AI haters are snobs
In which I briefly turn into a libertarian
I should say upfront that I enjoy anti-tech takedowns very, very much. My industry has a tendency of being hubristic, naive, and dilletante-ish — it’s good for mental hygiene to occasionally hear why other people might think that we’re morons.
So I started my morning by reading the never-boring Ed Zitron’s latest jeremiad against the AI industry, which of course has some healthy criticisms that those of us funding and building AI companies should take note of.
But a few items did catch my eye. It’s not so much the content of the critiques, but the tone and what they imply about the person making the critique. These are from Ed (emphasis mine):
I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.
Deep Research is the AI slop of academia — low-quality research-slop built for people that don't really care about quality or substance, and it’s not immediately obvious who it’s for.
The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons.
And one from a commenter:
The part that offends me the most is that everything these Slop Machines deliver is so relentlessly mediocre. Imagine spending this much money, burning this much electricity, and dedicating this much human ingenuity in the pursuit of automating mediocrity.
I would synthesize this line of thinking into the following expression: “The AI industry thinks I’m too stupid to tell the difference between their crappy synthetic product and ‘the real thing’… but they’re wrong and I can!”
Self-importance, an obsession with quality and authenticity, a desire to project an image of expertise… I had a startling realization after reading through all of this: Oh my God, these people are like wine snobs! These are basically hipsters who want to impress us with their knowledge of fair trade coffee beans, Japanese whiskey, local craft beer, and artisanal chef’s knives. “I know quality when I see it! Can’t fool me!”
They argue from a specific point of view about consumer products: That anything mass-consumed (or mass-produced) must be definitionally mediocre1, and that anyone who doesn’t notice or care about this has inferior taste to them.
Mediocrity as compared to what?
Where the dividing line is between appreciating quality and fetishizing craftsmanship, and at what point you become an annoying snob who won’t shut up about the stitching on your footwear, is an argument for another essay. Personally I like nice things, I have a nice desk made of real wood, et cetera.
But what I observe in more Luddite-adjacent pieces of AI criticism is an obsession with the “real,” the “authentic,” and the “inspired” aspects of human cognitive performance and how they cannot be replicated in any manner by machines without massive sacrifices in quality. And, yeah, that’s one hundred percent right if we are comparing Midjourney to Picasso. But is that really what we’re doing here? Is AI taking aim at the apex human skills of elite talent and craft? Or is it building cheaper automations for undifferentiated drudge work?
I argue the latter, which means that comparing AI “mediocrity” to the output of Hemingway or Plato is totally missing the point. AI output — to the extent that it is “slop” — is computer bot slop that attempts to outcompete human quasi-slop for 1/10th the price. Here’s a comment from the one brave soul who dared post any pushback to Ed’s piece:
That said, one place to look to steel man the argument is legal document review, a field I work in. Costs in the US are $42B per year. AI might knock that down by at least 50%, based on my personal experience, so that's $21B annually in just one market--and there are other markets just in legal, but perhaps not as large.
Is a human doing manual legal document review adding art and craftsmanship to the world in the same way that Walt Whitman did when he composed his poems? Does this task summon talents and skills from the absolute limits of human ingenuity and genius? No. Obviously. Karl Marx would describe this person as merely the alienated means of production. The labor might be cognitive rather than physical, but it’s still jamming widgets into sprockets on a (cognitive) assembly line.
And I’m not in any way implying that their labor is undignified; of course I am happy that this person has a job and is providing for their family and chasing their dreams(?). I’m merely repeating back their own words. If you know anyone who works as a paralegal or a recent law grad who has to wade into mountains of document review, they will tell you themselves that this fucking suuuuuuuuuuucks. Why are we pretending like this job is super-duper awesome for the legal associate doing it? Didn’t they go to law school to do… not this?
Everything is Chinese bluejeans
I continue to feel that the comparison between AI and Free Trade2 is an apt one (ahem). You can get mad that Chinese-made jeans can be purchased for under twenty-five dollars at WalMart. You can complain all day long about the inferior quality & lack of craftsmanship in the mass production techniques, and how you "wouldn’t be caught dead” wearing imported pants from a big box retailer (oh, I’m sorry, are you better than Jim Harbaugh?). Feel free to be a snob, I won’t stop you.
ORRRRR… you could marvel that our modern production and distribution technologies have enabled almost every person with a job in this country to afford new pants with a couple hours’ labor (compare to 125 years ago when a middle-class outfit cost about two weeks’ income). Chinese-made jeans show us that products with one-half the quality but one-fifth the price end up winning because lots and lots of normal people want to buy them. And meanwhile the high end craft denim category is thriving; there have never been more options for the connoisseurs and the normies!
I do not think we should go the way of turning human cognitive labor into a fetish object for hipsters (artisanal, small batch account reconciliation, anyone?). Asking people to continue performing jobs that are better3 suited for machines — just because AI makes us feel icky — is backwards and infantilizing.
Notably, the word “mediocre” appeared six times in Ed’s essay.
Sorry for the abrupt jump cut. Tl;dr: both are examples of lowering input costs to production. This is not to say that they are without downsides. But both are genies that are extremely difficult to put back into the bottle.
What constitutes “better” probably deserves its own essay. My personal conception is that there’s sort of a better/faster/cheaper efficient frontier where multiple configurations of those attributes could simultaneously be “best”. Humans doing high quality work at an expensive price, and AI doing medium quality work at a lower price, could both be on the efficient frontier and thereby be more or less substitutes (or at least subject to some analysis that could make the AI appropriate for some firms but not others). Imagine an AI customer service agent that pissed customers off at some predictable rate that you could quantify — some companies might opt to use the agent anyways because the cost savings are worth the occasional customer satisfaction issue; some other companies might prioritize differently.)
But you could also imagine examples with a more extreme skew, such as an AI who can operate at 98% of human skill for 1/1000th the price. That might functionally be no different from an AI that operated at 102% human skill at the same price, because the cost savings are so dramatic as to make the quality vector less relevant. This is why the question of “is it equally as good as a human in all circumstances?” is less important than the snobs like to think.
Never stop writing Patrick.
Nobody puts together prose like you do not eh topics that you do.
You fill an important gap and it's such a pleasure to read.
I loved this, and see it as more populist, or maybe even more accurately plebeian, than libertarian (plenty of libertarian snobs!)
In fashion and style, the coolest people master high-low. In knowledge production today, those who get highest leverage on their inputs are doing the same.