Hoasi

Also because it’s mid :)

> Adobe seems to have gotten the memo though.

So far Adobe AI tools are pretty useless, according to many professional illustrators. With Firefly you can use other (non-Adobe) image generators. The output is usually barely usable at this point in time.

Another one bites the dust.

But they did ironically also drive the value they offered towards zero in this case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Exactly what I meant indeed. They probably thought how nice and how much cost-savings they were gonna get.

"We can drive the value of a service towards zero and create additional value at the same time," was the thinking here.

Of course.

New Age is the absolute worst, even though it might contain elements of truth.

A modern analogy: New Age is to spirituality what using an LLM is to reading a book in search of knowledge.

> When mall is called a public space... Public space situation is really sad.

Absolutely, but still, that is a reality in many cities. They are places where "going to the mall" is the main form of entertainment left.

Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you get this sense of looming despair all through the book.

X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.

Also, some religions have the best branding ever. Studying religions will teach you marketing and virality.

Competition is good, right? Open source the models! Open source the employees, too. Why not? Enough with Sam's whining.

Indeed it's better to buy comics to help real artists pay their bills while their work is "democratised".

It's unclear to me how the paid Spotify experience compares with free, but you still get ads with the paid one. Also, you need to curate heavily because Spotify's algorithm will push certain types of content. If you listen to a podcast once, it is hard to get rid of it, as it will keep popping into your feed, or whatever they call their interface.

Yes.

> Throughout art history the good stuff always floats to the top as it will always.

No really. For example, you have political art, conceptual art, and topical performances that, while interesting, soon become irrelevant and likely won't float on top for very long. Likewise, many past excellent artists disappeared from the museum chart, so to say, and periodically resurfaced.

Well, this is only partially true. My optimistic take is that it will redefine the field. There is still a future for resourceful, attentive, and prepared graphic artists.

Exactly, but what users want is not part of this equation.

> It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out.

But then again, it's not as if markets always rewarded real work either.

“We used publicly available data” worked good enough for now. And yet OpenAI just accused China of stealing its content.

In that case, you'll need the equivalent of ad-blockers for the brain, to prevent eavesdropping and intrusions by commercial and state actors.

Competition is for losers. All you have to do is create value in an entirely new niche category that you will own by offering something that didn’t exist before and that people want.

If the goal is sparking the imagination, these flaws are often a feature, not a bug. You have to do a little bit of work to complete the picture. That's also why the original book is almost always better than the fully rendered movie inspired by the book. No matter the budget.

> I think it should be illegal to trick humans into reading "creative" machine output.

Creativity has lost its meaning. Should it be illegal? The courts will take a long time to settle the matter. Reselling people's work against their will as creative machine output seems unethical, to say the least.

> It should be required that publishers label AI-generated content.

Strongly agree.

Exactly

It is even less meaningful than "software is eating the world". But it sounds catchy, and people can remember it.

> Their flip-flopping on AI - from it being the best thing ever to being completely overhyped and underperforming - and then back again - has been amusing.

One could tell they had no idea what they were discussing on many occasions, specifically on AI.

Jason and Chamath said AI prompted them to start "coding" again while entertaining the notion that AI will eventually replace all programmers in a matter of months. One day, AI will help the best to become "10 X" engineers. Another day, AI is a dud.

Friedberg said multiple times that everybody would create their Hollywood movie thanks to AI when there is little to no indication people would ever do this, leaving aside the production capability of LLMs to do so.

He has no problem with large language models trained on copyright data but didn't even consider the ethical implications, conflating how humans and machines learn, which is rather simplistic for such an intelligent person to say. He then retro-pedaled in a later episode, not on that specific point exactly, but when he realized he would prefer his businesses and investments to keep their proprietary licenses and hard-earned know-how.

It works for some annoyances in life, though. For example, you can get it to write a complaint to an administration. It's good enough unless you'd rather be witty and write it yourself.

Great explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.