If you search for burning police cars, you will find that it's a whole photography sub genre. Placed diagonally across the center of an intersection, an old police car is on fire, typically an old crown Vic.
Respect the art form, even as it adapts to new technology.
There is a (dystopian) world where AI is so good at making movies or series so well tailored to a person so cheaply that there will be no more shared culture.
It’s reaching, of course, but imo the best shows are those that have small, dedicated, fanbase. If it’s small it means that the show has enough personality to drive other people away.
And that’s fine. Popular stuff is popular mainly because of lack of controverse.
On the one hand you say it's dystopian, but you also seem to be celebrating it? ;P Maybe a show with a fanbase of 1 is in fact the best show in the entire world ;P. Regardless: I don't think you end up with no shared culture at all, because if something happens to me that normally would only happen to just me I still tell my friends about it, and maybe they want to experience the same unique thing I saw, and the same will be (and already is, fwiw) true of AI generated slop.
OpenAI doesn’t (currently) sell ads. I really cannot see a world where they’re wanting to sell ads to their API users only? It’s not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
You're thinking ads are to advertise products. Ads are to modify behavior to make you more likely to buy products.
ChatGPT has the capacity to modify behavior more subtly than any advertising ever devised. Aggregating knowledge on the person on the other end of the line is key in knowing how to nudge them toward the target behavior. (Note this target behavior may be how to vote in an election, or how to feel about various hot topics.)
> It’s not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
I’m pretty sure you do. Claude too. The only chatbot company I’ve made an account with is Mistral specifically because a phone number was not a registration requirement.
They don’t need to. It’s totally sufficient that they can correlate your chat history with your identity. That makes other identifiers more valuable, if they can extract your interests
The typical use case of an API is not that you personally use it. I have hundreds of clients all go through my API key, and in most cases they themselves are companies who have n clients.
It’s a good conspiracy theory, but of course it’s scoped to only ChatGPT users who are also developers and using specifically the o3 model via API. So if it is a conspiracy, it’s a fairly non-ambitious one.
The fact they don't sell ads doesn't mean they are not in the business of selling users data to third parties.
Also Netflix wasn't initially selling ads and there you have after increasing the price of their plans drastically in the last few years the ad supported subscription is probably the #1 plans because most people aren't willing to shed 15 to 25usd/€ every month to watch content that is already littered with ads.
You're incentivized not to sell targeting data, but you're very incentivized to collect and maintain as much of it as you can, and then offer access using it as a service.
So, at the end of your day, company X has an overdetailed profile of you, rather than each advertiser. (And also, at least in the US, can repackage and sell that data into various products if it chooses)
> To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
Phones are notorious for spam...
Seriously. How can the most prolific means of spam be used to prevent fraud and abuse? (Okay, maybe email is a little more prolific?) Like have you never received a spam call or text? Obviously fraudsters and abusers know how to exploit those systems... it can't be more obvious...
I'm saying it clearly isn't enough friction. It's not worth the privacy cost. Which let's be real, those numbers are then commonly sold to those same spammers, even if indirectly.
You are also forgetting it is easy to mask, obscure, and hijack numbers. So it doesn't cost money per number, many times they can use their own number.
There isn't a universal solution, which is the main problem here. Sometimes numbers make sense, most of the time not.
What are they trying to prevent again? Requiring a phone number is one kind of friction for free services like twitter, but this is a service where a user registers a credit card and authorizes charges, they have the legal name of the person paying for a service, what's the phone number for? It's not like OpenAI gives me their phone number so I can call when I'm having an issue.
lol dude, they already have my credit card. Look back at the OP. You're arguing that a phone number costs money so pushes people out. You know what else costs money?...
Stop doing things just because others do it. You'll never find a better way if you're always following. You'll never find better ways if you just accept things as they are. If you never push back. Let's be real, the number isn't about identity verification. They have my name and credit card. Unless by "verification" you mean cross matching me with other databases with the intent to sell that information.
You keep pestering me but you won't ask why they need that data. Like you just accept things at face value?
Depends on your region. It is fantastic in Cupertino. It is literally unusable in Japan or Taiwan. Literally--it will fail to get directions or even find your destination (typing in English or the local language).
I find the search pretty poor on Apple Maps, but I’ve traveled the world using only Apple Maps and I’ve gotten around fine in quite remote areas.
The only reason I ever use google maps is to search somewhere and copy paste the address into Apple Maps.
Can’t speak towards Japan or Taiwan specifically but it’s been fine in extremely rural Africa, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Bosnia, Australia, etc. Much better than Google Maps in most of Western Europe and America these days.
Works pretty well in Australia but it didn’t use to. As an aside, last time I was in Japan google maps had some issues too, and people recommended other map apps
Going from Apple Maps to Google Maps is now like going from ublock origin to a stock browser. Crap everywhere that you didn't ask for, slowing you down as you try to locate what you're actually trying to find.
Meanwhile the maps/data quality is quite good, probably 95% there for the things I care about. I've been able to use it full-time for years now.
