This is in fact an insidious form of gatekeeping. It is shutting out people who are excited to learn new skills and become the next generation of creative people by collaborating with other talented humans, receiving apprenticeship, and being rewarded for their labor. Their opportunities and newfound capabilities are being thwarted by the slop machines, and it stinks.
There is no gatekeeper like a Capitalist trying to convince you that Yet More Automation™ is good for everybody!
It's a position of weakness. If their products were really "must have" in a way that everyone is simply clamoring for, they wouldn't need to be so thirsty. The Pick-me Corporation vibe is getting real, real tired.
For small/unknown companies, all publicity is good publicity may be true, but McDonald's is one of the biggest and most well-established brands around. A horrible ad isn't going to turn many new people onto their products but it sure as hell can turn a lot of people off.
I saw an "AI" tool recently which showed how you could create two very different poses for a character, and it would "tween" between the two in a realistic, convincing way. It could be described as "genAI" I suppose, but the company claimed they were very specific with how they trained the model and what it was intended to do.
There were still animators upset about it, and I get it. I'd probably be upset about it if I were in that profession. I'm certainly upset about LLM use in programming. But if I squint really hard, I can barely eke out a vision of limited, targeted, vetted tools which accomplish very specific aids to creators in their professional workflows.
That is not by and large how any of the services we regularly hear about are built and marketed. There's a wide gulf between ethically-sourced, limited professional workflow tools and the Copilots & Soras & Sunos of the world. I would say as a general rule, if something is produced based on a "prompt", it should be immediately viewed with immense suspicion.
About 93% of corporate leaders and 80% of investors said they think AI will be net positive for society compared to just 58% of ordinary people, according to the poll by nonprofit Just Capital.
Honestly PieFed is the best thing that happened this year to the fediverse IMHO. I'm having a blast running my own instance and hope to make a lot of use of PieFed going into 2026 for both business and pleasure.
The sheer degree to which all of these moguls' ideas are utterly bankrupt and devoid of real human craft & creativity continues to be shocking to me. Like, if any random person on the street got scooped up and put in front of a microphone and said the exact same things, everyone would think they were fucking idiots. Because they somehow are billionaires and are CEOs, they're geniuses? Spare me, please.
I really don't understand why lemmy hates technology which regurgitates slop based on data stolen from creators against their will, erodes trust, degrades mental health, wreaks havoc on the labor force, destroys the environment, and temporarily enriches a handful of fake billionaires with fake money…gosh I just don't understand!
Well the first and most obvious answer is that LLMs need to fall under an extensive regulatory framework which makes quite a number of use cases of them effectively illegal and still other use cases moderated by science-backed harm mitigation. There also need to be systemic corrections to the financial markets & business law such that a company like OpenAI in its recent or present form couldn't exist at all.
But unfortunately, that's not the world we live in (at least in America). Future generations will pay for our gross negligence, once again.
Oh like this weirdo? 😬
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/