It’s less about the AI and more about how the AI is used by folks. It all boils down to how it lets people who don’t care about the quality produce way more than it lets people who care about quality produce, even as it helps both.

My experience browsing video content to discover new stuff is pretty much ruined. Folks that really don’t have a good idea prompt up crap. AI speeds up folks that don’t care about quality orders of magnitude more than it speeds up people that care about quality, so the flood favors low quality. Then there’s the knockoffs. Something looks like a creator that I liked and I’m not paying much attention and then 30 seconds in I’m wondering why the hell it’s so soul meltingly hollow, then I catch on it’s an AI knock-off riding the wave of a more popular channel.

In software development, folks that formerly trusted in the developers to do the job as they see fit now think themselves experts on software development. They prompted up “hello world” type fodder and now they are micromanaging folks with decades of experience. This happens to some extent with every tech fad, but this one is just way worse. Then there are people who have basically been pundits, high on opinion, low on actionable anything. They’ve always been annoying and pretty much wrong, but you could pretty much tune them out because everything they said amounted to nothing. Yeah, it’s annoying that they get paid to basically talk the way executives like, but at least they didn’t actually impact anything. Now they prompt up their bad ideas into pretty bad concepts, and there’s increased demand to pay attention to “almost realized concepts” that they convinced their executive friend looks good.

In terms of what to change, basically I don’t see a good way other than going back and just not figuring out this tech in the first place. I don’t see a path for leveling the playing field to penalize slop, for the narcissistic know-it-alls to go back to being on the sidelines.