I own a beer bar, and we work with some friends who have a catering business that does pop ups on our patio. They’ve been using AI to generate flyers and then tag us to have us share them to our larger audience. I stopped doing it because they look like trash, get low engagement, and are off brand for our art-inspired space. They got upset with me that we weren’t helping promote, and I explained my position on their AI flyers, and they sent a very lengthy email back about how AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that we’re still scratching the surface to understand its value. I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol. Now I have more work on my hands to design their flyers for them, but it’s worth it.
it’s so bizarre to me that people who work with food don’t realize that the ai trash is producing images that are REVOLTING, do not look like food, and actively deter people from their products.
you’d be better off with a half lit shitty polaroid of actual food than putting that trash on your branding, so much of it is nightmare fuel
You’re definitely right, the food looks so phony. The thing that’s wild is half the time they make a flyer, there’s only bricks of yellow text on a black background that’s too much info to read. I’m visiting San Francisco right now and saw a pizza shop last night that their entire menu was AI garbage and was so shocked how prevalent it’s become.
I used to work in a wine store. Customers would always joke “hahaha i just pick them by the label 😂” and I would always say. That’s not stupid, wine is about aesthetics. Someone who makes good wine will appreciate the value of a good label. And the inverse is true, people with poor taste won’t care about their label, but they won’t be able to make good wine, either.
I’m saying judge a book by its cover. How else are you gonna know what’s in the book without looking at its cover??
. . . You’re supposed to open the book . . .
big fan of Our Daily Red because it doesn’t give my wife migraines lol.
valid points all over.
It’s always an “it’s inevitable” argument.
It’s also inevitable their pop-up gets replaced by humanoid robots next year, using the same logic.
I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol
It doesn’t work that way tho
I mean, it literally does though. The email sounded phony AF, especially knowing that the person’s first language isn’t English and it was overly proper sounding. I copy and pasted it into chatgpt and said “did you write this email?“ and it’s response was” yes, based on the writing style and phrasing, I wrote this content."
Someone put in the intro to the book Frankenstein into an ai checker and it confirmed it to be 100 percent written by an LLM. It’s not deterministic.
I’ve been using ChatGPT a bit at work lately, since they’ve already paid for the subscription for everyone. I’ve learned that it is a bad idea to ask it any leading question, because it is likely to just give you the answer you want to hear.
Doesn’t work that way. Only if they programmed LLMs to sign the work like using a hash you would be able to confirm or deny with 100% accuracy
A usual ramen spot I’ve been going to for the past few years for some reason replaced the old images of the food on their menu with AI-gen ones and it looked so weird. I saw it last time I went for my usual, but I kept looking at the art and like a Lovecraftian horror the longer I looked at it the worse the details appeared. It literally affected my appetite because psychologically I couldn’t help but think I was ordering some freak-ass food as depicted in the new ai-gen pictures, and the ramen just didn’t taste as good to me that day. And I don’t think I’ll go back anymore :(
You should tell them
Isn’t a beer bar just a bar?
Typically, one expects a “bar” to have beer and liquor and the ability to make at least basic mixed drinks (rum and Coke, gin and tonic, etc.).
A “beer bar” usually has a wider variety of beers on draft and no liquor or mixed drinks.
Damn you could just have a lot of beers and liquor as well, sounds gimmicky
Some places have different licensing costs and requirements for places that serve beer and wine only vs also serving spirits.
Upvoting this obviously human response
Never heard of this shit, ngl. In Pittsburgh you can still smoke in bars, even ones that serve food
AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that we’re still scratching the surface to understand its value
Exactly, that’s the point! Google and Microsoft can burn their billions of dollars scratching that surface to understand it better. For small businesses, it’s NOT ready as you saw through real business results.
The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
The “invisible hand of the market” is such a fascinating myth, because it frames the results of capitalist endeavors as inevitable and almost holy - but as soon as the sufficiently wealthy and well-connected suffer a setback, then “government bailouts” are granted.
The invisible hand is actually very visible of you dare to look close enough.
The basic supply & demand, “invisible hand of the market” stuff applies at like. A farmer’s market. This is the context Adam Smith was talking about when he made up the invisible hand phrase. If one farmer has cheaper produce than another, he’ll probably get more customers. Anything more complicated than a local farmer’s market is… more complicated.
The problem is this time American national debt is too big for the size of bailout needed for AI.
Housing is already maxed out so where is the next thing to prop up the market?
It’ll have to be robotic automation.
It’ll have to be robotic automation
Factories are already robotic. Replacing humans is just more tech bro bullshit, like how AI will fix your toilet.
SPCX is the model all AI companies plan follow. IP0 valuation of 2K X forward Earnings.
