There’s been some recent drama between Valve and Epic Games, who run two of the world’s largest online game storefronts. Apparently Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, said in an interview recently that he was opposed to Steam putting disclosures on its storefront informing buyers of AI-generated content. The new version of Epic’s Unreal Engine uses generative AI features that developers can’t turn off, and Sweeney believes that Valve warning gamers about AI slop will be bad for sales. Apparently it’s never crossed Tim Sweeney’s mind that the reason why this would be bad for sales is because people hate AI.
You would think that, if there was some invisible hand of the market guiding the laws of supply and demand, companies who make AI garbage generators would recognize that nobody likes their products and would stop making them. But it seems that these corporations have grown so big that they no longer need to worry about what consumers think. If they want us to eat shit, well then, shit we shall eat. And let’s be real: all of the stuff they make is shit. I’ve finally switched away from Google Search because when I search for a website, it seems to think that I want an AI summary of a Reddit post vaguely related to what I’ve typed in. Either that, or they want to shove an ad in my face.
Still, even if I’ve finally quit Googling stuff, I’m forced into the Google ecosystem. I have a Gmail address, and all of the (non-pornography) videos that I watch are on YouTube. You kind of have to bend to their will if you want to use the internet these days. It used to be that you could host your own email server out of your closet, but the tubes are so clogged with spam that running your own server is impossible to maintain. We’re forced into the same narrow boxes, the same websites, until Google tries to write our emails for us every time we open a new window.
It would be nice to be able to opt out. It would be nice to have a choice. But choices, as far as I can tell, are no longer for people like us. They’re for billionaires, who as far as I can tell, have aspirations far greater than recreating the age of robber barons. They want to bring back feudalism. They want us to pay for everything while they pay us nothing and replace our jobs with AI.
This is one of the problems I have with the argument that “we can’t have an income tax in Washington because billionaires ~ * CrEaTe JoBs * ~. If Boeing or Starbucks or Amazon could get away with having no pesky employees demanding annoying things like “paychecks” or “benefits”, they would. Microsoft just spent $110 billion to buy Activision Blizzard, then laid off ten thousand XBOX employees. Corporations don’t create employment out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they are obliged to.
I’m hoping that soon this whole AI economy collapses like a giant house of cards. Technocrats like to claim that “AI today is the worst it’s ever going to be”. That’s bullshit. AI isn’t learning or thinking. It’s taking words on the internet, stirring them around, and spitting them out in a (sometimes) coherent order. It’s like if you claimed your alphabet soup was intelligent because sometimes words come out when you dip your spoon in. As more and more of the internet gets taken over by AI, the quality of that alphabet soup will deteriorate, like copies of a copy. It’s like how the Melvins pioneered the genre that would be called grunge, but many lesser bands imitated them, then even lesser bands did the same, until eventually we got Nickelback. Do you want the internet to be Nickelback? Because that’s how you get Nickelback.
But that’s how bubbles work. Everyone gets super rich until suddenly they’re not. So if you’re a venture capitalist hoping to make a fortune on the next big thing after AI, I have a proposal for you. I’m selling shares in a company that will hold a monopoly on shipping goods from the South Seas. It’s foolproof, I tell you.
~ Ian (listening to Demon Days by Gorillaz)