AI enables people to... produce even more useless slop than before?
> Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
Chosen by the editors as word of the year, by the way.
The point is that AI can produce slop (as people do, too), but it's just silly to imply that everything it can produce is slop. That's just lazy, sloppy thinking.
However, I do think that the majority (or mainstream) use of GenAI today is indeed not very useful or even harmful. And I do think that something like railroads are more useful by orders of magnitude.
What are you basing this opinion on?
that is why people use slop qualifier, rather than not using qualifier
Well, I rotate about a dozen of free accounts because I don't want to send 1 cent their way, I imagine I'm not the only one. I do the same for gemini, claude and deepseek, so all in all I account for like 50 "unique" weekly users
Apparently they have about 5% of paying customers, the amount of total users is meaningless, it just tells you how much money they burn and isn't an indication of anything else.
For someone who doesn't like the product and doesn't care about it, you surely make a lot of effort to use it.
It's also literally 0 effort, click > sign out > click > sign in. It saves me $200 a month, that's not too far from half of my rent
Also, maybe I'm missing something, but no amount of free accounts on ChatGPT gives you what you get with a paid subscription, especially with a $200 one; and there's paid plans from just $8/month.
> Also, maybe I'm missing something, but no amount of free accounts on ChatGPT gives you what you get with a paid subscription, especially with a $200 one
These days I'm mostly running opus 4.5 through "antigravity" and I'd rather become a potatoe farmer than give $8 to Altman
If you have to stop torrenting it doesn't mean that you have to pay $20 per movie. There is a price >0 that you're willing to pay to do something you love. On youtube there's a lot of movies for 4 or 5 dollars.
I'm also using Claude, both through Cursor (paid by my company) and privately (paid by me, $20/ month).
> I think AI will be far more impactful
is not correct IMO. Those are two very different areas. The impact of railroads on transport and everything transport-related cannot be understated. By now roads and cars have taken over much of it, and ships and airplanes are doing much more, but you have to look at the context at the time.
The pace was slower indeed. It takes time to build the railroads. But at that time advancements also lasted longer. Now it is often cash grabs until the next thing. Not comparable indeed but for other reasons.
Doesn't have anything to do with AI itself. Consider Instagram then TikTok before this, WhatsApp before, etc. There is a clear adoption curve timeline : it's going WorldWide faster. AI is not special in that sense. It doesn't mean AI itself isn't special (arguable, in fact Narayanan precisely argue it's "normal") but rather than adoption pace is precisely on track with everything else.
This comparison keeps popping up, and I think it's misleading. The pace of technology uptake is completely different from that of railroads: the user base of ChatGPT alone went from 0 to 200 million in nine months, and it's now- after just three years- around 900 million users on a weekly basis. Even if you think that railroads and AI are equally impactful (I don't, I think AI will be far more impactful) the rapidity with which investments can turn into revenue and profit makes the situation entirely different from an investor's point of view.