iprayiam3
1d ago
Another is google ads. There’s an apocalypse brewing here for companies that rely on adspend for inbound driven pipeline. It’s falling off a cliff
iprayiam3
1d ago
Someone said in a lower thread the internet will be the first casualty of AI and I tend to agree
iprayiam3
1d ago
AI is already imploding the white collar world in other ways than just job replacement. Let me give an example.
AI BDR (business development representative) is one of the roles that most AI agent companies are rushing out because it’s (seemingly) low hanging fruit.
What is a BDR? It’s the lowest sales role that fields inbound requests and does outbound prospecting (cold calls, emails etc).
Cold calling used to be the best way to do outbound until 3 things happened: 1. Email, 2. decline of the office phone, and robo calling + smartphone with contacts making answering unknown calls a scourge.
Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.
So emails.. that worked for a while, but it’s been an arms race of attention against spam. In the last 6 months it’s broken completely Why? Because there was a really short period of time where AI BDR was a super power, human like messaging, custom not templates, even personalized to company / contact research at scale.
But the pipe has already been clogged and it’s ruined for everyone. A world of perfect AI, every company who can maybe sell me something can send a handcrafted message to me every single day. That’s millions of messages. No one AI can get through the other. Email and marketing on both sides of the equation is over.
There’s no quick fix. AI being good didn’t improve outbound sales for the seller or recipient (except for a short period inside 2024).
It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.
This will happen in other places.
iprayiam3
3d ago
Sounds like you should move the base forward and go back to underhand pitching
iprayiam3
14d ago
I get your point. On the other hand, rehiring this guys is probably the strongest at to say, no we don’t do cancel culture anymore.
Somewhat ironically, the more transparently fair and judicious about this stuff the less power you actually have. We’ve seen this play out over the last half decade enough to known for sure. It’s why apologies don’t work. Unfortunately you can’t push against the tide with small reasonable discernments. You end up just breathing more power into the controlling frame.
The best thing to do would have been to not hire this person to this position in the first place.
The second best thing to do is to use the oppprtunity to tell activist journos to shove it.
This way the next time we can ignore them, and the time after that we can fire people justly in an understood isolation from the noise.
The among the worst things to do (in terms of efficacy) would be to tell the journos they’re right this time with their cancellations but not next time we promise!!
iprayiam3
16d ago
In the meantime it would be nice if people would avoid poking this obvious sore spot. I'd be fine letting you get away with doing it once. But you are doing it twice as a top level post.
Twice? This implies that the below top post (which I stressed was unrelated) is poking a sore spot, rather than earnestly calling for the BLR return. You can look at my Reddit history to see I’ve been calling for its return since immediately after its retirement. There’s nothing wrong with using the recent AI developments to recontextualize such a call. thus you’ve over counted my ‘poking’ by 50% and by your own justification should have let it slide.
I’d like my ban stricken from the record
Unrelated to any other post of mine, I would like to submit a suggestion that this forum consider a Bear/Lynx repository, where folk could post various links, thoughts, and essays about these two mighty predators. These could be concrete or metaphorical.
While some may worry that this would not be ‘culture warry’ enough, I am quite confident it would prove otherwise.
To demonstrate, I have posted a CharGPT prompt below, unedited with 3 ideas.
-
Environmentalism vs. Development – A repository focused on bears and lynxes could serve as a symbol of conservation efforts clashing with economic interests.
-
Symbolism in Political Ideology – Both bears and lynxes could be used as political metaphors.
-
Climate Change and Animal Habitats – Discussions about shifting bear and lynx populations due to climate change could produce some debates over environmental policy and whether concerns about species loss are exaggerated or valid
iprayiam3
17d ago
Last week there were a few ‘performance piece’ top posts that utilized AIslop to demonstrate a Goodharts law adjacent concept about the problem with effort posts as too simplistic a concept.
My reading was an uncoordinated but aligned demonstration that AI can produce the facsimile of a top post while entirely missing the point of a discussion board by and for people.
Unstated as it were, I am quite confident that the implied intention of both was to make transparent through the remaining dichotomy, the need for a return of the Bare Links Repository (not to be confused with unrelated calls for an unprecedented Bear/Lynx Repository).
(aside - The original BLR was likely only retired because of jealousy at its success by a sore mod team and sock puppetrous smear campaigns by one Julius Branson.)
Of course nobody wants uneffortful top posts but a BLR, is something entirely different.
