[keiferski]

To me, these brainstorming sessions theorizing the future of AI tools always miss a key thing, which is that human beings are still human beings. They don't follow logical rules of adoption and they often rebel against the things you force them to do.

For example, they talk about AI-generated copies of your voice becoming the way people communicate with each other. But who wants to listen to a computer copy of someone else's voice? No one. Maybe it will replace the pizza shop guy answering the phone, but it certainly isn't going to replace real conversations between friends and family members.

I saw another app that uses a small number of family photos to generate the surrounding scene where the photos were taken. Again, it's just a gimmick – family photos have value because they are memories of real events, not because of the intrinsic nature of the photographic paper.

If I were a betting man, I would bet on a major backlash to this sort of "automate everything" approach and a serious counter-culture to arise in the next decade or two.

[sensanaty]

I think most of the people hyping it up are just thinking about the pure money-saving/generating side of it. You can automate away entire teams of people, imagine all the savings! You can generate infinite content with 2 clicks for basically free, think of the money to be made there!

They of course ignore the fact that most people don't want to be talking to a robot and would take the human any day of the week. And most people create things as an outlet for their creativity or whatever else, not (solely) as a way to make oodles of money.

The company I work for provides tools for Support teams, and there's been talks from the higher ups about "automating away 90% of conversations", which basically translates to us auto-closing 90% of all incoming messages for our customers based on some "AI" decisions. The only people who buy into it are the CEO/CTO and their direct underlings, everyone else in the company realizes how fucking stupid and shortsighted that is, but they don't care. It's the big hype thing, all the competitors do it regardless of how idiotic it is, and our customers want to get rid of as much human labor as possible.

[wildrhythms]

It's pretty clear the implementation of these 'AI's is not solving a user problem. At my workplace we have mountains of user requests for maybe ~5 key features from years ago that no staffing has been assigned to; instead, the PMs and VPs and Directors are focused on shiny new features (yes, like 'AI') that they can put into marketing materials and get promoted. It's all hype. I have never seen a single customer request for the 'AI' features that these multi million dollar engineering teams are working on now.

[humanistbot]

> But who wants to listen to a computer copy of someone else's voice? No one.

I think you underestimate the cultural desire and pressure for a perfect presentation of one's self. It started out with mass marketing, where every advertisement and authorized photos of celebrities published in the last 50 years are in some way retouched, cleaned up, photoshopped. This cancer spread to social media and metastisized it with filters. Now Zoom by default smooths my patchy face. The next logical step is basically VTube but with your own face instead of an avatar. Conventionally attractive people have huge advantages, after all. If it starts to be normal, then those who don't will be disadvantaged. Maybe family calls are different, but in professional settings where you're trying to influence others, it's an advantage.

[keiferski]

Meh, David Foster Wallace made this prediction thirty years ago and I don't think it's actually come true. Most people simply...don't care. The majority of influencers and other people who are on camera for a living are just average looking folks.

[ian0]

| But who wants to listen to a computer copy of someone else's voice? No one.

Id imagine a lot of people would be up for doing this if it improved call quality..

If you could reconstruct a persons voice from text in realtime locally on your phone you would only need to transmit compressed text during the call reducing the bitrate a tonne. And those volume issues and difficult to remove voice artefacts would cease to be a problem too (assuming the senders side can still transcribe correctly).