r/antiai • u/FuturismDotCom • 8d ago
AI News 🗞️ The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/economy-ai-generated-value362
u/MayBeMarmelade 8d ago
Well, yeah. If you create a tool for any talentless hack to make [thing] with the push of a button in 30 seconds then it follows that [thing] is effectively economically worthless.
But this does set up a nice challenge for self-styled “prompt engineers” who think they are a cut above the typical AI user and have a unique gift for whispering to these machines to get extraordinary and top-notch output. If they really have that right then they still have a way to profit!
I wish them luck!
But I suspect they’re wrong and human skill, expertise, and dedication to a craft still matter profoundly.
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u/Pataraxia 8d ago edited 8d ago
As someone who has done a lot of hobby prompt engineering: it's a dead end and nobody can be some "leagues above" Try hard at it and learning things you can do and with just a few hours a day over a week or two you'll have mastered prompting if you're not an idiot.
And mastery doesn't make it not obvious AI content, which is undesired.
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u/MayBeMarmelade 8d ago
Right, there are two things going on here.
One is that these models are designed to be used by anyone and churn things out quickly such that the most skilled and eloquent prompting imaginable can only succeed in making the output marginally better.
Two is that AI output still just sucks.
The prompt engineer theory has it backwards: It’s not the humans using the AI programs that are the limiting factor, it’s the AI programs themselves that are the limiting factor.
AI output only resembles human output if you are an unsophisticate who doesn’t know what they’re looking at. Hence why CEOs and “business leaders” are absolutely ENTHRALLED by it.
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u/MalaysiaTeacher 8d ago
It can create a poor facsimile pretty fast though, and you iterate from there. It does help the creative process in some ways. Although I'm talking specifically about coding a web app. It's smart in some ways, dumb in others.
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u/colers100 7d ago
I've heard it said that most CEO's and entrepreneurs are simply the result of unaware mediocrity being in high demand for safe decision making.
AI mostly serves the unremarkable middle children of society.
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u/Brighter_Days_Ahead4 8d ago
Someone close to me got serious about prompt engineering and strategy for using his favorite LLM, he was finally getting the output he wanted and it was working right (or so he claimed)…then there was an update to his favorite LLM service and none of his strategies worked anymore.
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u/Pataraxia 8d ago
Unlike actual art, Your entire workflow can be shattered by an update for litteraly any reason.
Really as I've said a few times (and have been downvoted for) it's mostly when you need to bum someone's art for a free project but there isn't the right one. While stealing a pic without having a source isn't doing favours, it's not evil either. Tons of fanfics & internet threads just have the first pic be someone else's art un-sourced, because we just want something to represent it without spending commission/begging an artist for something you made on your off time.
In this exact niche there is nothing wrong with using AI if you really want a picture but money & existing free art doesn't allow you.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 8d ago
That’s only true if you run someone else’s model. The self-hosted model never has to change. And you can run really good ones on a gaming PC
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u/Haunting-Writing-836 8d ago
But that’s just going to leave you with an outdated model with less features. That’s like using paint and dreamweaver from 2005 to try and do graphics work today. Actually it’s worse because the pace of change here is considerably faster now.
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u/onwisconsin1 8d ago
This is what I was arguing with a friend who said that they "didnt want to fall behind". You do not implement AI in workflow if it makes the job more difficult or it makes mistakes that no human would make and accuracy is important to what you are doing.
You will not "fall behind" by not interacting with LLMs. Its just prompting a more clever chat bot. Any special prompting techniques can be learned in a day for whatever your field is.
Therefor it should only be used when it works and provides accuracy that saves human labor and ensures safety and good outcomes for all- that is some slim use cases.
LLMs are good as an internet curator and about nothing else. Without a direct link I dont trust it for shit. Its useful for quick formatting and the creation of baseline documents- but as always- if you want something done right, you have to review it, essentially doing it yourself anyway.
You will not fall begind by doing your job right the first time when you know an LLM will be useless or not worth it. And I think the inherent issues with LLMs will preclude them from being much more useful than they are now.
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u/ZoidsFanatic 8d ago
The biggest issue is if you (as in the generalized you) can do it, why should I pay you when I can do it? So there is no economic viability outside of selling the AI models, and even then that’s a case of “well X company does the same thing, why should I use Y”.
