I read his take as not that "we've solved prose", but that we've created the McDonald's slop food version of prose, and people who are undiscerning will cause it to succeed and dominate the culture. While the effects of other people eating McDonald's affects us all in indirect ways, the effects of other people accepting lowest common denominator slop art/labor is going to be much more dire.
A big reason that political discussions here get so silly is because so many people here believe that the world can/should work like code, and that the right algorithm/data structures could solve everything. The ambiguity and subjectivity only there because we haven't put programmers in charge of law!
The fact that everyone is jumping through so many silly hoops now that they're writing code non-deterministically should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be.
Displacing a vast amount of labor is what makes the numbers make sense. We don't know if they'll succeed or not, but it's obviously what they're chasing.
In addition to actual lost jobs, replacing a skilled white collar worker with a fungible operator of AI lowers the salary for that role significantly.
The best concert I ever went to was one I only knew about from a TV commercial. Somewhere along the way I started blocking ads and commercials aggressively and in hindsight I've noticed that (for example) there's fewer movies/concerts I'm seeing because I've cut off a mechanism for learning what's out there for subjects I'm not in the habit of actively researching.
After 30 years I've stopped watching baseball altogether because the announcers read tiny ads between pitches and at-bats and I can't stand it.
I accidentally let myself get too extreme about deciding that ads are evil. Not surprising I regret that, given the nature of extremism. For better or worse ads are a kind of information, and I should remember that I'm an adult and can tell the difference between the facts and opinions there in.
The tech giants owe their success to people accepting this new business model in which revenue can scale without the company having to scale headcount proportionately. In other words, automated customer service, automated everything.
My idea of an alternative to a modern phone would not let Meta/Google anywhere near it. I'm curious how many people would go out of their way for this kind of hardware but still use those. I thought the point should be making your own choice about what apps are "essential", not going down the path of least resistance and using the ones we're told are "essential".
It's hard to believe that in the late smartphone era there are people who think they're not online enough already, and want smart glasses so they can be even more online.
Something I appreciate about Samsung phones is that having a Samsung account is completely optional. I've never had one. If I accidentally click on one of the dumb AI features I'm not even allowed to use it without an account.
Steam gave me similar problems. In the process of trying to get in for the first time in a while to delete my account, I completed a successful 2FA but still couldn't log in because I had to prove I owned the account by providing extra information.
We've fallen so far from the days when the retailer let you just have the game you bought and then they were out of the picture forever.
What could be more representative of this community than the hubris of believing a simple algorithmic change could fix something that's actually deceptively complex and better off living with?
People are so desperate for this to be true. Maybe it comes from a subconscious recognition that their own self-imposed deskilling will inevitably catch up with them.
Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.
A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.
It's been weird finding out how many people don't see media past its finished surface text. People for whom the subtext of its creation is so unimportant that the concepts of coming up with a prompt and creating a work are mutually fungible.
I have usually permitted that when it comes up and sometimes declined it. But when I permitted it I didn't have to worry about them entering everything I say into a permanent history from which a random sentence could get used, datamined, hallucinated into something that could be used against me years later.
What will actually happen is that instead of a person being accountable and taking a reputational hit, errors will be shrugged off as bugs and accountability will go off into the aether. Like all the other reasons to distrust the tech giants that have not meaningfully damaged or corrected them.
Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.
Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.
I wonder if that's because there's a downward price pressure on physical inventory because it needs to get liquidated to free up physical space for new inventory.
We talk too much about hallucination and too little about the more mundane elephant in the room that AI, whatever its effectiveness, will simply be used more for scam and deception than positive uses.
One of the scariest things to me about getting older is that there's entire generations younger than me who don't realize a growing number of things we used to have and lost. Because, like you said, they grew up without it.
And they don't believe things even can be better because they regularly hear one of the dumbest ideas of our time: that the past wasn't actually better, we only remember it that way.