Zed Potts on FaceBook

[Ed. Note. I usually believe Facebook posts about as far as I can throw them. But I know for a personal fact that every word of this is true.]

The one thing about AI that most people don’t seem to get, the really critical thing, is that this whole thing isn’t a “tech miracle,” it’s just the Wal-Mart scam. When Wal-Mart moves into town, the first thing they do is they run a bunch of sales, for years and years.

Not because they care. Not because they just realllly wanna help. But because they really want to drive every single store that sells the same things they sell out of business.

And because they don’t really want to (and can’t really compete) on the quality front, they do this by just leveraging deep pockets to offer really, really, really cheap prices. They do two things with this: First, they close every single other business that sells the things they sell. Second, they manage to get everyone used to shittier versions of the stuff they used to have higher standards on— it may not be as good, but hey, it’s cheap, and who can complain these days?

[Ed. Note: On top of that, it is illegal: “predatory pricing, where a dominant firm lowers prices to drive competitors out of the market” blatantly violates antitrust law, as ignored by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades. Lack of enforcement has nothing to do with[1] the 10s of millions of dollars Walmart donates to politicians each year, directly and indirectly.]

AI art costs a lot to make, and it costs way way way more to build the machine models that make it, and this money all goes straight to creating a bunch of waste power, heat, and pollution. It’s the anti-environmentalist effect your mother told you about.

But it’s virtually free to you to use right now, even for the paid services. Do you know why?

Because they want you to use it. They’re trying to kill off every source of news writing, picture painting, song singing, book writing, movie making, library storing, lesson teaching, code writing, information sharing, community building, thought thinking they can possibly manage.

(The plan is) to replace (all that) with worse (but cheaper) versions that can run through machines they run and then they can charge you for it, and get BACK some money for the billions and billions and billions of dollars that they keep pouring into this stuff.

The people who build this stuff aren’t your friend. This product isn’t cool. It’s not “no big deal” when you share an AI thought, or project, or message – it’s about you willingly hopping on board with the people who want to kill everything you love so they can run a zombie robot version of it that they can rent to you later when it’s all you have left.

This isn’t a “conspiracy”. It’s not secret. It’s just the fucking plan and it’s right out there in the open; these people even say it out loud if you’d start listening.

Footnotes

[1] Yeah, right