I often get in arguments about how I tend to avoid brands that put too much into marketing.
Of course, theoretically, the amount of money a company puts into marketing doesn't automatically lower the quality of their products, but in my experience, the correlation is there. Whiskas, Coka Cola, McDonalds, etc.
And suddenly this type of quality is becoming "normal" and acceptable now?
The notion that "computers are never wrong" has been engrained in society for at least a century now, starting with scifi, and spreading to the rest of culture.
Complain to it enough times, remain resilient and you’ll eventually figure it out (that’s a wild card though). Or find someone who has and take their word for it (except you can’t because they’re probably indistinguishable from the ‘bot’ now according to the contradictory narrative). Iterate. Spiral. No one should have to go through that though. Be merciful.
I've recently started wondering what the long term impacts of AI slop is going to be. Will people get so sick of the sub-par quality that there will be a widespread backlash, and a renewed focus on handmade or artisinal products made by hand? Or will we go the other way where everyone will accept the status-quo and everything will just get shittier, and we will just have multiple cycles of AI slop trained on AI slop?
I'm already seeing screen-free summer camps in my area. There's going to be a subset of the population that does not want to play along with calling hallucinations and deepfakes "progress," kids will be homeschooled more as parents lose their jobs and traditional classroom instruction loses effectiveness.
I thought the movie "the Creator" was pretty neat, it envisions a future where AI gets blamed for accidentally nuking Los Angeles so America bans it and reignites a kind of cold war with Asia which has embraced GAI and transcended the need for central governance. Really it's a film about war and how it can be started with a lie but continue out of real existential fear.
I'll guess it will be both at the same time with a far greater number of people going for the easier (latter) option, but still a real chunk of people going for what's real, and also a spectrum in between.
This is how it already is for most aspects of life that have, for many, been enshittified by progress. Sadly the shitty part is not entirely avoidable by choice.
Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT.
Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!
For example, in the times of "lectures", where transmitted information was literally read (as the term says) in real time from the source to the public.
But in general, the (mis-)information that spinach could contain so much iron to be interchangeable with nails had to be a typo so rare that it would become anecdotal and generate cultural phenomena like Popeye.
That is very worrying. Normally this would never fly, but nowadays it's kind of OK?
Why should false and or inaccurate results be accepted?