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Comment by noufalibrahim | Hacker News Reader

There was a book by Roald Dahl called the great automatic grammatizer which described an automatic typewriter that could be tuned to automatically create novels. Mediocre but quickly producible content swamped the market and genuine authors found it hard to get paid and so turned to these automatons to ghost write for them. A few held out and the cost was starvation. The story ends with "give us the courage to watch our children starve".

It was prescient. And i think this article captures the same sentiment.

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> mediocre but quickly producible content swamped the market

I hear stuff like this all the time. It feels odd, given that pulp fiction dimeback "novels" exist for over a century. Some of these series run into several thousand issues, with authors expected to write a new novel each week.

The "mediocre but quickly producible content" has existed for ever, and it hasn't drowned out the "serious" novel market. Why should it now?

I'm not sure if you're American but take a look at the food situation here. Eating out practically anywhere is total garbage food. If you want high quality stuff made by people who know what they're doing be prepared to pay big bucks. A little pastry shop opened by me with a professionally trained French chef. The croissants are out this work but are like 8 bucks a piece whereas the Costco ones are maybe a dollar a piece and taste good. The market obviously incentivizes consumers to purchase the Costco variety but that's b/c the Costco variety is being more heavily subsidized than people realize.

Seems weird to be writing about croissants here but the Costco croissants are no where near the quality of a croissant made by a skilled baker, to the degree it is hard to call them a croissant in anything but form. The ingredients, flavor, flakiness, number of layers, etc. are all inferior when compared to what is possible from an artisan. I've bought the Costco croissants a few times in the past to make sandwiches out of as that's about all they are good for.

Your $8 croissants are subsided just as much as the $1 ones at Costco. They are cheaper because they don't have to pay that professionally trained french chef.

I think it is unlikely the high-end bakery is using the same e.g. milk and butter as Costco.

Is there a subsidy for cheap milk and butter that doesn't apply to the expensive stuff?

If the subsidy is like 1 buck/gallon of milk, the expensive milk will stay expensive even after subsidies, while the cheap one will come up almost free.

What does your food analogy show?

We already have a market for books, we can observe the market for books, why do we need a food analogy?

Mass production is cheaper than mass customization is cheaper than artisanal or full custom production.

That’s true in the absence of subsidies and I’d wager that the relative or differential effect of subsidies is minor in terms of explaining why $1 croissants sell well at Costco.

> I'm not sure if you're American but take a look at the food situation here. Eating out practically anywhere is total garbage food.

I'm not sure how old you are but when I was growing up in America in the 70's, eating out meant either high-end/pricey restaurants or MacDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. Now you can get Thai, Sushi, Indian, Sichuan, and more.

> I'm not sure how old you are but when I was growing up in America in the 70's, eating out meant either high-end/pricey restaurants or MacDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell.

I grew up in US flyover country and I remember the 70s and that's not the case.

There were diners. There were mom- and pop-owned holes in the wall. There were more respectable "family restaurants" that didn't serve what was called "ethnic food" at the time but were certainly not fast food and were also reasonably priced. I remember my 15k-ish population town's one Italian restaurant and its one Chinese restaurant and the short-lived Greek place, none of them chains but all highly Americanized. Half an hour away in a nearby small city there were many more options.

> Now you can get Thai, Sushi, Indian, Sichuan, and more.

Those are all things we can find in the present-day equivalent of a 70s food court. They're part of the new fast food - mostly garbage.

> subsidized

By what and how? Don't left us hanging like this.

Don't think the word 'subsidized' is being used correctly here.

Nobody is paying Costco a 'subsidy' to produce cheap croissants.

The big box stores incentivize the supply chain to do things faster/cheaper. Cheaper ingredients, shorter baking times (hence maybe some other additives needed), etc...

So, cheaper butter, oil additives, cheaper flour, additives to streamline short cooking times, easy movement, texture for packaging, etc..

It all adds ups to "it's ok, but meh".

Wheat and dairy are both subsidized in the US, so it’s not incorrect to say that Costco’s croissants benefit from subsidies.

I think it is incorrect/misleading to suggest that they benefit substantially from subsidies that are not available to the $8 croissant maker. (Costco benefits more from highway subsidies, for example, but not by enough to move the needle between $8 and $1…)

Agree. But it is difficult to tease out how the huge Agriculture Subsidy impacts each product.

