Honestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
I would probably not pay $10 to post on HN, but many spammers who expect some kind of tangible return would pay that, so the fee just makes the problem worse.
The spammers wouldn't pay it once though - the idea is that it's a good way to scale moderation. Each time an admin needs to ban a user there is a 10$ subsidy supporting that action - and if the bots come back then they get to pay 10$ to be banned again.
Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
There are large swaths of spammers that indeed would not pay it. There are on the other hand plenty of NGO's that would pay it without a second thought to promote specific topics and dogpile on others. Those are the movements I would expect AI to take over if not already. AI does not sleep, humans do. AI won't miss the comments that groups believe need to be amplified or squelched.
Yeah, I love HN, but I wouldn't pay and I know many if not the majority of other people wouldn't. It would increase quality for awhile for sure, but what happens a year or two down the road? It would kill the user count and reduce comments and become less valuable over time.
reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit right with the mindset of the people at the time.
Also, while real people probably would not be willing to pay to E-mail, spammers who are making money would pay and consider it a cost of doing business. So the fee is having the opposite of its intended effect.
Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.
TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver needs is a brief notification that a message is available.
it's also something that was in my mind when i wrote about those two options. I still keep this idea in the back of my head since those days (i'm old enough to remember when gates had this atrocious, yet interesting idea).
We need something else, we need an "extreme" (~$1) fine that anyone can claim from any sender who bothered them, no questions asked. Spammers will stop instantly overnight. This would work for phone spam as well.
payment would need a delay too.
Pay $10 and then wait a week or so for the payment to clear without it being reversed. Hopefully that stops the card stealers from dumping as much as possible before getting booted.
Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment & posting forms?
Odds are it would harm real discussions more than it would harm bot spam.
The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an interesting discussion.
I think this tech is cool, from an engineering perspective. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay an artist.”
You can argue things like code generation are an extension of the engineer wielding it. Image generation just seems like a net negative overall if it’s used at scale.
Edit: By scale, I mean large corporations putting content in front of millions. I understand the appeal for smaller businesses where they probably weren’t going to pay an artist anyway.
If art isn't your job then it probably doesn't matter how good AI gets, you're still going to make art, and you'll do it however you want. If anything, capable tools will allow people who want to make art for art's sake but lack the skill to express their ideas.
I don't think brand designers or graphic designers are going anywhere.
Yes, the lower end of the market will be decimated. But that's been the case for a long time now. Services like Fiverr have already driven the value of that tier of service down to basically nothing.
We're using voice generation from clipchamp for our promotional videos.
It's an ethical conundrum because we're not paying anyone, but we don't have the money to pay anyone, and it's good enough for our budget.
But we're getting used to the process of changing a part of the text in a few seconds without any artist involved and for 0$.
I guess that soon we'll be able to create voice sample from know personalities for a few $ with prices based on the popularity of the artist and some sanity check based on the artist preferences.
I think this is where I see the benefit for small business. I don’t want to speak for you, but I imagine it’s either “no voice over, we can’t afford it.” or “inexpensive AI voice over to make it more accessible and appealing.”
My thought is the large corps that could afford it, still won’t because it’s a cost they don’t need to incur. For them it’s not even a moral conundrum.
It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
FWIW I've never seen a correlation between a small company's website and the quality of their product. Slick website? Maybe they care for their craft, maybe they're all marketing and no content. Website stuck in 1998? Maybe they're sloppy and don't care; maybe they care about their core product, not a slick marketing brochure. I don't see any reason AI would be different in that regard.
That’s true. I think it’s more of a problem of getting someone in the door. Anecdotally going to art festivals I’m much more likely to enter the booth of someone who has handcrafted marketing over the person who has generated marketing.
Basic marketing theory says that spending extra to make your ads signals (term of art) to your potential customers that (1) you are successful, since you can afford it and (2) you are confident your product is superior, since you’re effectively paying people to try it, and expect doing this will generate revenue in return.
Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative.
YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).
