I applaud the idea, but I don’t think this will happen. People want things cheap and fast. Not quality. They’ll on average prefer anything AI can give them for free and today, over improving the situation. That’s just how things work in real life…
I actually wrote something on this back in February. The TL;DR being that given that so many companies manage to build impressive businesses on garbage software, that maybe professional devs like myself were thinking about it all wrong. Maybe garbage is “good enough”.
It wasn’t until months later that I posed this question to a former project manager and he offered the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Garbage is indeed good enough… until it isn’t. Then you’ve got to spend 10 times more money to unfuck the mess. So either you pay a little more now, or a lot more later. Either way, building it properly has a higher return in the end.
Well said. It’s also related to why people have the old saying: you should buy proper boots and spend some money on them. Also related to Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And it’s tricky to get it right. A cheap job is often the more expensive one and vice versa. Also in programming.
I recently saw some Youtube video from someone who said he was an artist, doing video work, advertisements etc. And he loves his job and doing a good job. And he can’t earn money with that any more, since someone else will do it on his iPhone, do the post-processing in two hours on some modern video editor and chage a tenth of the price (or so). So there isn’t a big market for a freelancer with a $10,000 camera spending lots of hours on color-grading and getting details perfect…
I mean I totally get that. In the old days this wasn’t a thing. Now it is and you don’t need quality, you need some Insta reel twice a week for your company to stay relevant and quality doesn’t matter with those. I feel this itself isn’t the problem. But it’s going to become a big issue once there aren’t many experts, professionals and artists left. Because occasionally people need something robust or nice and with substance to it.
I don’t think so. Most people I’ve seen are pretty aware whether they buy some domestic quality product that’ll last, or a cheap chinesium one. I’ve also seen people replace human logos, texts with AI, and they previously would have commissioned that to a human. It’s not like they confuse the AI with a human. It’s just that it’s so convenient. And they don’t really need it to be perfect or art or anything. It’ll do for instagram and people aren’t really paying attention in other areas, so it’s good enough…
I think people get manipulated into thinking they need a lot of stuff, everything needs to fit into the attention economy and they loose track of the bigger picture. So the entire quality vs quantity is shifted. But I think a decent chunk of people is still aware of what quality would look like.
I applaud the idea, but I don’t think this will happen. People want things cheap and fast. Not quality. They’ll on average prefer anything AI can give them for free and today, over improving the situation. That’s just how things work in real life…
I actually wrote something on this back in February. The TL;DR being that given that so many companies manage to build impressive businesses on garbage software, that maybe professional devs like myself were thinking about it all wrong. Maybe garbage is “good enough”.
It wasn’t until months later that I posed this question to a former project manager and he offered the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Garbage is indeed good enough… until it isn’t. Then you’ve got to spend 10 times more money to unfuck the mess. So either you pay a little more now, or a lot more later. Either way, building it properly has a higher return in the end.
Well said. It’s also related to why people have the old saying: you should buy proper boots and spend some money on them. Also related to Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And it’s tricky to get it right. A cheap job is often the more expensive one and vice versa. Also in programming.
I recently saw some Youtube video from someone who said he was an artist, doing video work, advertisements etc. And he loves his job and doing a good job. And he can’t earn money with that any more, since someone else will do it on his iPhone, do the post-processing in two hours on some modern video editor and chage a tenth of the price (or so). So there isn’t a big market for a freelancer with a $10,000 camera spending lots of hours on color-grading and getting details perfect…
I mean I totally get that. In the old days this wasn’t a thing. Now it is and you don’t need quality, you need some Insta reel twice a week for your company to stay relevant and quality doesn’t matter with those. I feel this itself isn’t the problem. But it’s going to become a big issue once there aren’t many experts, professionals and artists left. Because occasionally people need something robust or nice and with substance to it.
People get manipulated to a point where they think they buy quality but actually buy shit.
I don’t think so. Most people I’ve seen are pretty aware whether they buy some domestic quality product that’ll last, or a cheap chinesium one. I’ve also seen people replace human logos, texts with AI, and they previously would have commissioned that to a human. It’s not like they confuse the AI with a human. It’s just that it’s so convenient. And they don’t really need it to be perfect or art or anything. It’ll do for instagram and people aren’t really paying attention in other areas, so it’s good enough…
I think people get manipulated into thinking they need a lot of stuff, everything needs to fit into the attention economy and they loose track of the bigger picture. So the entire quality vs quantity is shifted. But I think a decent chunk of people is still aware of what quality would look like.