m very concerned about this.

But I’m even more concerned that the jobs that AI kills are jobs that no one gets trained to do, and that no one will know how to do them when the computers stop working.

LLM is destroying the ability to think in kids. Even if you want to switch back and retrain people Gen Slop isn’t ready for that.

Yeah but the job market will be hot for any Gen Alpha that even has half a working brain.

The people doing the hiring will be too addle minded to recognize a working brain.

They say “Well people will just work in the upper levels, strategy, etc.” Uhhh, how do they think people develop the skills and instincts for those positions? Sure, you can train someone to go through the motions but they won’t know if they are good or bad, no experience with past mistakes and crisis, no sense of what will work or not, etc. It is like saying everyone will become the site manager but never put a house frame together or swung a hammer in their life.

Ai isn’t even close to replacing a job yet. Its not even cheaper than a human. Anyone going into a field that people are fleeing due to Ai will be in huge demand when we move on to the next scam cycle.

Tech layoffs in the last few years arent jobs being replaced with Ai, they are from the massive amounts of overhiring that occured in 2020-2021

This is pervasive throughout any segments where AI is leveraged. I’ve heard it called a Diamond-shaped market. What used to be a pyramid of entry-level to mid tier to experienced staff no longer has entry level. So it’s just mid tier and experienced staff. There is no one in the pipeline to move up. What happens then? The genie is out of the bottle. The big AI shops could close up now and it would only slow the decline as local models are getting more performant. I’m impressed at what Qwen can do on a MacBook with 32 gig of ram. The question I have is, what’s the solution? I got nothing other than hoping the process of decline drags out longer than I think it will.

When AI removes the need for so many jobs and people can’t afford purchases and the economy collapses (again), how will the world’s governments act? I can’t see the US ever introducing universal basic income and the vast majority of countries simply can’t afford it. I think AI might be one of those moments where it seemed like a great idea in the zeitgeist, but in retrospect, they just didnt plan for it, because all they wanted to do was just make as much money as possible. The current crop of James Bond baddies at the top of the ladder are happy to see the world burn, because they won’t be around to give a shit when it all comes crashing down.

They’ll be around for it, but they’ll be insulated from it because they have more money than God.

All the money in the world cannot render someone immune to kinetic energy

it can, if it buys you a wall o flesh.

Better be paying those security forces top notch pay.

In Douglas Rushkoff’s “Survival of the Richest”, originally published on Medium on July 5, 2018, with the subtitle “The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.”, Rushkoff describes accepting an unusually well-paid invitation to speak about “the future of technology” at a luxurious private resort. He expected roughly 100 investment bankers, but instead found himself sitting at a table with five extremely wealthy men from the hedge-fund world. Their questions shifted from cryptocurrency to whether New Zealand or Alaska would be safer during a collapse—and then to their bunkers.

A brokerage-house CEO who had nearly finished building an underground bunker asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

By “the event,” they meant a catastrophe such as environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear disaster, or an unstoppable virus. They worried that money would become worthless and their armed guards might take over. Rushkoff recounts them discussing combination locks on food supplies, disciplinary collars for guards, and robot security. His response was to treat their security personnel well and build relationships rather than rely on coercion.

They didn’t like that answer.

…rushkoff.com/…/1094-survival-of-the-richest.html theguardian.com/…/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apoc…

“What? I am going to have to work to build social capital, ridiculous. How do I buy it?”

No billionaire wants to live in a bunker for the rest of their life. They want adulation, people fawning over them, etc. They’d also need to continue to receive supplies, fresh food (you think they are going to put up with dried rations?), hookers, travel, etc. If they are cut off they will be no better than Hitler in his bunker.

History has shown when the leadership is corrupt everyone around them follows suit. Stealing whenever they can, abandoning their posts at the first chance, incompetence, security goes to whoever pays them the most, etc.

And this is why they’re investing so heavily in killer robot technology. The private armies protecting these bunkers, won’t be comprised of humans.

Though there will probably be a heavily brainwashed IT guy shackled in a sub-basement Faraday cage beneath each bunker, for just in case there’s any crisis that can’t be ‘reprogrammed’ upstairs using the AIs, but these guys are going to be nigh on impossible to get to.

Don’t accept their money. “We’ve converted all cash to freedom bucks. Your money is no good here.”

The new feudal lords will own everything and be super duper kind enough to let the peons and slaves toil the soil and keep 1/100th of the produce. Pretty sure that’s literally how they want and expect things to become

I can’t see the US ever introducing universal basic income

Recent polling shows 66% of Americans support Medicare for all. The people will demand UBI once it’s needed, the only question is whether the Epstein class will comply peacefully or not.

The US debt is so high now that a UBI would push it over the edge most likely without massive tax increases. Decades of being told all taxes on anyone are evil probably mean people would walk off a cliff before doing that.

Even the AI just wants to die.

Businesses destroying the skills development pipeline by eliminating entry level jobs.

Retail is so polluted with AI scams and deceptive ads that the public is being driven off of any but the most well vetted sites. This is on top of the massive scams problem worldwide.