The new funnelWell, you know where they are coming from, at least.I can add, anecdotally, that in Q1 of this year, Fat Gold [an olive oil subscription product?] saw its first subscription referrals from LLMs. We don’t (can’t?) track these programmatically, but we do ask new annual subscribers where they heard about us, and, for the first time, the reply has come: Claude sent me.
Linked to by the prior post. Buttondown is a company with an (eponymous?) newsletter/email automation product. Justin (JM) Duke is the CEO. Their numbers appear to be soaring due to LLM referrals???
LLMs and ButtondownThey are rightly viewing the development very gingerly.It feels weird to complain about this. So let me list some of the weird ways it has surfaced.
- Churn. It is too early to really understand the statistical significance of this, but I'm faintly worried about churn being higher for these users than for our traditional cohort. A lot of our approach to onboarding and pricing hinges on a fairly high LTV; it's how we can justify outsized investment in support, for instance. Definitionally, lower LTV warps a lot of these decisions.
- Support. While the absolute volume of support tickets coming from LLM-born users isn't significantly higher than the median, the shape of those tickets is off. To put it bluntly: a lot of the tickets we get are themselves LLM-generated. This is, frankly, extremely annoying — and demoralizing for me and the team to spend half an hour meticulously answering some complex question only to receive a machine-generated reply in return.
- ICP. Buttondown has grown through word of mouth alone since its inception, which means that our customers all kind of have the same vibe — and, more importantly, know what our vibe is in return. LLM-born users, by virtue of having outsourced the research process, really don't. This materializes in every aspect of the conversion pipeline, from prospecting (I recently had a sales call with a user who was shocked to learn we don't support cold email) to volume.
The whole UBI (Universal Basic Income) movement seems to be seeing GenAI as a possible savior? BIEN - the Basic Income Earth Network - is I think the strongest UBI promoting organization. I think Leon Skunk & the rest are selling them a bill of goods, to try to get someone other than corporate managers to like GenAI.
AI leaders see mass job loss coming. They want government’s help solving it.This links to an article of the same title in the Washington Post. So Bezos is helping to dangle the carrot.Elon Musk has a plan for a future where jobs are wiped out by artificial intelligence: a benevolent government will provide.
From Will Lockett's Newletter, which apparently I stumbled across on SubStack. Will Lockett is "A Climate & Politics Journalist who is pissed off that the world is burning, corrupt and broken, yet no one in power seems to care."
This is a really well thought out & informative post.
Our AI Fears Have Been ConfirmedI really like the "slow-motion car crash" verbiage. I'm sure that was what lead me to read the article. I think it is a most excellent description of the Bullshit Apocalypse.A slow-motion car crash.
I think we'll see more & more systems seizing up, becoming unworkable, as the 10% error rate in the underlying GenAI tech compounds, leading to Degenerative AI. I think this author is seeing the same thing.
This post is a must-read, please check it out. A few excerpts. It's hard not to just copy the whole thing. There are several very well thought out themes.
You see, AI layoffs aren’t actually happening. As Oxford Economics found, companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and instead suggest that they are actually using the AI layoff narrative to cover up their own shortcomings. In other words, the massive Big Tech layoffs aren’t about AI automation, but to pay for bad performance and AI expenditure.I also think that the layoffs "due to increased AI use" in the big tech companies are mostly marketing - "look, we're eating the dogfood! Nom, nom, nom!". It's getting harder & harder to keep the AI bubble inflated.Why? Because AI doesn’t increase productivity on a business or economic scale. One of the best lines from the Oxford Economics report is when it directly asks, “If jobs are being replaced, where’s the productivity surge?” Everyone seems to have forgotten that productivity is something we measure, and if the AI rhetoric is true, that metric ought to be skyrocketing. But it isn’t; it is stagnating.
its use is deskilling us at a remarkable rate. We have known that overexposure to AI in the workplace damages expertise and skill for a while now, thanks to studies like those from JYX and Carnegie Mellon. Even Anthropic found that coders using its tools lost coding skills and comprehension. But researchers and professors are starting to notice a striking, consistent trend in recent findings: workers using AI at work are deskilling at disturbingly rapid rates.Why is this a problem? Well, thanks to constant hallucinations (which aren’t going to stop any time soon, read more here) and shocking high costs, AI can’t replace workers. So, this deskilling will inevitably harm the economy.
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AI is a massive threat to our economy. However, can we stop pretending that it is because these hollow plagiarism tools are themselves a threat because they are so capable? They aren’t; they cannot replace us, and it is moronic to suggest otherwise. The real threat is big tech grifting the stock and debt markets to turn their value into a perpetual-motion machine and, as a result, undermining the financial systems our economy is built on.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #124.
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