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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it "The only winning move is to do good work"? If non-AI aided work is superior then it should win out in the long run because companies that do that type of research will be able to make superior decisions and thus be rewarded in the market. The argument isn't really AI versus non-AI, it's quality work versus shoddy work. It is right to lose patience with people who submit shoddy work whatever the source.

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The market doesnt reward better, it rewards marketing. If better won, the consumer landscape would look very differnt in just about every category.

In theory yes, but in practice I wouldn't say that for example the way Facebook and Instagram developed is an example of superiority in social media design that has won. Honestly, technology can make life worst and we should find against that.

Also, things like visual arts and music can be watered down by devaluating the real stuff and equaling it with AI generated stuff.

Arguably, we used to be better at making physical stuff, we used to make beautiful amps, synths and drum machines, which to this day are highly valued only has software equivalents today.

Browse the web with your ad blocker off and then tell me to my face that quality work always wins out over shoddy work.

You're saying the people that work in ads are doing shoddy work because your ad blocker is able to easily block them, correct?

If they did quality work then your blocker wouldn't stand a chance and we'd all be flooded with BS ads all the time and barely able to read/view the actual site?

I don't read it this way. I think GP agrees with your point. The ad sphere IS the shoddy work.

If management can measure it. But in practice, the problem of course is the extra marketing of your good work against the marketing of all the ai firms trying to sell to your boss.

Many firms are unable to accurately measure the quality of research work and so they will be duped by the alternative marketing. The market can correct for this on a long enough time horizon if a competitor takes the opposite bet on whether this job is automate-able that way, but in the meantime you are probably out of a job and your equity goes down.

That seems problematic. It sounds like this is a long time horizon issue. An experienced researcher should be able to surface to management their concerns about the quality of research. Why is the research wrong?

I am not sure what you mean by “why is the research wrong?”

The reality is that shoddy work often wins out due to pricing.

The article leaves out the fact that corporate research has gone the way of political research. It exists to give cover for some decision that is unpopular, or serves the decision maker more than the company. It doesn't actually inform decisions, it retroactively justifies decisions in the most palatable way.

If anyone actually talked to users and did what they wanted, then software wouldn't suck.

Denying that slop general labor won't thrive in the market due to its cheapness is like denying that fast food and other cheap garbage food has thrived.

Then the market has spoken. Fast food fills a niche. I don't think you can qualitatively say that humanity would be happier if everyone paid more for food that was painstakingly created by hand. I know I can't. If poor marketing research is sufficient then the market has spoken.

The market is inefficient. It speaks too soon. DDT, asbestos, and radium were all wonder products for which that market spoke and later recanted.

> The argument isn't really AI versus non-AI, it's quality work versus shoddy work.

Unfortunately, that's not how most people make decisions on what to purchase. It's all about bean counting; what is cheap, vs what is expensive. Don't believe me? Why is Trump currently putting tariffs on foreign countries? Because it is cheaper to manufacture there, are their products better than American ones? No, but they're cheap.

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