#except thiel probably

[lacewise]

Something was bothering me about how YouTube commentary is running right now, because people are missing or adding details to important stories that don’t make any sense… and I realized that a lot of people are just stringing TikToks together until it sounds almost like an intellectual thought, which is becoming recursive, which ends up sounding a lot like ChatGPT, with hallucinated details or missing context and that’s what I’m noticing

So a lot of it is not coming from chatbots but it doesn’t matter, because the way the content is constructed is exactly the same, just more or less human intervention

My husband is saying this can only get worse as people cut more corners to keep up with generative text, as platforms keep promoting it and so their lookalikes become ever more popular, until the creators finally break under the weight of the nonsense they helped build and he’s also worried platforms will use this to regain control of influencers via their lackluster marketing and lose all their employment leverage in the meantime by convincing everyone, including themselves, their labor is a commodity—like already happened in the entertainment industry proper

The whole idea that people can only get ahead by constantly running on fumes and putting out their best work, otherwise they don’t deserve a paycheck, is literally the definition of commodification of labor

This is worrying because there’s a key multiplier detail people polarized against LLMs don’t notice: talking head influencers are the people who fit the exact target demographic LLMs are going for, and the most easily isolated

Oh and this will be extremely difficult to course correct because everyone is polarized against marketing and business theory

So… hopefully that’s all wrong. i’m sure it’s fine. Probably. Not like influencers have a history of hiring people with little regard for their long-term relationships with their platform or audience.

Anyway if anyone with an online platform accidentally sees this: stop saying the love of influencer economy is the root of all evil, start tooting your own horn, like REALLY hard. Find an artist, a craftsperson to promote. Find ten. Dig up old videos you love. The whole “this genre is rot”, “influencers are so over [this line was imported directly from 2016]” or “I hate this genre” needs to dead, immediately. You are not attacking the platforms, you are attacking your paychecks, you are attacking yourselves.