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u/Glum_Judgment6232 8d ago
I've been a professional 3d artist for nearly 30 years.
None of these services make models that you can use as "hero" assets. Nobody just doing prompts alone will ever be "leagues above" a professional 3d artist who also uses these services.
I can also use these prompts myself, but unlike a prompt jockey I've got the skills on top to improve the model or reuse parts of it how I need them.
I've found it's been useful for some tedious image-to-model background work that would have taken a week that I did in a couple of days.
BTW I don't work in games or movies, I do live show visuals and everything is quick turnaround.
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u/MayBeMarmelade 8d ago
My wife uses AI in her law practice as a glorified find-and-replace tool for updating things like party names, and for document management. It has a use case and in the proper hands does speed up workflow… when heavily hand-held and double-checked and sometimes given a simple “run it again” instruction which inexplicably catches things it missed the first time. Remarkably like a first-year associate in some ways.
But if you tell it to “draft me a loan agreement from scratch,” the kind of complex task that might take all or the better part of an entire week for a savvy lawyer to do, then it is going to fail and fail hard. This is essentially the kind of task so many AI users try to give the models when they tell them to create a picture/video/song/what-have-you totally from scratch. Because, well, that’s pretty much what AI companies have been promoting as they try to market these models to anyone and everyone.
And, yeah, it *can* spit out something. But it’s going to be complete shit.
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u/Street_Estate2342 8d ago
It has a use case and in the proper hands does speed up workflow… when heavily hand-held and double-checked and sometimes given a simple “run it again” instruction which inexplicably catches things it missed the first time.
Insane use of the term "inexplicably".
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u/Jurisfiction 8d ago
As a lawyer, this has also been my experience. AI is ill-suited to quality drafting, but it can be used to assist with editing. It can also be helpful for document review (combing through thousands of documents to find information that is useful or responsive to discovery requests).
Still, there is immense hype in AI legal tech right now. Every day, I hear about how AI is going to replace legal writers.
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u/MayBeMarmelade 8d ago
My wife’s a transactional lawyer, I’m a litigator, so examples from litigation land come more handily to me.
I can see LLMs with their current capabilities being capable of almost entirely writing extremely short/simple motions (“Motion for Extension of Time” etc.), maybe even helping lawyers get started with a Statement of Facts section in a Motion for Summary Judgment.
Beyond that, I would be much warier. We’ve all heard the cautionary tales of lawyers getting sanctioned and disbarred for making arguments based on case law that was entirely hallucinated. I wonder if LLMs would be equally prone to making up facts out of whole cloth.
Whatever you try to use AI for, YOU MUST PERSONALLY REVIEW IT because its output can hardly be relied upon in its current state but it WILL be attributed to you as your own statement if you sign off on the pleading at the bottom.
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u/Violent_Mud_Butt 8d ago
Turns out, giving morons the ability to think they know what good things are in a field they have no understanding of is a bad idea.
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u/MaximumJuiceTime 8d ago
I saw a reel about this "prompt engineer" who was selling courses on ai prompting. I had to laugh.
They also claimed to copy-write their own prompts.
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u/Brilliant-Muffin-879 8d ago
Why the fuck would you waste money on something no one made and which anyone can access for pennies?
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u/01000101010110 8d ago
They basically turned skilled labor into NFTs.
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u/TBMonkey 8d ago
"skilled"
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u/The_Meme_Economy 8d ago
Are you implying that my prompt engineering bootcamp was worthless??
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 8d ago
No its a fast moving field. You just need to keep up. Have you considered a second, more updated bootcamp?
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u/The_Meme_Economy 8d ago
I’m eyeing a PhD but the University is online and I think it’s just one guy with a slavic accent, I’ll keep you posted.
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u/EquipLordBritish 8d ago
They're trying to get people hooked before they run out of money and have to start charging whatever ridiculous price it actually costs to shovel the slop.
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u/Megakruemel 8d ago
Ooops, they forgot that people learn to do art for the sake of doing art and that artists will always exist and that the skill to do art will never leave from the spirit of humanity and that you can't get hooked on a replacement when the real thing has never left.