Your retirement fund will be the exit liquidity forced to buy through indexes as the stocks crash and flat line.
They already have. Public Banks are huge investors in the private credit companies that underpin a good amount of the AI bubble.
The Magnificent 7 have been driving the stock markets gains for the last few years. They have also created independent companies to build out the data centers. The debt for these companies is off their books and funded primarily by private credit markets and is underpinned by contracts with the big 7 for data processing once the data center is built.
Projections by the Mag 7 have driven their share increase. So what happens if one or two of the magnificent 7 miss their projections? Well look at Oracle, its stock is tanking because it missed projections.
If the Mag. 7 stock tanks so will your 401ks. When their stock is worth less they will stop plowing money into AI. Suddenly all of the companies with contracts to build the data centers will loose their source of revenue. No revenue and they can’t pay off the loans to private credit. Private credit companies will start to go under and begin to take down the public banking companies that invested in them…
Its a house of cards ready to fall if any of the Mag 7 start to flounder.
It’s a good time to learn about what investments are in your 401k if you have any. You can look at the data sheets on the investments to see what stocks the index funds are made of. I’m moving mine to International index funds that are not tech heavy. I’m no expert in investing but I have heard that it’s sound to invest in companies that make basic things that people need.
Healthcare, consumer staples and utilities are considered to be defensive stocks because they are always needed regardless of economic situation.
I am minimising my exposure to US stock market as well. There is the perception that the European stock market doesn’t have the explosive growth the way that US stocks does but it is at least safer.
Japan could also be considered safe and their stock market have been on the rise after 30 years of stagnation.
I noticed the pension fund thing and I’m scared.
Exactly, as long as it’s billionaire buddies with trump, they can always print more money to keep the bubble going. When they realize they need to print the money to keep the rest of us afloat, that’s when they’ll let it crash.
Too big to fail!
I’d probably have better luck shorting stocks if I could trigger a (rightful) panic like this guy can.
I’ve come to realize that I was assuming that there was a limit somewhere to “the market staying irrational”. I’m not so sure anymore
You could argue that a heavily debt-based business that requires years and years of more debt before becoming profitable would respond to rising interest rates quite negatively, but, yeah, the whole thing is already enitrely irrational.
I’m keeping some popcorn in reserve for OpenAI’s IPO.
the market is irrational
🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Tesla is all you need to look at regarding that.
The thing is the collapse is like a random chance every week/day. At some point some human being will decide fuckem im not working all weekend to bail them out again and that’s when the crash will happen. That’s literally what happened in 2008, bear sterns and Lehman brothers for decades just rolled over their debt until one day the banks were just like yeah nah we had enough go ask the govt for help and that was the crash. It easily could have happened months earlier or months later, some bank execs were just in a room and finally decided they wanted to get off the ride one and that was the day it crashed. Just human emotion at that point if it would have happened the prior month or following month instead.
Exactly this. The entire market is held together by people who are willing to bend over backwards to keep it working. And all it takes is two or three of those to decide “enough is enough” at the same time, and suddenly all of the market’s sins are laid bare. And at that point, the investors panic and everything snowballs.
It’s a safe bet.
The bubble will burst, that’s our boom-bust cycle. I think we’re at the point where it is always a few bad decisions away.
I’m actually impressed that it’s still going
Coincidentally, The FED was made to stop boom-bust cycles before WWI. It’s never, ever worked, and it will never start working.
Yeah the fed did a great job preventing the Great Depression lmao. You know what really stops boom/bust ? Taxing the wealthy and holding them accountable for their crimes. Also all those pesky monopoly regulations, post Great Depression regulations like glass stegal and other regulations that have been systematically dismantled in the last 40 years.
“the market cam remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
God I hope so.
It’ll only hurt us. The rich will profit heavily.
Yeah, but if the bubble lasts longer it’ll hurt us more when it does collapse.
Plus we’ll have to deal with more clanker bullshit in more of our daily lives for longer if it takes a long time for it to collapse.
Are you talking about the collapse of the AI bubble hurting us? I mean, sure, but what’s the alternative? There isn’t one. The sooner it pops, the more money that will be available to develop businesses that can grow the economy. Right AI is gobbling up investment capital and driving up the interest rates and inflation of the price of tech hw is stunting consumer and business tech, contributing to overall inflation, and making actual products people want to buy more expensive, ie less sold…
I’d like to say that this economic collapse could not have come at a worse time, but I think bubbles like this are only possible when markets are no longer competitive, everyone is broke as shit, and people have to invent fantasies to make investors think line will go up.
