Great article, thanks for sharing.
I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing.
I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits.
It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma.
What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.
The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.
Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes:
Lament: Oh why did we automate art?
Answer: Capitalism.
It's superficially true, currently. We've had generative AI for a few years and people are using it to make a quick buck. But even if the world had been taken over by communism, or if the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea had got imperial ambitions and now we all lived in a gift economy, people would still be using generative AI to gain attention and status. This will work until it wears thin. Thinner.
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