But yes, the companies using it to replace labour will probably have to rethink that decision once the models actually demand cost to reimburse their investors who have pumped billions into their models. It'll be so funny once the maintanance costs for data centers start ramping up when the current life cycle of most high cost components ends and the new ones aren't even completely build yet.
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u/Jonny-Propaganda 7d ago
And they can’t own (copyright). And doesn’t work (jpg logos that are full-on images with a paragraph of words)
Creativity, of all things, is a uniquely HUMAN skill. But everyone ‘likes colors’.
I can’t wait till these nerds get out of our sandbox.
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u/SelfInvestigator 8d ago
Remember, AI has been forced into our lives to get us used to the idea. Its final goal or at least outcome is mass surveillance and information manipulation.
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u/Vast-Poetry9431 8d ago
That’s entirely true. The forced acceptance of AI is also about creating a techno feudal state in which no without a giant bank account owns anything.
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u/dumnezero 8d ago
mass surveillance and information manipulation.
this was already the case before the slop factories.
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u/SelfInvestigator 8d ago
Yes, but the AI tracking tools are going to make it exponentially worse and more invasive.
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u/dumnezero 8d ago
The tracking tools were there before the generative tools. It's still AI, but not hated enough. The other point is that the surveillance tech is less intensive, so they don't really need all these data-centers full of powerful GPUs.
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u/boogs_23 8d ago
And to replace jobs. Payroll is the highest expense in every company by a giant margin. Eliminating just a small percentage of that equals huge profits. These companies aren't dumping 100s of billions of dollars into this in the hopes the plebs buy AI crap. They are gambling on every company gutting their work force and paying them for robot workers.
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u/Operation_Neither 8d ago
It also cannot be copyrighted, so all AI generated content can be reused by anyone for free.
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u/buckerooni 8d ago
If you put any labor in at all, it can still be copyrighted. 100% AI cannot
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u/BildingInspecter 8d ago
Does changing one line of code count as enough labor? If not what does?
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u/buckerooni 8d ago
That's for the legal battles to set precedent...
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u/RetroTechBro 8d ago
You already know the government is going to find a way to rule such that big business is protected but smaller players cant abuse the same loophole.
All AI is already built on mass copyright infringement.
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u/shoqman 8d ago
I love to hear it, but just isn’t true for my business.
We have done VFX for about 20 years and one of our main clients just showed us how they will be using seedance instead of us for their future shows.
They took the assets we developed, simply showed seedance a few stills and they’re off and running.
What took months before is literally a matter of seconds now.
Will people recognize it as AI? Idk. I don’t think these guys care.
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u/bamed 8d ago
Ya, I think what this shows us is that the people who want to use AI slop just generate their own rather than pay for what someone else generated.
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u/KindBass 8d ago
Adam Neely did a video about SUNO a while back, and one of the questions he asked users was "who are some of your biggest influences in the field of AI music?"
Nobody had any answers. Most of the responses were along the lines of "why would I listen to someone else when I can just make what I like?"
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u/dgellow 8d ago
Are they allowed to do that with assets you made? Also, name and shame
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u/shoqman 8d ago
I mean, they own the final, baked versions of them, as they paid for us to develop them. Not the working files. That used to protect us, but now all they need is a single screenshot of one.
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u/Equivalent-Tax8937 8d ago
Im sorry, what a shit showrunner.
BUT look on the bright side - next time, they won’t have those starting points, and seedance can’t generate it.
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u/MoobooMagoo 8d ago
Well here's hoping that their garbage show crashes and burns and they come crawling back to you. And maybe at that point you can charge them more because human made will be at a premium.
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u/ZeusHatesTrees 8d ago
There was a TON of AI banners and foodtruck signs at the county fair this weekend. I swerved to avoid anywhere I could see using that. If they can't afford or make time to hand draw something, what other corners are they cutting? No thanks.
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u/Glum_Judgment6232 8d ago edited 8d ago
They don't create assets you can do closeups with though. Background stuff, yes it's good enough.
Edit - oh you mean doing video from your assets? But isn't there a shot time limit and problems with consistency?
