This doesn't make sense to me on the most basic level. All the services mentioned in the article cost money, so somebody has to keep paying them -- and if they're being paid for by the company's revenue, out of its bank account, then the company certainly isn't dissolved. It's actually very, very efficiently automated (I think that level of automation, ~100%, is unachievable for a business like this, but that's by the by).
Really, this is a very fascinating article. At first sight it holds up and makes surface-level sense, but the moment you start scratching the surface, you see there's no substance and the article's premises and ideas correspond in no way to reality. Just like a lot of GPT output, in other words.
> I think that level of automation, ~100%, is unachievable for a business like this, but that's by the by
With a little flexibility in your definition, I think you could completely automate it.
1 - Have a cron job that collects trends (maybe a crawler, but perhaps you could get that info via APIs of some social media through your advertising account).
2 - generate the T shirt / whatever design using a generative package
3 - generate and place ads on various sites based on their current memes (mapping determined in step 1)
4 - take orders and send them to a print on demand shirt fulfillment service. This makes your company 100% automated, though some people are required at the fulfillment and delivery steps of course — but your payroll is nil.
This reminds me of the stories that appear from time to time in which some old person in Europe is discovered to have died in their apartment but are undiscovered for years because the pension is auto deposited, the utilities are autodebited, and what little mail arrives just comes in through the slot in the door and piles up on the floor.
This automated company could almost also survive its owner’s death, except for the tax filings.
You can't fully automate AI content for a number of reasons, chiefly because it can generate something extremely insensitive or offensive that can torpedo the whole business (e.g. AI Seinfeld's transphobic joke), but also because gettibg AI output to stay within a certain range of acceptable responses is -incredibly- hard, and if the ratio of misses to hits is too high, you're losing money (as every shot, whether you hit or miss, incurs some costs). For more details about this, look up how AutoGPT and similar things are actually doing in practice -- they get stuck a lot and require constant supervision.
And this is because, again, keeping AI outcomes within a certain range at scale is both amazingly hard and computationally irreducible (i.e. you can't predict its responses at a scale of say 1 million shots, without taking 1 million shots).
You could re-imagine it as some tiny, forgotten department inside a sprawling megacorp though.
I remember reading an article about a guy who still technically had a job, an employee number and got paid each month, however due to a HR mishap, he wasn't assigned to any department, did not have a superior and had no tasks assigned. The corporation was large enough that no one noticed.
You could imagine something similar with AI: Suppose that for a project, a fully automated product pipeline was set up like in the article. Then, let's say, some sort of chaotic re-org happened that caused the team to be disbanded. In the end, no one was left who knew about the existence of the pipeline. The pipeline would keep churning out new products, using the infrastructure and resources of the corporation, without anyone feeling responsible for it.
Also this basically already happens, except instead of artificial intelligence it's just SEO spam sites that are curated and maintained the old fashioned with, with cheap off-shore labor.
The examples of clothes is pretty glaring. There are already sites that will generate images of T-shirts or mugs based on popular search terms and then print them on demand when people order.
Kinda offtopic: I really like the main idea of this article, but the contents are really generic and feel like they were generated from the heading alone.
Generic call to AI regulation and vague statements like "undermine efforts to promote responsible consumption" - like what does that even mean?
Like the whole article is basically filler... I dunno...
The main idea behind the sustainability concept is that when left unchecked AI can and will fill not just our digital world, but our physical world with junk. Especially when the inevitable use of AI product generation comes about.
I did think about generating the article, but decided against it.
But how can it fill the physical world if there are no consumers buying the products?
Presumably this is pre-post end stage capitalism and the AI politburo isn’t in charge of who gets the meme T-shirt allocations so someone has to actually decide the shirt has more value to them than whatever is being charged. Absent this the company is just making ideas that nobody wants and will eventually run out of money to pay the power bill for the AI.
So, to summarize, the company is either providing value to customers or will go bankrupt like every other business in the history of the world.
Choose the higher quality options from the big brands, such of Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, Gildan, etc., and not the 12 shirts for 12 USD packs.
The premium lines from these brands are the 1-3 for 20-35 USD, which have sweat wicking tech, cooling tech, brushed premium cotton, double stitching, etc.
