[ToucanLoucan]

There's every reason to assume that these applications are the ones actually backing Open AI and co's insane valuations. They want to use these products to lock consumers down even harder. Actively rewrite contracts that already favor them, to favor them even harder. Cancel contracts that look to need payouts soon. Determine risk assessment for insurance policies, mortgage holders, and screw every last customer out of every last nickel they can. And the privacy destruction will be smuggled in under the notion that "well no HUMAN is looking at these photos, only these machiiiiiines!" with the added side benefit of laundering the responsibility of awful decisions onto those machines, and assigning them the credibility of them too. "The decision is perfect, impartial and unbiased. A computer made it, after all!"

And these applications, crucially, are not pie-in-the-sky, someday-this-will-work type situations as is comprehension of knowledge by an LLM, or a video generator that can remember what a character looks like, no. This is exactly what ML is already used for: aggregate analysis of massive amounts of statistical data. This is it's bread and butter.

That's worth $80 billion. Not shitty melty royalty-free images.

[realce]

This is my opinion too. The real profitable application of current AI is surveillance and the removal of human empathy from the corporate equation.