Without hashing through its obvious differences from AIslop, tldr they are fundamentally mirror cases of ‘low effort’, where the former is earnest in its low effort and point outward, the latter is disguised and points inward.
The fact is, the BLR in its return would bring necessary life to this forum and counteract the slow momentum erosion the site has suffered since losing Reddits network effect; all while not compromising the rules.
iprayiam3
18d ago
The average LLM is more trustworthy than the average Twitter or Reddit commentator, though for now I would hope the Motte does better.
Again, my primary objection is not with the 'quality' of the AI output
Hey, I asked ChatGPT to do a vibes check on your comment. It pointed out these objections, which look sensible to me. Why ought I disregard them?
In other words, hey, can you talk to ChatGPT for me?
iprayiam3
18d ago
I do agree that it’s not how it’s conventionally used, but I think it’s better. Slop as a quality of writing commentary is slop of the gaps as LLMs improve. But the fundamental issue with nobody cares about your prompt engineering will remain
iprayiam3
19d ago
AI as a writing and editing tool is one thing (I still think it’s a double edged sword that leans negative, but that genie can’t be returned to the bottle so no use debating it). What is AIslop imo, is not the quality of the AI output, but the motion of:
“I asked AI x and here’s what it said…”
Where the human has contributed nothing more than the prompt, and the substance of the piece is what some LLM had to say about the prompt.
It’s slopped because it’s just been ladled out into your bowl without much more effort.
It’s not about the content, in fact that’s a red herring. It’s the ‘prompt’ What is being criticized is the implication that there’s something interesting or even contributory about having typed in a particular prompt and seen what comes out. Everyone can do that for themselves.
This kind of shit is all over Twitter. “I asked grok…” is the most tediously vacuous and self indulgent post possible.
iprayiam3
19d ago
Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.
You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.
Yes I know, my point was in agreement with yours. That's why I said the original is an 'un'trolley problem. My point in describing some additional opportunity cost was exectly to illustrate that opportunity cost ruins the thought experiment.
And that's why it has very little to say about foreign aid or most other real world charitable activities that are abstracted from time and place. Because outside of immediate and present opportunities (like saving a drowning child right in front of you), opportunity cost does have to be considered.
And as you've agreed, it becomes different than the thought experiment, thus the thought experiment is no longer relevant.
iprayiam3
19d ago
And at the end of the day, this is the problem -- I haven't spent enough time reading literature responding to it, so hopefully this critique is already well documented -- this is an un-trolley problem. It's designed so that there's absolutely no opportunity cost. But then used to imply therefore, the opportunity cost of other scenarios are handwavable.
If I'm walking by a pond where there's a drowing child; in all likelihood, rescuing that child is the most valuable thing I can do in that moment, and the ruin of a 1k suit, that I'm already wearing is a sunk cost.
But this doesn't extend to prove that some future fungible time and money, there's a best thing to do and thus it is a moral imperative to have it done.
As soon as we add any actual opportunity cost to saving that child or ruining the suit, the parsimony of the aesop falls apart. Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.
At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem, with a little bit of forecasting mixed in, and there's nothing really to gleam from it.
If alternatively we take the most superficial lesson from the problem: We should help others when we are able, at a cost to ourselves, even when we aren't physically near them. Then sure! It's a great reminder. And it has just about nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.
Yes but that’s why we had a bare links repository.
The volume of effort posts has been diminishing anyway.
Bare links and aislop are routes toward similar ends you described, but it’s not the outcome that solely makes them bad. It’s that AI slop is an inferior low effort entry point into a topic, for the reasons I described.
Now ideally we would have nothing but effortful and timely top posts, sure. But my point is that in the event that someone wants to juice the conversation without the effort post, the bare link is a far superior and more earnest, and less empty way to do so.
That said of course bare links as top posts are bad roughly on par (well…) with AIsloptopposting. But nobody is advocating for that. The people are asking for the repository back.
If we want an experiment, let’s have the BLR and an AISlopTopShop that is exactly the same, but for AI posts. Let’s see which produces more fruit, while keeping the rest of the CWR thread clean
iprayiam3
19d ago
In that (perhaps quite likely) eventuality then forums and social media as a concept are dead. AIs talking to AIs while people nod and curate them basically destroys the platonic purpose of social media.
This is like if you brought photographs to a painting club and claimed that it expressed what you which you could paint better than you can paint it yourself. Can you see how that might satisfy an itch you personally have but is thoroughly uninteresting to the painters there to paint?