Avoid the pop up ads for tees on social media, none of them can match the quality of the big brands without paying 2-3X the cost
I've paid up to $50 for a single T and been disappointed. Price is no guarantee of quality. Sweat wicking etc is fine for workout shirts but not for daily wear, they must be 100% cotton.
The idea of a 'brand' constantly generating content and offering services without human involvement is interesting - kind of an AI powered vending machine.
However the article does little to explore this concept, and makes unconvincing and contradictory arguments re sustainability.
Well, if it's profitable, someone will want to claim it. If it's not, then it will get shutdown due to some unpaid bills. (Compute, electricity, connectivity, etc.)
Maybe possible if it's running as a truly decentralized algorithm running on blockchain with profits sustaining itself. (Not currently possible as far as I am aware.)
Flipping this the other direction, I'm intrigued by the idea of a perpetual purpose company, even a charity, that could be set up and endowed to keep to it goal even after the founders have departed (maintaining open source libraries, providing grants, etc.)
A vampire is both "immortal" and "the living dead". Immortality means that they don't grow old. If the hypothetical necrobrands never stagnate in their output, they can't grow old and thus uncompetitive.
A "vampire brand" sounds even more appropriate considering hypothetically it feeds on current trends and turns them to its advantage.
Then again, there's plenty of misnomers in the English language.
Zombies are visibly doing worse and not operating all that well. Vampires? They're slick, sexy killers and manipulators that people need to invite across their threshold.
I can't fathom the inner processes of these anti-capitalism folks.
Everything is a hustle against an energy gradient. We evolved into that. It's amazing that we're as relaxed as we are when you contrast our Disneyland bubble against all of nature around us. Take a gander at /r/natureismetal and tell me the way we capture energy from the world around us isn't a little less off-putting than the way lions and parasitic wasps do it.
Having the Gap and Balenciaga in your periphery is better than a Kalashnikov occupying that space.
If somebody wants to sell Marvel merch or OBEY, let them. Everyone is looking at optimization gradients and happiness gradients and solving it all in a distributed and fairly optimal way.
In the blink of an eye it'll all be over and earth's oceans will be boiled away by our sun.
Calm down about capitalism in this moment. There are far greater problems to be worried about, both in the here and now, and in the geologic timespans that predominate.
Capitalism has solved problems, and continues to solve problems, for which no other algorithm could even begin to approach. It makes the entire problem space fungible and lets actors participate frictionlessly. It's one of the best inventions of our species.
AI is going to make capitalism even more flexible than before. Now there won't be as many capital, labor, of expertise barriers to entry. More people can participate.
The true negative externalities of capitalism are taxed and regulated by all economies all over the world. The system is moderated for and by the people. If you have any argument against capitalism, it's likely at these touchpoints where you should focus your arguments and energies. (I'd offer that we're doing a good job and that we'd receive a passing grade, but I'll happily engage in debate.)
This person wouldn't have the means to convey these thoughts to your mind without the marvelous accomplishments of capitalism.
Take articles like this with a grain of salt. It's like cinema critique - pointing out the minutiae because the market has enough abundant wealth to make that a job.
That's a pretty rosy hot-take when there are tens of thousands of people in the US sleeping on sidewalks, let alone other pesky externalities like climate change, microplastic pollution, endocrine disruptors and on and on. Of course it's tautologically true that capitalism has gotten us all the amazing stuff we have, but the collateral damage has been significant; that alone suggests it could be done better.
The onus is on the critic to provide a better alternative. But all I ever see anyone propose is the same tired marxism that has been proven time and time again to be even worse. Its a lazy argument.
Perhaps we need to go back to first principles. Both capitalism and socialism are materialist. This is probably the wrong framework to structure society. It made sense when we became industrial. But we are now post industrial and at least in the global north rapidly approaching the possibility of post scarcity.
> thousands of people in the US sleeping on sidewalks
Somehow this is capitalism's fault and I don't understand how. I have been touring Europe over the past month and throughout the many major cities and small towns I have been in, the amount of homeless is exponentially less. Does Europe not practice capitalism? Or is it possible that our government and culture is to blame, and not our economic system?
Really, this is a very fascinating article. At first sight it holds up and makes surface-level sense, but the moment you start scratching the surface, you see there's no substance and the article's premises and ideas correspond in no way to reality. Just like a lot of GPT output, in other words.