Edit: Oh, and I just thought of a REALLY big benefit of an early pop: people’s retirements will be less exposed to AI-first and AI-only companies which are almost guaranteed to fail. If OpenAI raises 2 trillion, it’s going to be getting a lot of that from institutional investors investing other people’s money.
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Unemployment benefits in the USA? LOL! It’s gonna be a real shitshow when the bubble bursts.
Unemployment benefits in California are $450/week max. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in California ranges between $2,100 and $2,460 per month, depending on the source and specific metro market.
He’s predicted around sixteen market crashes so far by my count. The dude got lucky once and has been riding the fame ever since. I’m not necessarily disagreeing that this whole thing will crash, but timing is the important part and he keeps missing it. I’ll not be making any financial decisions on his recommended timeline anytime soon. He may as well be Dave Ramsay imo.
He may not be far off.
These bubbles usually last approximately five years. (Or at least that’s been the case historically.) We’re in year four. I’m actually keeping a portion of my portfolio in cash so when the crash comes I can take advantage, though I may move my whole retirement account into bonds and money market funds after the new year.
The AI bubble is propping up the American bond market too (countering all of the other crap Trump had been doing to undermine the economy). When the bubble pops, the bond market is going to suffer massively as well.
You’re not wrong. I’m thinking of buying in post-bubble potentially, but I’m not 100% sure what I’ll do yet. I do know that, by the day, it feels more and more like a good time to take the profit that’s there and wait.
Trump just said in a response to a question about our $40 trillion debt (jesus, that’s a lot of zeroes), “You know, inflation, certain levels of inflation, will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/trump-just-soft-launched-higher-inflation-as-the-new-solution-for-rebalancing-the-40-trillion-us-national-debt/ar-AA2dpocG
So I hope that cash isn’t USD. Honestly, all currencies look pretty bad right now. And if Trump triggers Iran into destroying the Middle East (and maybe triggering Israel to nuke, if Trump hasn’t already), the only thing that’s going to be worth a damn is cigarettes and penicillin.
So do I. We had our financial person take steps to limit our exposure. Still, I expect we’ll take a major hit regardless. Hopefully, we can ride it out with no major financial emergency forcing us to sell while the market is down.
Same, Michael Burry. Same
I certainly hope so as I may have sold all of my (meagre) investments in anticipation.
Mr. Money Mustache’s latest post is about this and I hope is right. Basically he thinks it will not destroy retirement, viewing market panic as a recurring historical pattern driven by fear rather than fundamental economic ruin. Instead of reacting to macroeconomic anxiety, he emphasizes that true wealth stems from human productivity and resilience, suggesting individuals ignore the news cycle and focus on personal financial habits. Also recaps the basics so a great reatd. We can do it one step at a time to increase freedom!
They’ve been saying the “bubble is going to burst” for a while now. If they keep saying it eventually they might be right. Then everyone will jump up and down trying to claim they were the ones who rightly predicted it. A quick search by date shows plenty of articles discussing the AI bubble from 2025, 2024, and even a rare few from 2023. Three years of doomsayers waters it down to meaninglessnes even if they‘re eventually right.
it has all the markers, unless the corporations drastically restructure their debt or the product suddenly finds an actual demonstrable use, then it’s going to continue being a bubble. all that requires for it to burst is a large swath of people vested in the bubble to get itchy enough to pull enough money out for the value to be questioned or need to be proved, and AI currently is wildly expensive incuring huge amounts of debt, which is being passed around in a very quick and difficult to account for manner, and has no proven value that can be demonstrated as of yet. to be clear, by demonstrated value I mean you can pull out the paperwork and show where is currently profitable. so here’s the ad revenue, or here’s the government contracts, here the subscription payments, something. they are all operating at a loss and betting their entire companies that those avenues will be profitable eventually, but they aren’t currently and that’s with a VERY heavy hand on the scale, we already have the cost of data center power and water being charged to average people, total failure in providing value to military and police efforts, and people rejecting AI content as acceptable entertainment, it’s all a bust no matter how much they insist, and the application as a digital creative tool is unlikely, it’s jarring and can’t be consistent from one shot to the next causing the exact problems you train to avoid in serial art and animation. digital creative tools generally require a large effort and testing from actual artists in development to be even marginally useful in a production pipeline and AI tried to be useful without any input also with the hope it could simply bypass the people who do the creating, the problem is, it can’t, it can only look at what it sees, fail to identify basic fundamental art principals, and try and remix the art it can look at. look at any AI attempt to recreate cubism, it can’t, it’s totally confused by the concept of incorporating movement and primitive shapes into complex work.
Id like to think that people are more aware of the circumstances that lead up to a bubble forming and popping.
