r/Showerthoughts 1d ago

Speculation Companies that become reliant on AI will all end up becoming clones of each other.

1.1k Upvotes

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228

u/theboomboy 1d ago

That's been happening for at least a few years before chatgpt and the other slop machines. Capitalism incentivises stealing ideas and making everything more bland and inoffensive

Everything has to look and sound professional and serious because we're a serious company making money for investors! What even is that "creativity" thing the kids are talking about? They'll grow out of it one day...

50

u/Toby_Forrester 21h ago

My true passion is human resource planning in the framework of agile matrix organization ecosystems!

122

u/sac02052 1d ago

Yes, by its nature, the current wave of AI is incapable of true innovation. It mostly just finds, copies, and nicely formulates information that already exists.

10

u/lordassfucks 9h ago

Hello AI please make my company unique.... Hi AI please make sure my company is unlike others.... Ai, I need my company to stand out from other companies...

7

u/sac02052 9h ago

No need for pleasantries (Hello, Hi, please), they only make AI, already an energy hog, suck up more power.

6

u/TheZenPsychopath 6h ago

This guy is going to get rekt in the AI-pocolypse for not being a robofriend.

Me? I politely compliment em dashes.

3

u/sac02052 6h ago

So you're saying that if Dave had said ... "Hal, *please* open the pod bay door" ... then he would have been OK?

1

u/TheZenPsychopath 5h ago

Lets just say if Dave's parents taught him better manners, things would have been so much easier for him.

-23

u/elixeter 22h ago

This is true for 99% of human creativity.

20

u/vgodara 22h ago

But due to shear number of people variance keeps occuring. On other hand AI most likely would produce standardized results. That's why if I formatted this comment using chat gpt you would have immediately know where it came from.

1

u/Highlander198116 8h ago

This is why Chat GPT AI art always has a yellow tint. Anything with a yellow tint is immediately recognizable as AI. The thing is, this demonstrates the sheer laziness of people producing these AI images, because I imagine you can tell it to drop the yellow tint.

8

u/InternationalEmu7241 21h ago

in that case it’s by definition not creativity

3

u/captaingleyr 11h ago

1% creative people making things is way better than 0% creative robots making everything forever. Shit, put 100 people in a room and you'll get a new idea everyday, put 100 AI in a room and they'll just overheat the place stealing peoples work

1

u/elixeter 11h ago

What do you mean by “a new idea”? Human brains are just sponges, everything we become is an accumilation of experience. This all feeds into our reasoning and ideas.

That is what I mean by my other comment. The very very select few manage to come up with purely original idea, and these folk are generally considered “geniuses” and make the history books.

Happy to be proven wrong!

2

u/spookmann 13h ago

"It's easy to be original. Just try and copy something you like, and fuck it up."

1

u/Highlander198116 8h ago

Humans can take something existing and innovate. Anything AI does that innovates at all is given to it by the prompter, so its really the human engaging in the innovation, even if the AI is doing the work.

1

u/elixeter 7h ago

And where does that innovation come from? Experience and learning. To think AI won’t be able to do that soon enough is rather blindsided.

35

u/StickFigureFan 1d ago

They'll become like that cracker barrel logo redesign: generic and hated

7

u/Highlander198116 8h ago

I keep asking this and have yet to get an answer. While I 100% agree the logo change is stupid and pointless.

Can anyone explain to me what is "woke" about the logo change.

Like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben's like, I at least understand where cries of "woke" are coming from. There was never anything divisive about the cracker barrel logo, so I don't get it. Or is "change" in general woke now?

6

u/fennelwraith 6h ago

It's not explicitly "woke" like making the background a rainbow flag or anything but the image of an old man and "country" barrel are aligned with "old west" and traditional tropes. So getting rid of them is in their eyes, an erasure of "history" and traditional ways of life etc, etc. Part of the bigger picture of their "erasure" and fears of change.

When stuff like this flares up online, I always wonder how many people are actually upset and how much is just a circle-jerk of rage-engagement

2

u/Highlander198116 5h ago

So my assumption that "change" in general is being associated with "woke" now is correct?

1

u/StickFigureFan 5h ago

Not necessarily change, but more broadly just:

thing I don't like == woke

1

u/fennelwraith 5h ago

Ehh, conservatives certainly don't like change by definition but there has to be a tenuous character connection to make it woke. But it's the online kneejerk term to change I guess. great for clicks

1

u/LordKwik 6h ago

I think people just identified with the old logo. that's my initial reaction, anyway. objectively it's very bland now, but it was a bit busy before for a logo. Cracker Barrel is also late to the changes, the flat design became popular over 10 years ago (was it around 2012?) and there has been enough hate about it all around.

1

u/Highlander198116 5h ago

I mean I don't disagree with anything you said. The thing is I've literally seen people saying "go woke, go broke" in regard to the logo change and again, nobody has explained what is "woke" about the move.

1

u/LordKwik 4h ago

you got me curious... it started from the official White House account on X...

