[Michelangelo11]

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.

[gumby]

> 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.

[Michelangelo11]

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).

[BizarroLand]

Could you not make a censor AI that scans content for offensive metadata and rejects the ones it finds?

There may still be a bit of slipthrough but it should be dramatically mitigated.

[gmerc]

https://m.twitch.tv/videos/1804206943

it’s in its early stages but it seems doable.

[techdragon]

There’s even a few ways the tax could be automated depending on where it operates from.

[xg15]

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.

[naravara]

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.

[nielsbot]

It's possible the service payments were set up from the same account that takes customer payments... and then it could run for a while anyway.

[Michelangelo11]

Yes, and then it's just very efficiently automated (to an implausible degree, even) and certainly not dead, as I said in my post.