You bring up crysis and I raise you Modern Warfare and Battlefield. Back then a lot of shooters went with the brown/piss filter approach to graphical fidelity that became so widely mocked and for good reason. Not only did it age poorly from a graphical standpoint, it all just looks so samey.

And even putting aside artistic intent, realism can actually be highly detrimental for game design as it can make readability and visual clarity incredibly difficult.

For example, modern battlefield games still have issues with readability where it can be genuinely difficult to discern player models from certain backgrounds, which the devs tried to circumvent with the controversial 3D spotting system. Because nothing says realism like having a bunch of colored arrows hovering above every player model.

Likewise you have the infamous yellow tape/paint in modern resident evil games to denote whether something is interactive or not. These are just some of the game design issues developers face when trying to go full into photorealism at the expense of gameplay.

This is an incredibly superficial view of graphical fidelity. Most games do not just push for realism in the sense that it looks just like real life.

Instead they pursue artistic realism, where liberties are taken with regards to lighting, shadow effects, particle physics, and even character models to evoke a specific reaction from the player. That is called artistic direction and atmosphere.

Also you seriously cannot believe that this default GenAI look is somehow realistic either. The lighting alone hardly aligns with how it works IRL. But that is a given since this dataset is likely plucking from social media glam posts and fashion magazines.

Like how would you even monetize AI models to begin with? Given that open source models exist especially in China it begs the question as to how you would reliably generate revenue through models alone, especially in a scenario where the performance of most models start converging on one another so the tech moat ceases to be in the long run.

Both ads and subscription fees have proven to be obtrusive and even downright exploitative, as they always ramp up the intensity or cost respectively.

Pretty much how I feel about the AI bubble. Yeah it will suck for some but I really doubt it will kill the American economy.

Now the housing bubble is a whole different ballgame and that popping combined with a devaluation of the USD will have genuinely catastrophic impacts on the American and even the global economy.

This Super Bowl has had some of the lamest and lowest effort ads I have seen in two or so decades of the Super Bowl. The AI ads are just the hallucinated cherry on top.

That AI.com one in particular shilling Sam, Elon, and AGI in particular was just pure unadulterated cringe. Could they really not think of an actual ad, even if it was generated by AI?

Though the Ring one had some genuine dystopian vibes with their newest feature for finding lost dogs. Totally not selling surveillance as a service here.

There is also the issue that said data centers will rapidly depreciate in value due to technological changes and general usage. On Earth at least we can drive up to one and change out the hardware periodically but in space that is not exactly an easy task fie a variety of reasons.

So either the data centers in space need to be cheaply made to recoup costs within say, 5-10 years or the demand for them exponentially scales at which point Musk would probably charge an arm and a leg for renting out their computational capabilities. Or shoot, he does both.

Either way this is probably going to be a huge money sink even for Musk and the U.S. government. I cannot see how you would recoup the costs of the hardware, let alone turn a profit within a reasonable timeframe without price gouging tactics.

The reality is that there are very few incentives for fixing these issues, especially since those who could were the ones who created these problems.

Social media is not in the business of cracking down on misinformation anymore than your average MSM outlet is. If anything there is more money to be had spreading fake news since it attracts more engagement and plays into whatever political power games are going on in the shadows.

Ultimately, the Information Age was effectively doomed to fail from the get-go. There are very few scenarios that do not involve either mass censorship or regressing back to pre-mass media forms of information and communication.

So far the push is to put people back into trades and other blue collar jobs.

Not saying these are terrible jobs or anything, but I am not sure if they can absorb the glut of displaced office workers who frankly do not have the fortitude for these kind of jobs. Learn2code was a failure for a reason.

Not surprising. Disney has been a creatively bankrupt company for years especially with Bob Iger at the helm. And Disney+ has been hemorrhaging money and users for months due to some very stupid management decisions.

OpenAI, another company also bleeding money, provides them an infinite content machine in the hopes both companies can bail each other out of their financial woes.

Meanwhile both companies will continue to hike the price of their services and implement increasingly more anti-consumer practices such as forced ads unless you pay extra.

I sure love the future of entertainment.

MS is basically your typical scammy Indian corporation at this point. Gates and Ballmer were not great either, but somehow the company is getting even worse and worse with all these indian executives laser-focused on shareholder value.

God imagine this company in the next couple or so decades. Hopefully MS gets put out of its misery before then but I doubt our government will let it die out that easily.

>Humans rely on training data too

Last I checked humans and machines are not considered one and the same legally or even scientifically speaking for that matter. This has long been established with regards to reproductions. Unless you can unequivocally prove that an LLM and a human are basically one and the same this argument will get you laughed out of a court.

The law may be murky with lawsuits pending and going but so far I have yet to see any AI company try to use the human learning = machine learning argument as their main case. Even they know that argument will not stand up to scrutiny. The arguments have been more about fair use and data scraping practices.

But how would you be able to tell if the amount of effort expended on an AI piece is equivalent to that of a handmade one?

That type of criteria becomes real nebulous real fast as AI programs take on more and more of the work while the human is relegated to a more supervisory/superficial role. This becomes more akin to being a commissioner of art rather than an artist in the traditional sense.

To me the whole point of AI is to automate out the human element as much as possible. Not augment, automate. Many AI companies have been upfront about this. Why do you think their CEOs yap about UBI and other Utopian talking points? Their business model is all about making human effort redundant.

The big issue is that there will not be any capital left to invest into these costly endeavors anymore.

Between a weaker dollar and a slowing global economic environment where consumers are not consuming as much as they should be according to metrics, where is the money supposed to come from? Print more money?That is how we got to these economic conditions in the first place.

So much of the tech industry was funded in part by boomer money that in turn was derived from the post-WW2 environment. That money is going to dry up soon with the way things are going.

Content creation is not much better in that regard.
Much like acting it is already a highly saturated field where most of the revenue is funneled into a handful of top creators while everyone else fights for scraps.
And now meta is rolling out an automated short-form content creation mill powered by AI. Companies want to also get rid of them so they can hoard all the advertisement revenue for themselves.

Is your hypothetical child a piece of software?
No?
Then case closed. The law makes a distinction between machines and humans. Muddling the waters is a great way to further dehumanize people as little more then meat machines, with all the fun cultural and social impacts that come with that.