Yes the existence of photographs and digital tools have fundamentally transformed art and even tradition methods can’t really exist outside of conversation with them to some extent. Yes AI has changed the nature of written discourse.
But no it’s not a good reason to dump AI slop and say ‘discuss…’
I am sure that, now having been convinced you will join me and the rest of the rising chorus to return the Bare Links Repository to the Motte
iprayiam3
19d ago
And this is why daesch and self made human are wrong to want AI slop here. The purpose of a human forum is subverted when top posts are AI generated text walls.
I say, we bring back the bare links repository as a palette cleanser to this new trend. It’s the opposite of ‘I asked ChatGPT and here’s what it said copied and pasted’.
It is brief where AIslop is verbose. It doesn’t dress itself up as original thought or even a point of view. It doesn’t claim to be effortful. Most of all, it points outward instead of inward toward an actual external idea, rather than reposting an ephemeral private chat.
Leaving behind the BLR was the greatest mistake of theMotte, nay of the rat sphere (standing among other mistakes like trans murder cults and founding an entire movement on fanfiction of kid books) and it is time we correct this blunder.
If this post gets 20 upvotes the mods will have no choice but to retvrn to the glory of the blr.
iprayiam3
22d ago
I find its response adequate. It is presented without any editing.
Copy pasting ai content is low effort nonsense. “I asked [AI] model…” is equivalent to “I had a dream where…”
In terms of being an interesting thing to talk about
iprayiam3
22d ago
But here's the problem. Before the fact that this AI can now displace all blue collar work, let's magically assume away some reason that won't be the case even for a super narrow slice of time. Such an AI will also collapse a great deal of the SaaS software business, which itself will be extremely economically disruptive. Once an AI is generally that capable, a lot of differentiated software becomes useless. Already I see many folks trying to sell me lipstick on top of the same 3 AI models. There's quickly decreasing utility in the UX if it's just a pass through to an agent.
iprayiam3
23d ago
There is no world in which the rich let everyone starve because it would lead to an extreme collapse in demand and a deflationary spiral that would quickly bankrupt them.
and
will cost negligible amounts to feed, house and clothe first-world publics
and
But capitalism, or at least this current form of it, is going to end
seem at odds. The end of capitalism is also the end of needing consoomers to keep the rich rich. Even if cost of keeping them alive materially is driven down to zero, they are still going to compete for land, political voice, and social heirarchy, without providing anything back. It might be a peaceful transition, but as long as we are earthbound, it seems this scenario would make >a few million humans completely negative value. Transhumanism would further make the billions of humans nothing more than space wasters.
iprayiam3
23d ago
Sure, my point is that in my corner of the world, I’m already seeing signs of breakdown. The bubble is extremely fragile because it’s self consuming. I am stuck being asked to sign contracts and make decisions on software that I have no confidence will remain viable or a front runner by the time we get fully implemented.
The rate of change is already too fast and unpredictable to make business decisions on anymore. The landscape’s moving faster than sales cycles.
iprayiam3
23d ago
Well this circles my point. If we got to that then we have such a fast and powerful AI, software isn't even on our mind. But even as we get closer to that, the entire SaaS ecosystem will start to collapse. If fundamental functionality from UX to API communication relies on an LLM, unbounded by underlying code bases, niche software vendors won't have anything to differentiate themselves.
I think we are already starting to see some collapses in the space I work in where, each vendor is completing to be nothing but a chatgpt terminal wtih some lipstick
iprayiam3
23d ago
I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, typing this as I sit through yet another agent presentation. Basically every app is collating around an agent that automates everything within itself and / or across other tools it integrates with.
This is a mad rush to overturn UI into an LLM chat with flows being constantly chased by general browser agents that can do the same.
iprayiam3
23d ago
My greatest fear at the moment is that we will reach a stage where people start designing UI for AI agents and not humans anymore, and from computers become truly incomprehensible.
This is the Star Wars Future. Where computers become so incomprehensible people have basically unplugged, and we have to have special robots who talk to them for us. Not the worst possible eventuality.
I think the 'Star Wars future' is a best possible outcome here. The internet is ruined, in person interactions is the norm and AI is a lot of ideosyncratic robots who have to talk to eachother and the internet for us because it's all so incomprehensible for an average human.
Thanks to a competency crisis in IT that's been outsourced to robots, nobody really programs anymore, but we can rely on AI/robots to do that for us. Simultaneously that also forces more things back into a more mechanical world and skillset as people spend more time interacting with their high tech environment materially rather than digitally / through pixels.
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