I have another pipeline that pulls down all the groceries from stores every week in a 3km-radius and then builds cheap, healthy recipes from them, then orders the things I need by how the stores are laid out.

In general I spend about 65% of what I used to, so I think that the incentives for consumers are there.

I feel like this is shooting from the hip from a single point of view from some semi-large corpo.

If people did not feel good from passive consumption, no-one would be listening, following or looking at things, people would just make and create all the time, which is obviously not true.

If what you say is true, there would be no value from AI-generating blogs in question, or AI-generated movies/youtube films. Yet both have millions of downloads, views and listens, as the article mentions.

So the conclusion is that the utility of the activity is subjective, and if most people spend their time listening to AI factually incorrect podcasts about knitting and enjoying it, it's no different than knitting yourself and enjoying it. The blog was poor in this disambiguation, and pushed a more Aristotole-like ontological view of what is meaningful, which is more common view in engineering/hard-science dominated fields.

We happen to have time to argue about the philosophy about direction of the ontology of information at the downvoted bottom of a HN thread today, most people dont.

Go to China, or Congo and you will find that the public might hold a different version of some truths than you do.

We had religions dominating the world order for thousands of years, which projected their versions of the truth onto their societies.

If we would extrapolate that to today and to your opinion, it would be that everyone in the middle ages actually had it all figured out, they knew that the religious texts about splitting oceans or the moon were fake, and were all just playing along with it for the social structure.

Maybe it just happens that the LLM-generated stuff is the next thing in this iteration.

However, it seems to not be the case, it seems like they prefer to spend their free time to doomscroll, or sit at home, and engage more in parasocial relationships that perhaps can be more on their terms, on their timeframes, and with their opinions.

People might not care. I might identify as a runner because I bought a little jacket, expensive shoes, and wide-purple-tinted sunglasses, do I have to run? Not necessarily if the objects and my identity gives me the feeling of completion and satisfaction.

If your premise was true for all people, and the sense would be distorted, we would not see these phenomena, and people wouldn't listen or engage with AI-content. But the biological reality and the path of least resistance seems to prove us otherwise.

If the generated podcasts did not bring any value to the users, such as validation, or engagement, they would not use them, and there would be no change.

> But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

If the real is the feeling you get from listening to the podcast or identifying with a subculture, then that is the real for that person. Factual, grounded information is just one take. If it was not this way, we would have much less myths, religions, etc historically.

People will feel the same degree of joy and completion when the final word of the podcast is read like you feel when you finish a really complex piece of work.

We were used to having psychologists and doctors in person, now the most common form is to have it through apps, and the younger generation does not care, it's in fact more efficient to get a prescription that you like than to spend time going places and having in-person meetings. But older generation finds it hollowing out and horrifying.

You need to accept that society moves on, and it can look different from your perspective.

It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.

I have seen the same idea with processes, pipelines, lists, bullet points, jsons, yamls, trees, prioritization queues all for LLM context and instruction alignment. It's like the authors take the structure they are familiar with, and go 100% in on it until it provides value for them and then they think it's the best thing since sliced bread.

I would like, for once, to see some kind of exploration/abalation against other methods. Or even better, a tool that uses your data to figure out your personal bias and structure preference for writing specs, so that you can have a way of providing yourself value.

I think this is only possible if you find a community with similar values, like religious, or hippie, where the focus is put on other things. Otherwise you might deprive your kids of what you want to give them because they will not feel socially connected.

When the social culture is based around platforms and content that has subscriptions, and when media and what you see is consolidated, you can't just exit without losing a big part of the social context because the people around you are eating the same thing.

I dislike slop as much as anyone else. I think it puts a higher burden on the receiver of information to filter the signal in a pile of trash. I just don't really see an actual way out if you look at it from a societal level with the existing structures and incentives.

The only losers here are old or bitter people who have tied up their worldview into their own time and cannot see or comprehend that the world has moved on with a different bound for the experiences and expectations.