It's true in most rich countries at this point. Apple's been steadily launching more of their capabilities in new countries. I just used Apple Maps across eight countries in Europe. I did send a few problem reports, but they're better than Google now everywhere I went.
At this point if I lived somewhere they weren't great, I'd submit improvements for all the places I went
Just checked my commute to work on the west coast. It found 1 of 3 public transit options, doesn't know that my company has an office at that location (public info), and doesn't list the cost. I also just finished a driving trip through Central Europe with an apple map user, where it got stuck in construction Google knew about (+1h), didn't have good traffic info at other times, and also chose the most boring route. The trip improved once we switched to routing with Google.
Apple maps is adequate now, but as a map power-user it's been pretty far from great every time I've tried it. I'm happy they finally managed to get an accurate basemap though.
I didn't say "generating code", I meant I find it offensive to have any code sitting on my computer that generates code, whether I use it or not. I prefer minimalism: just have on my computer what I will use, and I have a limited data connection which means even more updates with useless code I won't use.
If we try really hard, I think we can make an exhaustive list of what viral fads on the internet are not. You made a small start.
none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, interest, substance, endurance, prestige, relevance, credibility, allure, staying-power, refinement, or depth.
I think it sounds far more likely that 100M people signed up to poke at the latest viral novelty and create one meme, than that 100M people suddenly discovered they had a pressing long-term need for AI images all on the same day.
It's neither of these options in this false dichotomy.
100M people signed up and did at least 1 task. Then, most likely some % of them discovered it was a useful thing (if for nothing else than just to make more memes), and converted into a MAU.
If I had to use my intuition, I would say it's 5% - 10%, which represents a larger product launch than most developers will ever participate in, in the context of a single day.
Of course the ongoing stickiness of the MAU also depends on the ability of this particular tool to stay on top amongst increasing competition.
Apparently OpenAI is losing money like crazy on this and their conversion rates to paid are abysmal, even for the cheaper licenses. And not even their top subscription covers its cost.
Uber at a 10x scale.
I should add that compared to the hype, at a global level Uber is a failure. Yes, it's still a big company, yes, it's profitable now, but I think it was launched 10+ years ago and it's barely becoming net profitabile over it's existence now and shows no signs of taking over the world. Sure, it's big in the US and a few specific markets. But elsewhere it's either banned for undermining labor practices or has stiff local competition or it's just not cost competitive and it won't enter the market because without the whole "gig economy" scam it's just a regular taxi company with a better app.
It's quite hard to say for sure, and I will prefix my comment by saying his blog posts are very long and quite doomerist about LLMs, but he makes a decent case about OpenAI financials:
A very solid argument is like that against propaganda: it's not so much about what is being said but what about isn't. OpenAI is basically shouting about every minor achievement from the rooftops so the fact that they are remarkably silent about financial fundamentals says something. At best something mediocre or more likely bad.
All very fair caveats/heads up about Ed Zitron, but just for context for others: he is an actual journalist that has been in the tech space for a long time, and has been critical of lots of large figures in tech for a long time. He has a cohesive thesis around the tech industry, so his thoughts on AI/LLMs aren't out of nowhere and disconnected.
Basically, it's one of those things you may read and find that, all things considered, you don't agree with the conclusions, but there's real substance there and you'll probably benefit from reading a few of his articles.
While 100M signing up just for one pic is certainly possible, I note that several hundred million people regularly share photographs of their lunch, so it is very plausible that in signing up for the latest meme generator they found they liked the ability to generate custom images of whatever they consider to be pretty pictures every day.
It’s hard to think of a worse analogy TBH. My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit. It is a fad, but it’s also a very useful tool.
Ape NFTs are… ape NFTs. Useless. Pointless. Negative value for most people.
I would note that I was replying to a comment about the 'big trend of ghiblification' of images.
Reproducing a certain style of image has been a regular fad since profile pictures became a thing sometime last century.
I was not meaning to suggest that large language & diffusion models are fads.
(I do think their capabilities are poorly understood and/or over-estimated by non-technical and some technical people alike, but that invites a more nuanced discussion.)
While I'm sure your wife is getting good value out of the system, whether it's a better fit for purpose, produces a better quality, or provides a more satisfying workflow -- than say a decent free photo editor -- or whether other tools were tried but determined to be too limited or difficult, etc -- only you or her could say. It does feel like a small sample set, though.
Applying some filters and adding some overlay text is something some folks did, but there's such a massive creative world that's opened up, where all we have to do is ask.
I am contrasting how instagram filters gave users some control and increased user base and how today editing photos with LLMs is doing the same and pulling in a wider user base.
they're not but I'm already seeing ai generated images on billboards for local businesses, they're in production workflows now and they aren't going anywhere
I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
I assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
Makes sense. Although I think that's an error. TikTok is "just" a video sharing site. Joe Rogan is "just" a podcaster. Dumb things that affect lots of people are important.
Everything Everywhere All At Once won a bunch of Oscars. They used generative AI tools for some of their post-production work (achieved by a tiny team), for example to help clean up the backgrounds in the scene with the silent dialog between the two rocks.