1

u/StickFigureFan 5h ago

The uproar was really stupid and the ones who were most vocal probably hadn't even visited that place in a decade. These days woke is right-winger shorthand for 'thing I don't like'.

1

u/futurepixelzz 1h ago

It’s because a female CEO is the one that led the redesign.

18

u/crybxbydxn 1d ago

You can see it already happening to some extent

16

u/CrispenedLover 1d ago

Honestly it was happening before chatGPT, it's just faster now

6

u/Commentator-X 21h ago

There's always been Hollywood and music industry cookie cutter slop. But their templates were always based on the truly creative stuff. As much as the big labels tried to dominate with their CC slop, there were always exceptions that just blew everything else out of the water.

19

u/C1rc1es 1d ago

Simply not true. AI has huge applications across so many spaces, go look at how it’s being used in climate science and compare that to robotics and the compare that to a media company and for good measure check out uses in medicine. Those companies nothing alike and never will be, you’re just talking about lazy companies that are essentially wrappers on LLM’s and that’s a naive and uninformed take. 

16

u/Hyosi 1d ago

Most people think AI = LLM

7

u/couldathrowaway 1d ago

That's a good thing, as soon as the first one collapses either because they have become so mid to low tier level companies that nobody uses them, or because the ai was never ready for this much work.

The other ones will follow shortly. Since they copy each other.

3

u/jaan_dursum 1d ago

Companies that rely on AI will eventually have no humans to run them.

3

u/Agile_Proof7582 21h ago

The real challenge will be leveraging AI in a way that maintains their competitive edge!

2

u/otto333 1d ago

It'll probably be more like types of vehicles (cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, etc.) where there are types of AI companies where they all look exactly like each other within their subtype.

2

u/Every_Lack 23h ago

The reality is that original human thought and creativity will be one of the most valuable things to have, depending on the industry.

2

u/ChronicRhyno 8h ago

They also become clones because they only answer to investors who only fund companies that are min/maxing profits in the same several tried and true ways.

2

u/Graystone_Industries 6h ago

Organizations have heavy tendencies for isomorphism. There are many examples of this, and yeah...I can imagine this technology contributing greatly to said tendencies.

2

u/Blackmagic213 6h ago

Thank you.

I built my company with non-AI technology because I focused on the solution not just what’s trending.

And people act like I’m crazy. Now I can just layer AI in certain areas to make the product better.

But I focused on solving a problem not just chasing what’s popular. I don’t follow the crowd. Remember the crowd wanted to kill Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the Sun. 

2

u/futurepixelzz 1h ago

As a creative person who works at a company like this, it’s infuriating because with any original idea I now get asked, “did you validate/run this idea by ChatGPT?”

1

u/monkeykiller14 1h ago

Ok running ideas by chat gpt is a little bit ridiculous at any level

4

u/empericisttilldeath 1d ago

Yeah, I remember when they invented the hammer, and suddenly all the contractors looked exactly the same.

AI as a tool. If me and you each use that tool, we will get completely unique results. The tool reflects what the user wants, not itself.

1

u/Commentator-X 21h ago

Ever heard of suburban hell? It's when you drive through a neighborhood of cookie cutter homes that all look exactly the same with little variation. In your analogy it's not the contractors that would look the same, it's the houses. And we do see exactly that.

0

u/empericisttilldeath 20h ago

That's not because they all used hammers, it's because developers reused to same blueprints in a housing development, to save money paying architects.

God, Redditors are stupid.

3

u/Mental_Victory946 11h ago

Lmao you practically say his point and it still flies over your head. Yeah dude ai is using the same blueprints

3

u/Commentator-X 21h ago

Said the same thing previously related to writing. If everyone relies on AI then everyone's writing will be the same with no creativity

3

u/the-white-chickens 1d ago

This prediction is likely relying too much on how companies seem to all be using AI in the same way. In the early days of computers, few foresaw the diversity of their utility.

We see AI (gen AI) as one thing, but we have barely scratched the surface of its utility. We are just getting into organizing agents to successfully perform specialized tasks. This kind of agentic infrastructure will be different for various intents, but will likely have common patterns. Just like software.

Caveat 1: There are plenty of ways to augment gen AI, so not just referring to gen AI here, but referring to tech that relies on AI.

Caveat 2: I could be wrong. I am making a prediction, and the future is unknown. But I would not bet against a future that has a diversity of companies that have built out infrastructure that relies on gen AI to run and improve many aspects of their business.

2

u/Iamhummus 1d ago

It’s not unlike developers copy pasted stack overflow solutions into their code

1

u/MrErickzon 1d ago

Then asked you for help when it didn't compile and had no idea what they pasted into the system...

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

1

u/ImWithStupid_ImAlone 23h ago

It will be AI exchanging data about other AI.

1

u/ImInfiniti 13h ago

As if this wasn't already true well before AI

1

u/LetMeExplainDis 1d ago

But AI will be good at finding gaps in the market.

1

u/Uncertn_Laaife 1d ago

You ever heard about a herd? That’s what you get a a herd. AI to me is just another glorified and a bit personalized search engine at this point.