alt Hacker News> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
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> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).