Sure, if you don't like reading, then it's great you don't have to. But personally I like to read, and be taken on an adventure by writers, that's why I read, I don't read just so I "know what happened".
So everything remains the same, nothing has changed. Nothing been destroyed by AI, it only seems to have destroyed your own perspective.
Becoming a successful writer / musician, is already hard. With software, it was easier, but in my opinion, it will become hard as well. There will be individuals in the software development who are like Taylor Swift, because they know how LLMs work, and how to optimize them to squeeze one more KPI. The rest will just be nobodies.
And sure, if you think you are an extraordinary person, or you were born in the right environment, then you probably don't have to worry. But I'm an average Joe, who wants to live an average Joe's life, but it's being taken away from me. And while the select few might have access to a live Taylor Swift performance, or a personal reading of the latest novel by a struggling author, the rest of us are going to be fed AI slop.
I don’t think people “internet” for trust, but for dopamine.
To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking.
If you just care about average content then yes, you can probably live on slop. But do you want to? Because no one is forcing you, there is still high quality stuff out there, produced by people with good taste, and it'll remain like that forever.
And while sure, merit / good taste are important, but if you look at the mainstream it's filled with average. Now, from the consumer side you can claim "what do you care about the mainstream, just look for good taste, and you will find it", and I agree with you. But I do not speak about the consumer side, but rather the producer side. As a producer, I want to produce "good taste", but if there is very little demand for good taste things, I might struggle to sustain myself while producing based on merit.
In the end, the reason enshittification exists, is because "good taste" stuff became too popular and the authors decided to capitalize on it (can't blame them when you have a mortgage to pay, and family to feed), and turn it into "mainstream crap".
I guess the point I'm trying to make, is that creating good taste is not easy. And it will become even harder as the mainstream will expand and capture AI generated content, leaving people who believe in creation based on merit, fighting for the crumbs.
That's not a fact, because I never said this, nor is it in the article. What from the article made you believe that I think that?
> but if there is very little demand for good taste things
There isn't, there is huge demand for good things, and it'll only get higher as more people attempt to just produce shit things.
90% of everything is AI-generated, of the 10% which is left, 90% of it is crap, leaving just 1% of articulate, interesting, well-crafted content.
So, either work to create that 1% of interesting content, or filter/curate to find it.
I will note that there is a _lot_ of interesting old work which has dropped off the radar --- Hermann Hesse's _Magister Ludi_/_The Glass Bead Game_ was a book which greatly inspired me in my youth (arguably, it's why I use programming tools such as: https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor ) --- read it?
Some people crave the connection to the human experience through your examples. And personally, I wouldn't care in the least about any "work of art" created by a model. A model could produce the sequel to Grapes of Wrath, but I wouldn't care, because what experience did it have to motivate it towards it?
A model can generate a dance song, but it cannot feel the bass in their chest to know why the bass is there.
Art is about the human connection.
There are lot of maintenance chores that ClawdBot can't do. It's not going to cook for you, rake the leaves, shovel the snow off your sidewalk, or pressure-wash your steps. You can still find some satisfaction in doing these things.
There are two things you're mixing here.
One is how others use AI, the other is how you use AI. No one forcing you to consume content made by AI that you think suck, just turn it off if you don't like it.
Seems really doomsday-like to proclaim "The end goal of AI is to abolish all work possible" when that's not realistically feasible, regardless of what the AI-hypers say. Don't listen so much, and think more.
How? Or do you mean, like, stop using the Internet entirely?
If you don't notice it, then is it really an issue? And if you notice, you're one click/keypress away from making it disappear.
Oh what I wouldn't give to push one out, you entitled pos -- AI.
If we taxed land ownership a la Georgism and then taxed negative externalities like pollution, we could give everyone UBI and probably kick back and take it easy for a bit.
Of course this would require a global democratic mandate bigger than the world's ever seen, so I'm not waiting up on it.
That can work for some things. Some things don't actually need reliability. That automated tool that's going to help a dozen people in accounting? Yeah, it's got a buffer overflow, which also can be used for a DOS attack, but who cares? (Unless someone like an AI exposes it to the internet...)
For things where reliability does matter, AIs may be a fad for a couple of years, but it won't last, for exactly the reasons you mention. For a bunch of things, reliability really matters. For those places, you cannot be replaced by AI. Migrate to those places.
That leaves the problem of the next couple years. You may need to look for places that understand, today, that reliability matters more than fast slop.
> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?
I mean... for books (and movies) that I'm mildly interested in but don't want to take N hours to wade through, I've been reading the Wikipedia summaries for a while. AI is here now, but I still go to Wikipedia, because I actually trust it more than the AI summary.
Because the summary is often wrong, and the summary might not even be the point?
> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?
You've been able to read a good summary by a human for most books on Wikipedia for decades now.
Just remember that AI can not create art, it can only remember art. AI is not a human, AI is a probabilistic function.
I enjoy AI art. I don't enjoy AI slop. There's a fundamental difference between the two. It's true that the Internet is flooded with low-effort AI slop, but AI is just a tool like any other, and you can create real art with it. It just takes skill.
Here's an experiment: try visiting CivitAI's featured images page[1] and then tell me with a straight face that you'd classify none of those images as art.