I was reading someone's post on Facebook — an artist and musician — who was lamenting that one of the definite downsides to AI is the way it enables people to reap short-term profits doing things that have absolutely no lasting value.
She was mostly referring to the trend of people being able to create "instant music stars" via AI, posting some catchy AI tune that goes viral, collecting the money and then... crickets chirp.
Maybe I am just getting old-fashioned, but I have always been oriented towards the long term and the creation of lasting value.
I'm sad to admit that almost feels like a dying art, these days. Or nobody cares.
But why?
I've been sitting with this question for a while, and I keep coming back to the "culprit" being that we have created a system and society in which everything is commodified, monetized and incentivized.
"So what?" you might ask.
The what is that people approach everything thinking about profit first and actual value/utility/enjoyment second.
We have created this attention economy, but the rather dark side of that is that virtually every action in people's lives is now evaluated for profitability and rewards, rather than for anything else.
And that runs the range from "Instant AI Music Stars" to ordering cheap products from TEMU.
I bring TEMU into the picture because I was messaging with a friend who was all up in arms because the ready-to-assemble "Catio" (basically a large enclosed outdoor window box for your indoor cats) she had ordered for her cats turned out to be a complete piece of crap that not only arrived with broken pieces, but started falling apart within less than a week of her two cats starting to use it.
While it's a sad story, it's at least an improvement over some of the individual sellers that pop up in Facebook ads, sell a bunch of total garbage products and are gone from the surface of the planet before people even get their items and discover that they basically got popsicle stick knock-offs of the real product they thought they were getting.
The fact that such sellers end up with hundreds of negative reviews within the month is ultimately irrelevant because the objective of selling several thousand pieces of cheap junk has long since been met, and now nobody cares.
With AI, shady operators can create a web site that makes them look like Cartier, Rolex or Tiffany's, spend $100,000 on advertising to draw a crowd, collect their $500,000 in sales, send the crap products that cost them perhaps $50,000 on Alibaba and vanish with the remaining $350,000 and not a worry in the world long before the storm of complaints reach them.
Sadly, that is a "business model."
It's not even that different from many crypto projects that launch with a huge amount of hype that briefly sends them skyward... and then they quickly decay to nothingness.
Nothing actually illegal took place; everyone who bought in had the appropriate warnings that "crypto involves risk" and there was no actual rug pull, just a failure to follow through... a couple of hundred people made lots of money and everyone else — quite voluntarily, by their own hand — turned $1,000 into $1 trying to chase something that was never going anywhere.
It's interesting to consider that — at nine years and change — Hive is already an "old project" by some measures.
Crypto is (mostly) very short-term oriented, as well... starting with the fact that few projects have actual business plans, beyond a thinly veiled "let's issue a token and get rich."
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I miss the times when starting a project revolved around building something lasting; a legacy... something that could last a lifetime, or even multiple generations.
But so it goes...
Thanks for coming by, and have a great Wednesday!
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