Comment by llm_nerd
5 days ago
>and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this"
People have been saying this about Show HNs for time eternal. There have been an insane number of poorly thought out, poorly considered, often Get-Rich-Quick type of creations, long before AI. Things where the submitter clearly doesn't understand the industry they're targeting, doesn't provide any sort of solution, etc. Really strange if people actually think this is a new phenomenon.
Indeed, a recent video that I rather loved touches on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg
Its subject is "Everything was Already AI", the point being that everyone is quantizing and simplifying and reflecting everyone else and the consensus, in such a fashion that people acting like AI ruined everything...yeah, it was already ruined. We already have furry artists drawing furry art just like countless other furry artists, declaring it an outrage that someone used AI to draw furry art, and so on. As the video covers, the whole idea of genres is basically people just cloning each other.
Be right back, going to put on a cowboy hat and denim and sing in a drawl about pickups and exes.
While I agree with your overall point, I think art is quite different.
I don't personally consume furry art but I am a fan of Studio Ghibli and the anime medium in general. And even within that medium, certain artists have a very different style than others. I can usually tell Makoto Shinkai's style vs Hayao Miyazaki's style vs Akira Toriyama's style. I don't think any of them ever claimed to have copied each other. But they have all worked thousands of hours to perfect their craft.
With AI, you get people like me, who can't draw stick figures, tell Chatgpt or nano banana to make an anime version of themselves and then voilà! You get something that could probably pass as Miyazaki's in a minute.
No artist has a claim or monopoly on a genre, but they do have a claim on their own art style. With AI being trained on artists' styles, the artists whose works literally trained the AIs are now being inundated with low effort copycats of their creations.
That being said, I wrote in another thread comment that AI is an accelerator of what already exists. In a codebase, if you have crappy code patterns, AI will just accelerate that.
In business, like you said, people who had crappy ideas have always been able to submit crappy business ideas. Only a few of them actually tried to execute on them. With AI, more of them can execute on them.
I think this "boringness" the article is talking about always existed. It just becomes more prevelant because AI reduces the barrier to entry.
On the whole you're right, but it's also the case that scale matters. Show HNs have always been mostly bullshit, but producing a bullshit Show HN was on the same order of magnitude difficulty of producing a good one. If LLMs were to provide 10x productivity, we'd have the same number of good Show HNs, and 10x more bullshit ones.