I'm 'assuming', that if it is something like 1 cent, or 5 cents. Then it is a larger impact on the 1$ Costco Croissant), versus the 8$ bespoke croissant.

Then we'd also have to look at quantity sold.

Crouasant Sold Price Per Unit Total Revenue Cost Of Goods per unit Subsidy Total Cost of Good Total Subsidy Profit Subsidy / Profit Costco 100000 1 100000 0.2 0.1 10000 10000 90000 0.111111111 Bespoke 100 8 800 0.5 0.1 40 10 760 0.013157895

So, it is true, Costco makes a larger percentage of profit from subsidies than the bespoke.

11% versus 1.3%.

The Quantity is much bigger factor.

So guess, on balance, Costco is more subsidized than the small baker. Man, we should include labor too. Basically small bakers are at huge disadvantage.

Edit

My spreadsheet didn't look good here. Is there a way to format HN to show a table?

I mostly read non-fiction and won't try speaking to the novel market, but in other pop culture media, it seems what happens is more the long tail of the reasonably good, still has artistic value middle that hollows out. There's always going to be a high end, if for no other reason than sufficiently rich people are often willing to lose money patronizing great art for its own sake, but the vast bulk of new content becomes mass-produced generic trash with easily replaceable creatives who are given no real creative control. I'd say it happened to mass-market film somewhere between 2005 and 2010. It's probably happening to serial filmed content right now, thanks to the zero-interest streaming wars being over and peak TV coming to an end. It arguably happened to pop music as early as the 1980s, but music is comparatively cheap to produce and starving artists will always self-finance, just discovering their work is difficult when it's made outside of a recording industry marketing machine.

Novels seem like they should have the same dynamic. It's effectively free to write novels. You only pay with time and stress and don't need money. But without a publisher to market you, the hope that anyone will ever read what you write gets dimmer and dimmer.

In the same vein, I feel like serial cartoons are holding out much better right now than filmed television. They're still in a golden era, probably because they're so much cheaper to produce that they can survive not being popular without getting canceled.

The issue is that for a hundred years, even that 'mediocre' content took a bit of skill. Even trash authors spitting out a book a week, are better than most people at writing. Not everyone can write a book a week, no matter how trashy. So the volume of trash was still limited.

The new tools have dialed the trash volume to 11. It is now possible to have infinite trash. Thus the value goes to zero.

There are a million novels produced annually. Most of them don't sell 100 copies. We already have essentially infinite trash and the majority are worth essentially 0.

OTOH, Rowling has sold close to a billion novels.

There's a marked difference in having an author spend a week crapping out a cheap pulp novel vs having a text generator spit out 5000 in the same time period. Coupled with self publishing and automated stores, the market can be flooded with pure garbage in hours.

Not really.

There are a million novels now, of which 90% is self-published for a reason (no one wants to publish it, because it won't make any money). With a text generator, there are now 10min lion novels, of which 99% won't make any money.

The book market has found methods to deal with the "99% is garbage" problem. This isn't new.

Except for two things:

One, AI creates a a 99.999% garbage situation. Which as anyone who deals with SLAs can tell you is a world apart from 99%.

Two, Clarkesworld has announced quite clearly that the scale AI creates is not solvable using the old methods.

And we can respond with markets that vouch for provenance.

I am curious why vouch for provenance rather than vouching for quality. In “mass-produced AI garbage” is the “AI” part a bigger problem than the “garbage” part?

> I am curious why vouch for provenance rather than vouching for quality.

Because the tech community only has ideas that involve solving problems with tech. Provenance is (relatively) easy to address with tech. Measuring quality might require human input, so that's right out.

I've sort of felt like this has already happened in many aspects of my life. To be an American consumer feels like living in a perpetual 4.5 star limbo these days (I note that nearly every Amazon product I look at now has a 4.5 star rating). Every experience seems to be optimized via algorithm (perhaps orchestrated by computer, or perhaps just via one human organization or other) to be as bland as possible. Mass entertainment seems the most obvious - AAA games have become money-printing slogs, and the latest blockbuster movies seem ever less original.

It's possible this is at least partially an effect of getting older, but I do tend to find smaller works to have a bit more character and chance to be entertaining. Obviously the hard part is sorting that out as the signal to noise gets smaller.

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