Every local business I deal with is completely lacking on the online side. They might have square POS terminals and all that stuff, but their website either doesn't exist, sucks (not updated in years) or they throw me to Facebook (also sucks).
This is like the last mile for online presence. The average barber out here doesn't use Squarespace, barely knows how to use Facebook and doesn't touch GenAi. But they can still cut your hair pretty well - tech savvyness doesn't have a huge connection to business competence out here.
The amount of lost revenue due to the implication of cut corners needs to be higher than the cost of hiring an artist by enough of a margin that the managers who make the decision start to care, and enough that they're willing to put the effort into hiring an artist.
This assumes that models won't improve and you'll always be able to tell that it's "AI slop" ... that seems like a bad bet. Five years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that a computer could produce images from a natural language prompt and that it'd be accessible to everyone -- not just corporations with deep pockets.
Yeah if/when it becomes indistinguishable I think most people won’t care. That being said I do think someone finding out something is AI generated will be met with poor response. Does that ultimately matter? Probably not in a business world.
It will be a begrudged but normalized compromise of modern life, like GMO, Auto-Tune and foreign child labour. Which of those it will be perceived as the closest to is hard to say right now
> It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.
Average person won't notice, and would not care either way.
I've been using it to replace things that I used to do for personal projects in photoshop/gimp. Remove a background, add a person, put a letter in here that looks like the same crayon as the other letters.
Things that would take me an hour or so the old way takes three minutes with NB.
But I can see this applying to small businesses. Something that some random person would have to spend on hour photoshopping can be done in a few minutes with NB.
All things traditionally done by artists or artist adjacent roles. I can understand at an individual level, say for a solo gamedev who wasn’t going to pay an artist anyway. That’s not at scale though.
Larian Studios most recently was under fire for this [1]. Like I can see a director going “what would X look like?” and then speeding over to the concept artists for a proper rendition if they liked it. I don’t think this is at scale though. Any large business is just going to get rid of the concept artists.
There are many places in general office work where you need some kind of graphics. Slides, reports, info graphics, dataviz. Or academic papers. Some are just illustrations, like a fancy clipart or stock photos, some are drafts for a proper tikz or svg or something that you then redo in draw.io etc. There is much more use for graphics than the use cases where people would ever even consider hiring an actual artist. I've seen good results for iterating on eg model architecture figures quickly between PhD students and supervisors, faster than dragging boxes around and fiddling with tikz. Obviously you don't simply paste the result into the paper. You redo it but it's a good discussion basis. That's for info graphics stuff. But the same can apply to creative stuff, like an event poster, an invitation card to your wedding, storyboards, mood boards, DIY interior design, outfit planning etc etc
Same answers you'd use beyond "we don't want to pay an engineer". 100x shorter iteration speed, and the associated workflow (stream of microrevisions and spaghetti throwing), top quartile outputs in many langs/styles/contexts without having to source, hire, and maintain a fleet of separate specialists who can quit when they feel like it.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
> Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better.
This is a good point. My gut reaction is “well at least someone was paid to do it and can continue to keep society/the economy going ”.
I can see the other side where that’s a soulless job. Not sure what’s worse. Soulless job where your skills apply or even less jobs in a competitive industry.
Sora is already a flop. People are sick of slop and are getting good at identifying it. Grok is the only player that has any semblance of success in the visual gen market, only because they do the one thing that will always make money.
Yeah I’d started doing this already. Put up my own Gitea on my own private network, remote backups setup. Right now everything stays in my Forge, eventually I may mirror it elsewhere but I’m not sure.
Those sites typically end with “talk to your doctor”. There’s many creators out there whose entire platform is “Your doctor won’t tell you this!”. I trust the NHS, older CDC pages, Mayo clinic as platforms, more than I will ever trust youtube.
I kind of thought this video was going to be about Flatland the book but it was even better. This is a fantastic and easily digestible explanation of ray tracing.
This is great. I do wonder if eventually we’ll see brand names return. I basically only order things that I don’t care about quality with now. It feels like Temu.
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