United States Politics Thread 47

[zompist]

The "intellectual property" angle is weird though. It's romantic, almost charming, to be concerned about authors and artists; it also has nothing to do with the billions being invested in AI. There are about 50,000 authors in the US; the average book sells about 1000 copies. That is a tiny market. AI is not going to take it all over, and if it did, it's peanuts to investors.

Another thought: In the video, he shows some AI tools/services that claim to be able to write music and books, so at least somebody is already trying to take over this market with AI.

People are trying to cash in, yes. They're not going to make much money, nor will they take over the market. What they may do, however, is flood Spotify, Amazon etc. to such an extent that humans avoid those services and go back to traditional publishing, or trusted curators.

As an example, I like Charles Stross-- I'm likely to consider reading anything he writes. Does that mean I'd read a chatbot that supplies Stross-like slop? No, I have zero interest in that. And I can check Stross's website for what he's actually written.

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background. Would you actually go to a concert of AI slop though? Why bother?

[Travis B.]

The thing is, would anyone truly enjoy AI slop music? E.g. you hear people complain about "dad rock", and I have a hard time imagining that AI slop music would be any better than that.

[Raphael]

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background.

Hasn't that kind of music, in various versions, existed long before AI?

[Travis B.]

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background.

Hasn't that kind of music, in various versions, existed long before AI?

Elevator music -- which I have never heard anyone say anything kind about.

[WeepingElf]

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background.

Hasn't that kind of music, in various versions, existed long before AI?

Elevator music -- which I have never heard anyone say anything kind about.

Yes. Such things will from now on mostly be AI-generated - but there will always be a market for genuinely human-made music. (I somehow have to think of luxury resorts now which advertise that their elevator music is human-made.)

[jcb]

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background. Would you actually go to a concert of AI slop though? Why bother?

People have raged against AI art alot, and I mostly agree with them, but I do think there will be a place for it: As filler art, basically. But this market has already been disrupted in the past 50 years, first by CDs full of clip art, and then by searching for images on Google Images.

[alice]

No one is making money on AI, except the chip-makers. And since the AI vendors sell at a loss, and have been flogging the product for years, it's not likely to make money. But the idea is this:

1. Convince CEOs to fire all their workers and use AI instead, at absurdly low prices.
2. Make sure you're one of only 3 or so companies offering AI. Hopefully get Congress to make laws ensuring this.
3. Somehow this doesn't crash the economy. But no matter, tell everyone there is no alternative.
4. When all the CEOs are hooked, jack up the prices.
5. Profit.

You willl of course be aware that this is classic enshittification, as per Stross. A depressing sign of our times.

[Travis B.]

Of course, it will be this enshittification that will kill the "AI boom" -- when AI costs more than human workers and the hype fades, the idea of firing humans and replacing them with AI will fall by the wayside.

[Nortaneous]

There are a few different risks with AI.

1. A risk to tech incumbents: they could be outcompeted by dedicated AI companies. Tech incumbents take this risk seriously enough to have their own AI labs.Dan Davies: "If you are earning profits of 100, and you are faced with the need to make a big capital investment in order to ensure that those profits only drop to 90 rather than to 50, then you grit your teeth and make it."
2. A risk to AI labs: they could be unable to make a profit. They already have a healthy gross margin on inference calls, so this would have to look like distillation attacks. Basically, once you have a big expensive model, it's much less capital-intensive to train on the big model to produce a smaller model. It is widely believed that this is what DeepSeek is doing. It's unlikely that OpenAI and Anthropic will be able to fully defend against distillation attacks, or that the open-source / local-model ecosystem will never reach the Opus 4.8 level (which is probably good enough for many uses with the right workflow improvements), so their endgame has to be regulatory capture or becoming Sellers of Capabilities. (That blog is annoying but I don't have a better link, sorry.)
3. A risk to office workers: AI could take their jobs. I don't think this is worth worrying about unless you're a junior engineer. I've been spending the last few months going down the list of utilities I wish I had the time to write and having Claude knock each one out in an hour or two. Claude has memorized every manual on the internet and I've ever looked at epsilon of them, so that's its comparative advantage -- and if the code isn't maintainable, who cares, just regen lol. AI is currently not competent to maintain actual codebases, but it could probably be made competent without further advances just with workflow improvements, at which point we'll all have to be architects or product or something, or start other businesses that weren't viable in the days of $300k per year per schmuck who knows frontend, or pack up and open a dry cleaning shop. The guy who owns the dry cleaning shop in my hometown drives a Mercedes. It can't be that bad.

[malloc]

Yes. Such things will from now on mostly be AI-generated - but there will always be a market for genuinely human-made music. (I somehow have to think of luxury resorts now which advertise that their elevator music is human-made.)

Possibly although it seems deeply unfair that human-made music is reduced to one niche rather than everything. Music was after all a beloved and respected form of work, so much that "rock star" has become synonymous with admiration and talent. Off topic sure, but something that will always bother me from here on out.

[jcb]

I've been spending the last few months going down the list of utilities I wish I had the time to write and having Claude knock each one out in an hour or two.

