In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.
This is how the world ends. Administrators on both sides being replaced by AI and consuming all the worlds available compute arguing with each other about healthcare bills.
The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'
I try to comment on Roblox whenever it comes up as my daughter was pulled into a grooming pedo gang through Roblox.
Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.
I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.
I think that a lot of people will still support Brexit. Leaving the EU allows a (future) government to do a lot of stupid things. Throwing out good fiscal policy, eroding human rights, aggressively stopping boats or changing migration rules, reversing climate change regulation. A lot of people believe, or will be led to believe (because previous governments were hamstrung by the EU), that those stupid ideas are actually quite good ideas.
Brexit was necessary for those ideas to be implemented. An individual's view on whether those ideas are good or not will correlate with their continued support of Brexit.
It is the financial risk that is obvious. The big players are struggling to show meaningful revenue from the investment. Because the investment is so high, the revenue numbers need to be equally high, and growing fast. The 'correction' is when (ok, if) the markets realise that the returns aren't there. The worldwide risk is that AI-led growth has been a large chunk of the US stock market growth. If it 'corrects' US growth disappears overnight and takes everyone down with it. It is not an issue about the usefulness of AI, but the returns on investment and the market shocks caused by such large sums of money sloshing around one market.
I think we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with the existing technology. A much more present risk from stagnation IMO is that if we stagnate, it is almost certain that the value of the tech will not be able to be enclosed /captured by its creators.
Imho it will take off in animation/illustration as soon as Adobe (or some competitor) figures out how to make good tooling for artists. Not for idiot wantrepeneurs who want to dump fully-generated-slop onto Amazon, but so that a person can draw rough pencil sketches and storyboards and reference character sheets and get back proper illustrations. Basically, don't replace the penciler but replace the inker and the colourist (and, in animation, the in-betweener).
That's more of a UI problem than a limitation in Diffusion tech.
That's a customer who'll pay, it might be worth a lot. But a $trillion per year?
There's a free addon for free Krita that did pretty much that when I tried it, last year.
The glaring issue with it back then was that unlike an LLM that can be understanding of what you try to explain and bit more consistent the diffusion models ability to read and understand your prompt wasn't really there yet, you're more shotgunning keywords and hope the seed lottery gives you something nice.
But recent image generation models are significantly better in stable output. Something like qwen image will care a lot more about your prompt and not entirely redraw the scene into something else just because you change the seed.
Meaning that the UI experiments already exist but the models are still a bit away from maturity.
On the other hand, when looking at how models are actually evolving I'm not entirely convinced we'll need particularly many classically trained artists in roles where they draw static images with some AI acceleration. I expect people to talk to an LLM interface that can take the dumbest of instructions and carefully adjust a picture, sound, music or an entire two hour movie. Where the artist would benefit more by knowing the terminology and the granular abilities of the system than by being able to hold a pencil.
The entertainment and media industry is worth trillions on an annual basis, if AI can eat a fraction of that in addition to some other work-roles it will easily be worth the current valuations.
For non-brits, Bank of England the UKs central bank and is a lot like the US Fed. Their comments carry a lot of weight and do impact government policy.
Not enough central banks were making comments about the sub-prime bubble that led to the 2008 crisis. Getting warnings about a possible AI bubble by a central bank is both significant and, in performing the functions of monetary and financial stability for a country, the prudent thing to do.
I like that the Bank of England spells out the "sudden correction" this time.
In 1996 Fed Chair Alan Greenspan warned about irrational exuberance, in 1999 he warned Congress about "the possibility that the recent performance of the equity markets will have difficulty in being sustained". The crash came in 2000.
The warning seems to have gone unnoticed. AMD just behaves exactly like Juniper in 1999.
The mistake central banks made in 2007-2009* was keeping monetary policy far too tight for far too long, for no real discernable reason.
Offering commentary on which particular sectors they feel are a 'bubble' is outside their purview and not particularly productive IMO, the state is not very good at picking winners.
I agree. You have to be a certain age to remember that a big part of Microsoft "Longhorn" was WinFS (Windows File System), which was intended to completely rework storage into a relational file system (or object-oriented depending on your view). "Longhorn" was supposed to do away with NTFS and failed miserably at that objective. I believe that WinFS delayed things considerably and eventually didn't ship with Vista.
Microsoft Longhorn's failure to be the next big thing was largely due to the bad implementation of a storage subsystem. The result was Windows Vista, which was derided as a bad OS (at least until Windows 8). Due to that history, I would not name any file system 'Longhorn'. It may not be the same as naming a cruise ship 'Titanic', but you wouldn't name it 'Iceberg' either.
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