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China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen
(www.thebeaverton.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Technology
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Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.
Regardless of how much of a bubble we're in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It's proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it "magic beans" is just wishful thinking at best.
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
Those are only conflicting statements if you believe that the market will not embrace worse products. It totally will so long as you have a group of people who lack the critical analysis skills to compare the products and arrive at the conclusion that the new one is worse.
It doesn't help that the potential drivers of this action are massive conglomerates, so if a sweeping change comes from the top-down and is paired with a lot of propaganda (Marketing) then people will have no choice but to accept it as the standard.
I think that a lot of criticism about the actual quality of AI art is mixed, though. I feel like it has flaws, but I've seen arguments about flaws I don't think are actually real problems with the technical quality.