LLMs shouldn't be used in place of artists because LLMs can't make art. There's a quote I heard somewhere that sums this up perfectly: "LLMs should be used to help creative people do tedious things, not to help tedious people do creative things."

That market is exclusively made up of people who a) can't write or make images themselves, and b) have an utter disregard for people who spent their lives doing so.

And that market is, unfortunately, absolutely huge. There is a frighteningly large demand for mediocre crap.

The LLM age has shown us how quickly the market is willing to settle for "not nothing" instead of "something good".

And a worldwide market in the 20 billion range is by no means remotely near the multiple trillions needed to actually fulfills what the AI boosters are promising.

In my experience, there are a lot of places very content to do a pretty bad job of stuff if it's low effort on the part of the person collecting the surplus labour value, and is making money.

The greatest deprogramming I've had through corporate experience is that capitalist myth that competition forces companies to try and make a better product.

Maybe in the odd case it does. But, for the most part, capitalism is pretty happy to just race to the bottom. A 2% worse product that costs 5% less to manufac6that I can sell for the original price? THAT is what every company is trying to do. Make a better product? Get the fuck outta here.

There is a market, for AI slop... because it's just a special case of a preexisting major market of "slop". We already had shovelware. Low effort high volume content creators. Telemarketers with accents so think you have to wonder if the costs saved by offshoring those workers could possibly recoup the reduced sales rates. It's all just slop. AI can absolutely disrupt the Slop Market. And it is.

But, as the other commenter pointed out... it's a tens-of-billions global industry, and AI is being invested in as if its a trillions global industry.

They need to make AI better, or make the slop industry larger. They won't meaningfully do the first, but can make some headroom on the second. Either way, not nearly enough for profitability.

Right now my money is on industry to repurpose barely used datacenter hardware which will become available for pennies on the dollar back to consumer-usable hardware.

Unfortunately, those things are pretty much the only things it's good at and the companies losing billions on them are going to try to recoup as much as possible by doing as much of that as they can.