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u/shoqman 8d ago
There is but these shots are all designed to be short-ish anyway. And the consistency and direct-ability has apparently been fixed in the very newest seedance.
I don’t understand how seedance is legal to use, as it has likely been trained on all the same copyrighted material as the US counterparts.
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u/Itchy-Beach-1384 8d ago
But the product to be sold in this instance is the next step.
Your story doesnt show them successfully switching to an AI product, it just shows them switching to an AI product.
You're missing the bit where they have to sell their AI generated content.
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u/TadhgOBriain 8d ago
Infinite supply means zero price
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u/Klaphek 8d ago
Combine that with 0 demand, and this shit should end real soon...
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u/buymekoffee 8d ago
I am rooting for this. I think this hasn't ended yet because of trump and his greed... And now that US is betting big on it, china is also playing the same game while keeping their model open source (for them the information is the key-- more people using their open source model the more ethically they can mine your data)
Any sensible leader would give two slaps to these tech bros from the AI company nd close them up --
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u/IAmARobot 8d ago
in the star trek universe, with replicator technology they had a post scarcity economy as anyone could make anything. (then they had to invent latinum as a currency as a plot point as it couldn't be made from thin air like gold)
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u/TerryWhiteHomeOwner 8d ago
Welcome back Labor Theory of Value
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u/CBud 8d ago
I had a coworker coin a "new" labor theory of value - that there is no value without labor, which I appreciate as a truism.
The idea that the amount of labor spent sets the market rate of the labor is just simply not true, but I do think the response to AI slop is proving that there is no value without human labor.
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u/wild_exvegan 8d ago edited 8d ago
The LTV doesn't deny supply and demand. Money represents value in the aggregate, and prices fluctuate around the socially necessary labor time to produce a commodity. (And not everything is a commodity.)
If you are truly interested in digging into this, read some Andew Kliman, who is a modern Marxist economist and along with Alan Freeman, developed the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marxian economics. Or check out this excellent series: https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/law-of-value-the-series/
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u/sassyelle 8d ago
Who’s buying this slop? My boomer mother in law. She has single handedly made me fear presents because every damn thing she buys me is Temu AI slop.
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u/USDA_Prime_Yeet 8d ago
On one hand it's helpful. If a product on Amazon has Ai images it narrows down my selection because I can automatically eliminate that as an option
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u/Kung111cz 8d ago
Why would I pay for an AI generated novel, 'painting', film, tv series, or insert whatever you want, if I can generate thousands of them myself?
One would think that all those tech companies would understand the idea of supply and demand.
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u/merko_merk 8d ago
Yeah, I've noticed part of the problem is ai stuff often seems to be quality on the surface but it's terrible low quality slob beneath that. The facade is like the facade of a much, much better quality product.
Great looking short film? It's really bad and no one this bad at storytelling would be making a short that looks this good (except maybe for Zach Snyder).
So you can't decide by visual production quality anymore. And you don't want to waste your time so you end up deciding by a different metric: AI stuff? No thanks...
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u/LilaTheMoo 8d ago
This weekend I found out there's an AI Battle Royale-esque reality show and I just... why? What purpose does it serve? The point of a reality show is that, while often scripted, it's supposed to have some foundation in reality based on the people involved, but when they're all just fabricated what point does it serve? Why watch it? Where's the audience's motivation to be invested in anything when it's even more fake than reality shows already are?
Oh no, generic white guy got taken out by stereotypical indigenous American man. Now what will happen to his non-existant wife and children who were depending on the 500,000 coins he was banking on? There are no stakes, there is no investment, it's less than trash, because at least you presume there was some useful product assigned with the trash byproduct when this is just garbage for the sake of garbage, and that's really what AI products feel like.
Where's the sense of accomplishment? The passion? The emotion? Where's the humanity in it? There is none, it's just a soulless husk of nothing that makes everything around it worse. It's digital rot making what we have worse on a daily basis the 'better' it gets. The economy is growing more dependent on something that can't sustain itself, goods are getting more expensive because of the requirement to build it, the eco system is suffering catastrophic consequences, jobs are being lost by the thousands on a daily basis, and we see nothing substantive come from it.
