The problem is that because the production costs of the crap content will now be near zero, it will always be profitable to create as long as there is just a fraction of the consumerbase falling for it.

It is never going to stop on its own because of lack of demand, it is going to continue and something drastic will have to be thought up to create an internet where everything isn’t buried in AI generated crap.

The problem is that quantity is no longer going to be a problem, it can be created for virtually nothing, so basically just a tiny profit will be enough to warrant it in the outlook of those responsible for it.

Now endless shallow spam, which slightly resembles something worthwhile, can be generated in an instant, because it will generate a meagre profit. It is already happening on the book market for example. Amazon is flooded with AI generated books, and proper authors are simply buried in the mountains of generated spam which is at best nonsensical but at worst genuinely misinforming.

Perhaps consumers will become more discerning in the future (although to be honest not much in the present suggests that will be the outcome), but it will never remove the increasing mountains of spam, because it will be produced for as long as just a fraction of people buy into it. And this will be applicable to everything on the internet. If we thought commercialisation and spam was bad now, we have seen nothing at all yet.

So even with proper discernment, it will take a lot of time and effort just to locate something earnest and worthwhile in the generated spam.

The manual for the original Elite was literally a novel, well one of the many volumes of printed documentation it came with was

Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends

That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later

Not really though.

Vinyl records sounds great despite their technical inferiority to CDs and streaming (with the right equipment of course, but that applies to all formats). They do not necessarily sound better, but there is an element of customisation with them which you can’t get with CDs or streaming. Most importantly the cartridge on your turntable. Different cartridges have different soundscapes. There is of course an element of quality connected to price of cartridge, but over a certain price you are not necessarily buying a better sound but a different sound. Many vinyl record listeners, especially audiophiles, have different cartridges which they can switch out on their turntable, based on which kind of sound you want coming out of your system.

I know it may be difficult to comprehend for people who haven’t personally listened to such differences themselves, but I assure you it is not audiophile snake oil, it is a very noticeable phenomenon. That is a pretty unique capability of vinyl which I can’t really compare to anything with other formats.

What a techbro take.

The easy and speed with which AI created photos, of a quality most photoshoppers could only dream, can be created of does very much change everything.

The new thing is the scope in which fake content is being created. In a very near future most internet content will be fake, including history. That is not something that has happened before in history.

The current AI situation is completely unprecedented in history.

I guess you must have been in a coma since 2015.