alt Hacker NewsThe most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.
Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.
I don't think standard economic indicators are tuned to detect these externalities in the short to medium term.
Replies
> Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.
I think most people will retreat into smaller spaces where they can rely on people to not deceive them. Everyone is moving to discord/group chats now for any sort of trustworthy information. This might be a good thing honestly. It was probably never good that we all got our information from the same place.
> The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.
This. I think generative AI will mostly generate destruction. Not in the nuking cities sense, but in hollowing out institutions and social bonds, especially the complicated and large-scale kind that have enabled advanced civilization. In many ways, things will revert to a more primitive state: only really knowing people in your local vicinity (no making friends online, because it'll be mostly dead-internet bots out there), only really knowing the news you see yourself, more reliance on rumor and hearsay, removal of the ability for the little guy to challenge and disprove institutional propaganda (e.g. can't start a blog and put up some photos and have people believe your story about what happened), etc.