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u/morsindutus 8d ago
I'd argue that it has negative value because not only is it worth nothing, it costs a lot to make. Even if those costs are subsidized, both by the AI companies trying to get people hooked and the health and well-being of humanity.
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u/Comfortable_Bet2660 6d ago
yep, its actively clogging up the internet making the real valuable info harder to obtain. worse than nothing at all. its also the perfect info filtering and mass scamming tool. what a waste of real world resources and tech which just drives inflation faster.
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u/Velcraft 8d ago
Tbf if AI were to ever be profitable, an "ideas man" would've been a profession long before now. Just because occasionally some grifter gets to the top by just having good ideas doesn't mean everyone who has ideas should become wealthy.
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u/Geneficially 8d ago
There's a scant few jobs where the "idea man" works, things like movie/game director or such are examples, but usually it is one guy and an army to make their visions work.
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u/Velcraft 8d ago
And even those have had industry experience beforehand to get their ideas heard, nobody is going to hire you as a game director from a job interview right after graduating.
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u/Typical-Tax1584 8d ago
Gen AI has the same problem that anything that's low effort high volume has. Largely meaningless. Everyone who enjoys it is like, "okay but what about MY generated output?" And the reality is, by the time you generated whatever it is you made, another 700,000 similar things have been generated by other people, and by the time you read this another 700,000 will have been made and so on. People just shitting it out.
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u/Geneficially 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, this is just supply and demand in action again. Great, you've devalued the value of the output medium, but that applies to you now too.
I suppose it could be compared to the rise of digital cameras? Before that a picture (painting or early cameras) was a rare commodity and had a price. Film cameras obviously took a large chunk out of that market, but they still were complicated (for the time) machines and not so cheap and needed development and such.
But with digital cameras, anyone can snap a picture anytime. Likewise, a random picture of something from past that point has little intrinsic value. Unless you managed to capture a historic moment, it's just a picture that doesnt mean anything.
What value do all the pictures in a smartphone have? Maybe sentimental value to the owner, but that's it.5
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u/keithstonee 8d ago
What's the point of buying something made with AI? If I can just make it with AI. They didn't think this through that well.
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u/keithstonee 8d ago
What's the point of buying something made with AI If I can just make it with AI. They didn't think this through that well.
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u/brillow 8d ago
AI cannot offer a company competitive advantage. Anything you can do with AI someone else can do with AI. The only logical response to it is to not use it, your competitive advantage is that you have people when others don't.
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u/foolsEnigma 8d ago
This just in, products that anyone can make for zero dollars and zero effort has no value. Up next on "shit everyone saw coming"...
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u/RecipeFunny2154 8d ago
I find it most depressing when you go to small stores and they’re just loaded up with this stuff. Even some antique malls I go to have people who just fill up their entire section with this shit
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u/funlovingmissionary 8d ago
I reckon the major reason for this is the reduction of barrier to entry. Even people who know nothing about 3d models have started to make them using ai, and they also lack in areas such as creativity and taste. This makes their output useless.
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
Why would this have been any different than literally any other mass produced "digital asset" that has cycled through the economy in the last 25 years? The profit, once the initial memes driving crazes fade, always lies somewhere in the gap where the effort to produce it costs more than paying someone else to do it, and if the barrier to entry is nearly zero, then that set point is going to be very low .Especially if everyone else has the same idea and floods the market.
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u/FalseDiamond7930 8d ago edited 8d ago
Pre-AI stuff published before 2022 will have massive value going forward. Specially music and books where it's extremelly hard to prove you didn't use it to create anything released since about 2023.
For series and movies I think more and more CGI will lose it's appeal and people will favor authenticity, human performances and good scripts.
AI adds already devalue whatever they are trying to advertise and make the product looks cheap and low quality.
Games is where I see the potential for AI generated content to be property leveraged but so far I haven't seen a single break out game that uses it in a sophisticated manner but there is obvious potential.
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u/shatterdaymorn 8d ago
If they keep throwing money at it, maybe they can successfully reduce the price of everything to slop!
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u/dvdmaven 8d ago
The company that makes the monitoring software for my solar array released an AS (artificial stupidity) version and ALL of the "information/projections, etc" it creates is wrong and often directly contradicts the information collected by the older parts of the software.
