Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by simianwords 1 day ago
> If you do go fast and don't deprive your customers of your product but the product breaks and doesn't deliver its intended value, is that a better tradeoff?

Its not a good tradeoff if it breaks it enough that people move off your product, I obviously concede that.

Ultimately a firm should be incentivised to improve their long term profits after accounting for externalities to the world. Fast or slow is an implementation detail.

>Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.

Its not clear that your subjective view of slop is reason enough for the world to slow down on AI rollout and I'm glad I don't live in a world that doesn't necessitate slowing down due to whims and fancies of a few people's subjective aesthetic takes.

Ironically for me, all the companies _do_ want to slow down their pace for reasons related to actual safety. I think you would appreciate the cause and the foresight (if any).

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

1 comments

> Its not clear that your subjective view of slop is reason enough for the world to slow down on AI rollout and I'm glad I don't live in a world that doesn't necessitate slowing down due to whims and fancies of a few people's subjective aesthetic takes.

This is a misunderstanding of what I'm talking about. It's not about "slop" in and of itself, it's about what reality that slop inevitably creates. There's a lot of focus on the output ("ermagherd you wrote this with AI"), but very little on the ripple effects/second-order effects (people spinning up cults, ending marriages, and gambling away their money [1]). That's not just cute "look at the freaks" stuff, that's a serious, civilizational-level problem 1-2 decades out.

You're right that my subjective opinion means dick-all beyond being that of an experienced, educated user of this stuff. But I'd at least hope that people take heed of what I'm saying and start to push back when it's objectively clear that decisions are closer on the spectrum to disaster than they are to benign mediocrity.

Thank you for sharing that link, this is exactly what I'd hope to see happening behind the scenes.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chat...