> I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development).
Hm, that's a good point.
I see other commenters getting hung up on the idea that "in a world where nobody can tell that a piano is 0.01% out of tune, does it even count as out of tune?"
But that's just a toy example, and though the author already did directly address it, many don't seem to understand the impact. Maybe it helps to put it into other terms.
I can tell when there's problems in software that I couldn't write. Similarly with most systems I interact with. For society to lose the knowledge of making $system perfectly doesn't mean that nobody will ever know, it means everybody who interacts with $system will just be a little bit less happy than they would be otherwise.
Our societal fitness will be reduced because we'll all be a little less happy, a little less healthy, etc. Saying "it doesn't matter if this thing is a little worse and nobody knows how it could be better" is like saying a parasite is fine because you've been living with it for years.
The vast majority of content that entertains people online is just the Nokia Snake Game but for writing or film. Near-zero-value time-wasters. Hard to make it much worse or ruin it when it’s already worth about as much as used tissue paper. That’s also why I don’t relate to concerns about what might happen to the Web without ad revenue—nearly all of what that pays for has nearly zero value and is easily replaced by plentiful other low-value things.
(Yes, I do include this comment among the low-value junk)
That’s an insult to Nokia Snake. Nokia Snake doesn’t have ads, loot boxes, in-app purchases, collectibles, social media integration or any of dozens of other dark pattern that are practically standard in casual games now.
Oh, it’s not shittified, I just mean it’s a way to pass the time that’s basically interchangeable with tons and tons of other ways to pass the time. That’s most of what people do on the Web, and that’s what most of the content’s for. It’s all solitaire (the real card game) or reading the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Just something to do.
>I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development).
It comes up in all sorts of unexpected places in technology, once things are overly optimized for price often the original better version goes away. Like right now you can't buy a good cassette tape player, because the only ones made now all use the same mechanism that sucks. They stopped making good mechanisms like 20 years ago when people mostly stopped buying cassettes.
I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development).
It starts with the consumers accepting crap, and works its way back.
That's why I think AI-produced output will be just fine, for most folks.