> Eventually maybe the best experiences will be had with digital companions, etc.
Obviously I can't speak for all of Gen Z (and I realize we're no longer "the younger generation"), but my friends and I don't want any part of this, and feel optimistic rather than bitter that things won't go the way you're describing. I seldom meet anyone in my age group that isn't talking about moving away from social media, cancelling software subscriptions, all of the things that millenials and Gen X seem to be so excited to continue building and promoting.
Even at my workplace the "older" people are the ones that are excited about stuff like AI jazz remixes of rap songs and AI generated short films, while literally everyone else under 30 finds it pretty cringe and makes fun of them in DMs.
So all that to say, I disagree with your outlook, but I guess time will tell.
Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they're already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn't offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.
Maybe I’m naive since most of that was before I was born, but a lot of the past topics you mentioned seem more interesting because the people talking about them (I assume) had interesting knowledge and opinions to share about them. AI is an extremely boring topic because the people most excited about it are “idea people” rather than people with interesting knowledge and expertise. And idea people are pretty draining to listen to for years on end.
Even the top post on HN about ChatGPT’s image generation is full of a bunch of comments just saying “wow this is epic”, “I can make so many mangas with this”, etc. Or a post about a new model where people are saying bland stuff like “this doesn’t write Typescript as well as Nut43-2.1-Max”. Compare those to a post about language design, for instance, and you’d see a lot more interesting discussion and opinions.
Just my opinion though. It seems like the more interesting topics in AI are related to its divisiveness, and even that is getting super old after years of it going on.
I'm probably in a weird subgroup that isn't representative of the general public, but I've found myself preferring "rough" art/logos/images/etc, basically because it signals a human put time into it. Or maybe not preferring, but at least noticing it more than the generally highly refined/polished AI artwork that I've been seeing.
Cheaper/faster tech increases overall consumption though. Without the friction of commissioning a graphics artist to design something, a user can generate thousands of images (and iterate on those images multiple times to achieve what they want), resulting in way more images overall.
I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.
Really weird that you're basically advocating people to not have principles if they don't align with "broader incentives". Also lol at you pulling the "some people have kids to feed" bullshit in a thread where we're all making way more money than most people.
As others have said, it's definitely volume, but also the lack of respecting robots.txt. Most AI crawlers that I've seen bombarding our sites just relentlessly scrape anything and everything, without even checking to see if anything has changed since the last time they crawled the site.
Obviously I can't speak for all of Gen Z (and I realize we're no longer "the younger generation"), but my friends and I don't want any part of this, and feel optimistic rather than bitter that things won't go the way you're describing. I seldom meet anyone in my age group that isn't talking about moving away from social media, cancelling software subscriptions, all of the things that millenials and Gen X seem to be so excited to continue building and promoting.
Even at my workplace the "older" people are the ones that are excited about stuff like AI jazz remixes of rap songs and AI generated short films, while literally everyone else under 30 finds it pretty cringe and makes fun of them in DMs.
So all that to say, I disagree with your outlook, but I guess time will tell.