[ChuckMcM]

I think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production.

I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things;

1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.')

2) It takes the margin support that those people provided out of the pipeline, leaving only the folks who are quality focused as the market.

I have complained about this in the past with respect to personal computer hardware. I (and others) have used the term "crapitalism" to describe the hollowing out of the market by the flood of poor quality products.

With technology that is pretty easy to do by substituting "work alike" but less expensive parts, these work in the short time and then fail in terms of lifetime or drift over time specifications.

Now we have "cheap creativity" in the form of prompt directed creative works. I expect that we'll see a flood of self published romance novels on Kindle (even at 0.99/each you need perhaps a dozen sales to cover your time investment) Stories that speak at only one level (the constructions of the plot and the actions of the characters) then swamp the market and more nuanced stories or works will not be sold because of the money spent on these which isn't available to spend on better works.

I think this will be a huge legacy for these technologies and I don't think history will look favorably on it, but one can never know right?

[corbulo]

Ironically, LLMs are really low grade creative engines that will prop up the industries that have optimized creativity away. A highly creative society/culture would have minimal interest in LLM use cases like this or in entertainment more broadly.

What will the schism become? Organic vs. inorganic works? Will there be one or will it just be a guess?

[ChuckMcM]

I think you are largely correct. My observation is that "quality" as a discriminator in a market requires enough market share for quality in order to continue funding it. If you split the aggregate market into a standard distribution, the ability to sell quality products into that market seems to evaporate quickly once you get beyond 1.0 SD from the mean.

The more interesting point (to me) is your second one, which is how do you educate the market to recognize the "cost" of low quality? It is understanding that cost that convinces the market to pay what is required to get the quality version of the product.

[pixl97]

>, which is how do you educate the market to recognize the "cost" of low quality

Typically... pay them more. When I was broke quantity mattered more to me. Now that I have discretionary income I am far more selective.

See Also: 'Boots Theory' of Socioeconomic Unfairness

[ChuckMcM]

That is an interesting theory. From the perspective of craftspeople I have met a few who are both "low income" and focus a lot on quality for their tools. Having it be part of their livelihood meant that the longer it lasted, the less often it would be replaced. But it is certainly true that places like Ross lean into the "look" is more important than the "quality" message.

[corbulo]

I would add to this, in a lot of non-price sensitive consumer industries the perception of quality often overtakes actual quality; which is why brands will very frequently get bought out and hollowed but don't immediately fail.

It plays into exactly what you describe as being the more powerful motivator of the two. Though it does go both ways, you mention tools for lower income but expensive food (for higher income) is generally much higher quality.

I think it hinges on the industry and how obvious the quality is. Obviousness of quality requires a value-sense to be deeply thought out. Tools are not obviously higher quality, you have to think about it (the value of a dollar). Food is often obviously higher quality, and when it isn't its relatively inexpensive to discover (taco bell blows out your asshole, organic meats and veg make you feel more energetic).

[wiredfool]

The cost to refute BS has always been an order of magnitude greater than the cost to create it. ChatGPT just made the cost to create "quality" bs an order of magnitude lower.

[Avshalom]

Every market is A Market For Lemons.

nothing but price can be objectively compared. We were just talking about the dropshipocalypse/aliexpressification of amazon where it's no longer possible to tell if any two products are actually two different products; or if it's the product you will receive. Even quality sensitive/price-insensitive consumers have no way to know if they're buying quality; or if they do buy quality, will it survive 6 months of OTA software updates.

[ChuckMcM]

I understand (and agree!) with what you are saying, historically the role of "brands" was to curate customer specific features for sourcing product offerings. So while Sears & Roebuck might get hand tools from a factory in China, those that they applied the Craftsman brand to had a lifetime warranty, and as a result they would push both quality requirements and quality inspections on to the manufacturer. The consumer bought the "brand" because it was a "quality" brand.

Amazon, is in the process of destroying any brand value it has by not doing any curation for counterfeits, quality, or even fitness of purpose. In this way they are duplicating the AliExpress model which was essentially a payments processor in front of Alibaba the market aggregation web site.

I disagree that quality can't be objectively compared (I think it is possible you were using "compared" for what I think of as "discernment"). Using hand tools as an example, I can easily compare steel quality between two wrenches, I have a variety of objective ways to understand their mechanical properties and measure their conformance to specifications (like is a 3mm wrench really 3mm?).

But it is impossible to discern quality from either a magazine advertisement, a web advertisement, or a web site listing. I learned that the hard way when I ordered a "two person submarine" from the back pages of Popular Science magazine.

One of the greatest services Backblaze provides is annualized failure rates on disk drives they use. It demonstrates both what a lack of quality "cost" (in terms of disk failure) and who sucks. That is not something that I could take on (I don't have the budget for thousands of drives ;-)) but it helped improve the market for disk drives overall as consumers gravitated to the quality drives over the less quality ones. Similarly when I was at Google, Google started publishing power supply statistics and their requirements for PSUs in their systems. This drove both an awareness in consumers (the information was widely shared) and change in the PSU market place.

In the absence of brands, aka "white box" or "clone" manufacturers, discernment is not possible. And consumers who don't care and "just buy what is cheapest" get crap. And that crap gets crappier and crappier as people find ways to make it cheaper as long as you don't care how long it lasts or how well it does what it is supposed to do. (crapitalism in a nutshell). And to the extent that this exhausts the addressable market for quality items, it results in worse quality for everyone because the people who could make a quality item, won't because not enough people would buy it to keep the factory busy.