You're right, nothing has value unless someone figures out how to make money with it. Except OpenAI, apparently, because the fact that people buy ChatGPT to make images doesn't seem to count as a commercial use case.
Except lots of people are paying for it. I'll refer you to the other post on the front page for the calculation that OpenAI would have to get just an extra $10/yr from their users to break even.
They still are. Instagram is full of accounts posting gpt-generated cartoons (and now veo3 videos). I’ve been tracking the image generation space from day one, and it never stuck like this before
Anecdotally, I've had several conversations with people way outside the hyper-online demographic who have been really enjoying the new ChatGPT image generation - using it for cartoon photos of their kids, to create custom birthday cards etc.
I think it's broken out into mainstream adoption and is going to stay there.
It reminds me a little of Napster. The Napster UI was terrible, but it let people do something they had never been able to do before: listen to any piece of music ever released, on-demand. As a result people with almost no interest in technology at all were learning how to use it.
Most people have never had the ability to turn a photo of their kids into a cute cartoon before, and it turns out that's something they really want to be able to do.
Definitely. It’s not just online either - half the billboards I see now are AI. The posters at school. The “we’re hiring!” ad at the local McDonalds. It’s 100x cheaper and faster than any alternative (stock images, hiring an editor or illustrator, etc), and most non technical people can get exactly what they want in a single shot, these days.
JavaScript Chrome developers did a good job of convincing people that Safari is the new IE.
I love Safari on macOS. I love the pinch/zoom with the tabs. I love that private browsing mode, at least seems to, keep things contained to the tab they started with. e.g. if I open facebook in a private tab then open new tab and go to facebook, it’s going to make me login.
Chrome’s developers didn’t have to say anything. Anyone who’s been trying to build on the latest web features (for me, particularly WebGL, WebRTC, WebGPU and IndexedDB) over the past decade has been bitten by Safari over and over again. They usually come around after being raked over the coals by the web dev community, but they’re still usually years behind.
When “Safari is the new IE” was first published, they absolutely were. They’ve gotten a bit better since then, but all the same it was hilarious to see people who used to rail against IE for flaunting web standards (cough John Gruber cough) suddenly start saying that web standards were a bogus racket once Apple decided to stop keeping up with them.
Safari is far from perfect, but I’m glad they don’t implement everything Chrome does. Many of the complaints come down to “Safari doesn’t even support RunBitcoinMinerInBackground.js. It sucks!”
And on the plus side, it’s vastly better at power efficiency, meaning I can use my laptop longer without being plugged in.
sure if you want to live a life stuck in the App Store and Play Store walled gardens... having a decent web browser is the way towards a truly open web
Safari is the new IE not because they refuse to implement questionable new web “standards”, but because
- It has all sorts of random quirks in their supposedly supported features;
- Mobile Safari has even more quirks;
- No other major browser introduces random serious bugs like Safari does (remember the IndexedDB one?);
- Version updates are tied to OS updates meaning it’s the only major browsers that’s not evergreen, and coupled with the previous points you have to carry workarounds for bugs forever, and of course can’t use new features;
- Extensions are 10x harder to develop and more than 10x more expensive to publish since they’re tied to Xcode, Apple Developer Program and MAS, because fuck you;
- Like another commenter said, it’s the only browser that crashes on me (random “this page has experienced a problem and reloaded” or something like that);
- PWA is another kind of hell in Safari but opinions are divided so whatever. At the very least it’s not conducive to an open web.
It’s a piece of hot garbage, like a lot of other Apple software these days. Sure, maybe it’s battery efficient or something. I don’t give a shit because I work plugged in.
Oh and developer tools in Safari are crap but who cares.
Developers don't convince anyone of anything! They just build stuff according to standards (which are inevitably set not by standards orgs, but by the most popular browsers), and then they expect all browsers to follow those standards and "just work".
When a browser like Safari fails to adhere to those standards, sites will break ... but you can't expect developers (of most sites; I'm not talking about the top 100 or anything) to test in every possible browser ... and then change their code to accommodate them. Certainly not in ones with single-digit percentages of market share, that require their own OS to test (like Safari).
If Apple wanted more web devs to support Safari they should port it to Linux and Windows. The web is supposed to be an open standard, you shouldn't need a devices and software from a specific manufacturer to develop for it (I say that posting from a Mac).
But there isn't anymore, so there's no way for a web developer to ensure Safari compatibility (unless you expect every dev shop in the world to buy a Mac just for that purpose).
I continually try, but Safari is the only browser where I routinely experience crashes once or twice a month. There are also some random incompatibilities with certain websites (related to the CORS issue as mentioned in another comment) that force me back into another browser anyway.
I tend to use Safari on my mac, but I will say that it evaluates CORS slightly differently than other browsers so that sometimes I have to disable CORS protection to get a site to work that works fine in Chrome or Firefox, and it's the only browser I've used where I expect to have it crash hard with a SEGFAULT or something every once in a while.
