While Amazon was operating at a loss, it was still selling products that a lot of people wanted. The extremely high failure rate of enterprise AI projects, the multiple studies finding that AI frequently degrades productivity, and especially the end of the "all you can eat" offerings from AI...
The fact that so many AI services, like Cursor, Replit, Claude Code, etc, are raising prices and implementing increasingly strict and opaque rate limits seems like reason to suspect that AI companies are having trouble even charting a path to possible profitability.
I am reminded of Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - and with AI, I think it now applies to measures like the classic Turing Test. LLMs give me the impression of technology that was designed specifically to do things like pass the Turing Test...
100% agree from a creative standpoint. I take the existence of "AI slop" as a term as evidence that some, if not all, people understand the difference. Actual creative work is more intentional than anything we've seen from a LLM and it seems like a non-insignificant amount of people are...
I think it could even happen without the Internet as a whole being "dead", if high-quality text becomes increasingly paywalled /captcha-gated/rate-limited/etc while AI-generated text overwhelms public spaces. Doubly so with these AI companies getting sued from every angle by big corporations...
As evidenced by that incident earlier this year where OpenAI overtuned ChatGPT's sycophantic tone and people started to catch on/feel uncomfortable, so they had to tone it down.
I can't help but assume the slop and hallucination issues will get worse as AI-generated text becomes a larger share of the publicly available, scrapable text on the Internet and the AI companies continue to try to implement opaque schemes for routing requests to less expensive versions of their...