Such as what?

[Travis B.]

The only task for which I have ever thought "maybe I wish I could use an AI for this" is software design document generation, because SDD generation is a dreadful, unloved job and no one who actually cares about things really looks at SDD's anyways, so SDD's get very out-of-date because no one bothers to update them, but at the same time it has little impact if an AI hallucinates while updating them because, again, no one really looks at them.

For my own software development, though, I would never want an AI to do what I do, because while I might take ten times as long to knock out the code itself, knocking out the code is only a small part of what I do, at least at my day job, and I can trust what I do, whereas I could never trust an AI to get things right and would waste more time than I would save double and triple-checking every line of code generated by the AI. I have been burned by code generated by an AI before (I didn't run the AI, a coworker did, but I naively assumed that the code was right), and wasted half a day chasing a bug that could have been avoided had I spent the half-hour or so simply reading the docs and writing the code myself.

[malloc]

Some grim news ahead tomorrow as the supreme court will rule on whether the 14th amendment guarantees citizenship for people born here. It will almost certainly rule against it, overturning generations of precedent and taking away citizenship from numerous people born here. If we're lucky, the opposition will begin drafting plans to address this crisis after the ruling, although they really should have planned for this sooner.

It occurs to me that the many missteps that Trump has made paradoxically serve to reinforce his power and disguise his victories. Everyone laughs at him messing up the reflecting pool or hosting a fighting tournament on the White House lawn and takes that as evidence of his incompetence. Meanwhile his administration is rolling back minority rights, rigging elections, and so forth, racking up one catastrophic victory after another while we laugh at the egg on his face.

[zompist]

It occurs to me that the many missteps that Trump has made paradoxically serve to reinforce his power and disguise his victories.

ALL HAIL THE INFALLIBLE GOD-EMPEROR WHOSE SEEMING MISSTEPS ARE MORE EVIDENCE FOR HIS DIVINITY

Everyone laughs at him messing up the reflecting pool or hosting a fighting tournament on the White House lawn and takes that as evidence of his incompetence.

No, we look at him starting and losing a war against Iran, or reducing American credibility abroad, or kneecapping American universities, or seeing 20-point leads in various districts narrow down to a dead heat, as evidence of his incompetence.

People need a laugh; the reflecting pool is hilarious.

No one thinks he is not dangerous, stop spreading nonsense.

[zompist]

Another note: the Republican dominance of the Supreme Court is in part due to long-time Republican insistence, part due to sheer bad luck, part due to at least one serious mistake by a Democrat. None of it is Trump's cunning. In particular it is not due to the God-Emperor's unstoppable cunning in his second term. It has fuck all to do with the reflecting pool.

Thomas was nominated by Bush I; Roberts and Alito by Bush II; Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett by Trump in his first term. It's of course bad luck that Trump got to name 3 justices in just 4 years.

Obama nominated Merrick Garland in February 2016, but McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings. Probably this is unconstitutional.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused, despite being asked, to resign while Obama was in office and Democrats held the Senate. That handed a seat to the GOP.

[Ares Land]

Music might be different in that there's more of a market for, well, wallpaper music... music for people who don't know music and just want something nice in the background. Would you actually go to a concert of AI slop though? Why bother?

People have raged against AI art alot, and I mostly agree with them, but I do think there will be a place for it: As filler art, basically. But this market has already been disrupted in the past 50 years, first by CDs full of clip art, and then by searching for images on Google Images.

Nano banana seems to occupy a similar niche than clip art back in the day. I think they're about equally cheesy, but to each their own I guess?

[Raphael]

malloc: How do you get the idea that "competence" and "being (sometimes) good at winning elections" are one and the same thing? In Trump's case, he won his elections, and gained enough popularity to help many other people win their elections, by convincing a lot of stupid and incompetent people that he's just like them, and that therefore, they should support him.

You willl of course be aware that this is classic enshittification, as per Stross.

Doctorow, to be pedantic.

[Raphael]

As I reported over in the British politics thread, I just discovered someone going by the name "Cameron" on Bluesky.

He's now posted something that I see as really, very spot-on:

https://bsky.app/profile/cameroncorduro ... hufcaask24

the circle that nobody can square outside of this website is that Western Civilization is indeed under attack by barbarous hordes, namely MAGA chuds

[Travis B.]

Some grim news ahead tomorrow as the supreme court will rule on whether the 14th amendment guarantees citizenship for people born here. It will almost certainly rule against it, overturning generations of precedent and taking away citizenship from numerous people born here. If we're lucky, the opposition will begin drafting plans to address this crisis after the ruling, although they really should have planned for this sooner.

Well the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship today...

[alice]

malloc: How do you get the idea that "competence" and "being (sometimes) good at winning elections" are one and the same thing? In Trump's case, he won his elections, and gained enough popularity to help many other people win their elections, by convincing a lot of stupid and incompetent people that he's just like them, and that therefore, they should support him.

You willl of course be aware that this is classic enshittification, as per Stross.

Doctorow, to be pedantic.

Ouch! Of course.