| HN Mirror

The longer the AI bubble runs, the closer we get to defining where it's actually viable.

There are definitely some tricks it does well enough. I'm thinking of the old bit about the art students who make a better living than senior engineers on furry and fetish work, for example. That works because it's an industry where "good enough" pays the bills.

Conversely, industries where there's high standards, a risk of life/limb/finances, and associated regulations, are going to have a hard time with AI because it makes compliance and liability hard to manage. I could see some players trying to produce "HIPPA/PCI/etc-friendly hosted AI" or just putting up large insurance bonds to make their products amenable to industry, but there's a lot of "entire sector goes poof with the stroke of a regulator's pen" risk.

AI as "an augment" or as the primary user interface is at risk of trust corrosion. If the search engine/chatbot fails to respond reliably to prompts or hallucinates one wrong fact too many, the customer is going to bail. This has been a problem since Siri, if not every annoying IVR service-- we have marketers who desperately want to present the machine as open-ended and omniscient, which leads to insufficient documentation, poorly bounded user experience, and no easy way to control the user's expectations.

Many technical advancements are about being able to replace a skilled artisan with a less-trained and cheaper worker. I think a lot of the "AI for writing and coding" stories are going to fall flat there. You didn't get rid of the junior coder, you turned him into full-time QA, code reviewer and project manager to try to steer the robot, which is a lot harder!

I expect by the end of 2024, we'll have seen a fair number of services scale back the AI features, or at least constrain them-- offering AI interfaces alongside conventional ones when you absolutely need control. I don't doubt there will be some players with infinite budget still pushing it (Microsoft trying to make AI a thing may well be much like Meta trying to make VR a thing) but I don't think we'll be seeing so many 'your morning danish... NOW WITH AI' pile-ons.