AI Exuberance and the Calamity of the Commons

As the year comes to a close, we have experienced a boom in AI technologies and tools. Having been familiar with them for some time many were hesitant to call it AI when a lot is similar to machine learning of years ago. The naming doesn’t matter in the end as the impact of something either technology or a person is what is left behind. The impact is seen wide and far with many industries being disrupted with increased output through automation. However, with everyone piling into AI they fall for the tragedy of the commons where the entire concept becomes overgrazed. It is not to say AI is not valuable, but instead the economy may not support this type of devotion to a singular focus. Open source and cheaper models also put a constraint on the long-term viability of many businesses investing in AI. While my SaaS pricing post turned out mostly true with ever increasing prices it was not spot on as instead even more incumbent companies and technology entered the fray. Now, we have even more efficient SaaS companies offering their services with upgrades to use AI features. The real question now, are people willing to fork up to pay for AI or wait until they see solutions that catered to their exact need.

Looking at some of the latest releases and tools it appears companies are fumbling for a direction. They try to grasp out for new verticals to keep them from falling into the abyss. When a video AI company expands into image generation it makes you wonder about their loss of focus. In the quest to implement all things AI companies are going to question the purpose and value they produce. There typically is a stampeding of the herd into a new field but overtime that field loses the novelty of being fresh. The easy times come first with exuberance but the difficult times is where ideas and tools must be challenged. My hope for AI is that it continues on a stable trend but when looking at it from a financial perspective the numbers do not compute. Sure, I no longer need to pay for some marginal human generated services like simple graphics, mundane copy text, or even coding tasks. All this can be accomplished with various AI tools but it is still glued together with a human controlling it. But the real benefit AI does for people is it forces them to be even more efficient and better at their work. I don’t see a future where everyone suddenly stops thinking and allows AI to run their lives. Instead, there will be extremely difficult challenges where a person works in tandem with AI to solve them. For example, SEO work and content has turned into a complete AI generated mill with little value. At this point crawlers have consumed all web content plus many private data stores and papers. Even with the entire knowledge of everything digital the content produced by some models makes you sleep. The patterns, repetition, and lack of interesting new ideas forces one to be even more efficient when skimming online sources. If I find a source that appears to be AI generated, I usually can not decide to put as much weight into it or speed read even faster. There are probably are some articles that I cannot discern but overtime your mind is able to see patterns that you were unable to before. The overgrazing of AI content is a perfect example of this as it makes you appreciate human generated content even more. It is not to say that AI content is bad but instead it is just different from what we are used to. The same could be said for the invention of the camera and how it changed art. It did not eliminate art but instead it created a new form of it.

The key is to stay ahead of these technologies whether it is AI or something completely new that comes to existence. While the original message about overgrazing of the marketplace by AI tools is one concept there is another that is more critical. Instead, the farm where each and every action can be directed by the cow herder will be one that leaves little room for freedom and life. AI tools and companies should remain open and clear about their functionalities and output to ensure traceability exists to where content is produced. The current trend has led to companies believing they will control and own everything with AI, but that type of thinking fails to account for everyone else that has not even understood how or why to use AI. There are many lessons to understand before one can be adept at new concepts and even when you think you understand it you have to share those ideas with others to validate it. Overall, AI has seen tremendous growth, but the real question now is if those that control the leading aspects decide to continue to consolidate or the open movement nullifies their purpose.