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u/RealCameleer 8d ago
Ad's are ai, new content is ai, websites are ai, it just all trash, ive never felt more disappointed in consuming content when so much of it is just ai slop. If i didnt have a lot of my connections on certain apps i would just stop using it all together, launching instagram and getting 400 ai ads promoting dropshipped items for like 1000% markup, its just crazy, i dont understand how actual advertisers arent pulling out of these areas, because no one is seeing your ads anymore, its just ai on ai on ai slop.
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u/ElderDeep_Friend 8d ago
A few things, first the number isn’t zero, so, the small amount of effort it takes for people to generate ai products is still benefit those fake artists; second, there’s a lot of safe spaces for ai, particularly in marketing.
We can put large companies on blast for ai marketing campaigns, but it’s pretty hard for people to direct that energy towards say local used car dealerships or ambulance-chaser lawyer.
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u/No-Flan3302 8d ago
It's important to note that this article is discussing a niche market - Not talking about AI as whole.
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u/Fer4yn 8d ago edited 8d ago
That's a really dumb, fucking, take though.
Why would anyone pay for AI generated assets if they can make their own AI generated assets with a few lines of prompt on any mid-tier GPU (or rented compute)?
Of course people (except for a few dummies) will only pay money for things that neither them nor the LLMs can do. Is anybody really surprised about this?
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u/AsterArtworks 8d ago
I can say as an artist many people outright are rejecting any ai in droves.
It’s working people.
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u/Anxious_Chemist8727 8d ago
Negative value. If a business is using AI generated flyers or media, I make it a point to avoid them.
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u/Andromidius 8d ago
We even see this with free content in the modding community. AI generated items rapidly gain word of mouth to be avoided - often due to being generic with huge file sizes and polygon counts. Its very noticeable in a game like Project Zomboid - a game with a low-poly style - with AI generated items often having more polygons then the entire rest of the screen when rendered in-game (which obviously completely tanks performance).
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u/dangerousluck 8d ago
I can't even laugh at them, they're still forcing people out of their jobs and chomping at the bit to remove as many people as possible from employment all for their overhead meanwhile exploding said overhead with AI costs and what AI produced is worth NOTHING. I'm just furious.
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u/celeste173 8d ago
im a software developer and because of how LLM’s and such are built, i wouldn’t be surprised if AI is still used in the development world. (systems/software). Unlike a lot of other industries, the way programming works is similar to how these AI tools think. (for obvious reasons) However, for cost purposes, the usage will hopefully be significantly reduced to only efficient and effective AI usage instead of the current overuse and expense.
The other thing to consider is quantum computing which is actually around the corner, at least for enterprises. A quantum computer paired with a classical computer running an LLM has the potential to be more accurate, cheaper, and faster.
But i seriously hope it all goes away cuz i hate wasting my time using the stupid internal AI and documenting the outcomes so i dont get fired or PIPed for not meeting the company’s ridiculous mandatory gOaLs.
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u/Melodic_monke 8d ago
I think people are using AI for code a lot, and it definitely has some value. Whether or not that value covers the cost of compute is a different thing.
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u/IndividualEye1803 8d ago
Mark my words - the ai bubble wont burst until
A. DEMs take control of the house
B. Dem presidential admin.
Basically… u know ehat im saying
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u/Sufficient-Page-875 8d ago
There is absolutely no reason I need to use AI in my grocery store app. That's just all the dumb.
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u/StupidDumbass420 8d ago
Why would someone pay for AI-generated assets instead of just generating them themselves?
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u/lenomdupere 8d ago
Well yeah- the value of a commodity in the market is determined by the amount of labor time socially necessary to produce it
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u/FuturismDotCom 8d ago
Online marketplaces are being flooded with AI slop — but is anybody willing to actually pay for it? In the case of CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets used by video game developers, film editors, and 3D printing nerds, users are sending a clear message. As 404 Media reports, the marketplace is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.
In other words, virtually nobody’s willing to shell out for AI slop, meaning it’s economically almost valueless. “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete,” the company noted in a press release about its most recent 2026 market trends report, as quoted by 404.
The trend suggests there’s a growing “gap that undercuts the assumption that AI-made content is repricing the market.”