Comment by createful
17 days ago
I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.
But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.
If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.
Except enterprises aren't funding it with API usage either.
These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.
End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.
Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.
I think we know today that blaming everyone and their plant doesn’t actually solve the problem. The formula that does is: find the ultimate beneficiaries (shareholders) and make them lose a lot of money to, then their delegates (CEOs) and punish them with jail time. There are lots of opinions about this, but I don’t see how this does not work.
It doesn't work because the people who are supposed to be leading us are on the payroll - sometimes actually - of the shareholders and CEOs, or are in fact in that same group.
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Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
I got sick of Pokemon's (Game Freak's, Nintendo's) exploitative practices back when they just tried to con you into buying two of every game. Anyway I don't know how bad pokemon is these days, but I think your analogy would make more sense if you thought about the AI companies like they're in a big hole in the ground. There's something down there, no doubt about it, but they don't know what it is or what to do with it, they just know that it loves munchin' down on cash. Sometimes Jensen Huang is down there and he also loves munchin' down on cash and if you don't feed him he gets mad and says he wasn't born a loser. OK, now forget about all the different users and enterprise customers because they're insignificant by orders of magnitude, a bit like how you focused on the whales in your analogy but we're zooming out further, until we can see the even bigger fish: the venture capital investors! They're the ones with the wheelbarrows of cash that they're tipping into the void.
Anyway, the only "whales" funding the AI companies is venture capital. The reason it's not a viable business (yet, so far, whatever) is because they spend more money than they make.
>End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are ... complicit ... because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want
Erm, you appear to have missed the last 100+ years of updates to Western Capitalism.
People don't want it, you make the demand with hundreds of millions of spend on advertising (brainwashing), influencers, and social proof.
The capital holders don't sit back and see which company wins so capital can be directed to the best solutions, they buy up the competition, they pay corrupt politicians, they use current v market placement to embed their products name into billions of workplace computers and spread stories about how it's going to 'increase productivity but never at the cost of jobs', etc.
Yes, ultimately a dollar is a vote, but I don't think you can blame the people being manipulated "every bit as much" as those controlling the manipulation to feed their avarice and/or megalomania.
> Erm, you appear to have missed the last 100+ years of updates to Western Capitalism.
Not really.
> Yes, ultimately a dollar is a vote, but I don't think you can blame the people being manipulated "every bit as much" as those controlling the manipulation to feed their avarice and/or megalomania.
Oh but I do.
Collective social guilt is a thing. e.g. who is to blame for drug violence? Not only drug dealers.
Unless they are burning through funding. It's "blitzscaling" and is followed by "enshittification" when yhe free money dries up.