aiislove
1mo ago
Ok, I'll write that essay.
Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?
Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.
aiislove
1mo ago
I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.
aiislove
1mo ago
Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.
aiislove
1mo ago
How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?
I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:
I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.
I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.
Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?
I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it
aiislove
1mo ago
Yeah I made a post about him a few weeks ago he isn’t too popular on themotte
https://www.themotte.org/post/3413/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/393199?context=8#context
aiislove
3mo ago
In my specific case I already have to manually check each line at a certain point in my workflow so I just eyeball it as I go and there are very rarely things I have to remove. It definitely is more fast because having to brainstorm relevant keywords for every thing definitely takes more time than having the LLM generate them in an instant.
aiislove
4mo ago
I hate the 80s. I could make an entire effort post about this but I think the most terrible force that came out of the 80s was classism. The yuppie resulted in decades of insufferable arrogance and culminated in luxury beliefs that ripped apart the cohesion of American society. The 70s and prior decades showed a respect for rural and non-fashionable people that was completely thrown out in the 80s, at the exact moment that women fried their hair and wore the trashiest clothing of the century. The 80s invented the idea that Americans don't have to respect poor people, which I guess we can either pin on Reaganism or liberal yuppies, but the Michelle Obama-Hillary Clinton-notorious RBG people really, really liked it and took it to excruciating heights in the 2010s.
aiislove
4mo ago
Yeah, I find that opinion gross and evil and degrading to the average person to the extent that I don't understand where it comes from. The people they're imagining will do poorly without a job are frankly mostly already living without a job, and have done badly in school, which was difficult for them to begin with. Anyone who is doing fine with a job already will do fine without a job too.
aiislove
4mo ago
I would recommend going to google's gemini, explaining what you want changed, and paste in the entire column of dates that you want to be changed. Ask for it to give you the results in a spreadsheet format. If it doesn't do the spreadsheet format right just ask for it in plain text with everything on a new row to copy paste. How many lines of data do you need to clean up? The more data you feed it the more chance for error. I would start with a smaller number (maybe 500 or less) to begin with, you may have to feed it a few times if you have like 10,000 rows or whatever.
You'd think it would be better to upload the spreadsheet and ask it to edit the spreadsheet how you want but in my experience the more extraneous data you feed it the more likely it is to mess up. Just doing it in the chat box window keeps it simple enough that it won't usually skip rows or get confused. You may have to explain the "very non-standard date formatting" in the worst case but it can probably figure it out on its own.
aiislove
4mo ago
Yes it's a bit disjointed and sloppy but I still can glean some interesting insights from it. His concepts aren't completely disjointed but a bit meandering imo.
mentioned a few times (including here iirc)
I did a search for his name as well as "Predictive History" and there were no hits, I lurk extensively here and never saw him mentioned at the motte
aiislove
4mo ago
Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.
Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.
He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.
He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.
I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.
At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.
If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.
aiislove
4mo ago
Maybe tangential (and I apologize if this is not a direct response to you and may be more relevant a response to 2rafa's similar post below) but I think the largest innovation of LLM's that no one seems to really grasp or state explicitly is the speed of response of these models. It is not just that they can do some of your work, it is that they can do some of your work in seconds. I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds. This work would have taken hours and hours of time to do it in the past, which does not mean I used to spend hours and hours doing it, it meant that I would come up with a solution that was much faster but much less effective than what I can do now. As a one-man show my work is significantly easier and faster than it was before LLM's. I am reaping the rewards of it every day. I am someone who has only worked one internship and spent about a year doing freelance work in my life, otherwise I have always been self employed. I feel so little empathy toward people whose entire careers have been working for someone else and who suddenly feel betrayed by their employers or afraid of being fired. You relied on others your entire life, and along comes the single greatest invention for self empowerment in centuries and instead of empowering yourself, utilizing the new powers of instant text generation trained on the knowledge of everyone ever, you worry about being replaced. Well, if you lack the self direction and discipline to harness new technologies then I just can't relate.
Similarly I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI. I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that. I have never been bored and find plenty of meaning in my life. I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do. I spend much of my time traveling and thinking about philosophy and creating/designing when I am in the mood. I devote a huge amount of my time and energy to food and sex and relationships, but so do people who work full time jobs. I have never really accepted or bought into the mainstream modernist mode of work/life balance, see it as an abuse of power that I wouldn't accept for myself, and don't understand people who do- or these same people who fear its end.
aiislove
5mo ago
Yes I decided to just trim a tiny bit of my portfolio to pump my cash a little bit (I’m fine with about 8% of my portfolio in cash earning 3.5% interest as a very safe segment of my wealth even as I see cash as a pretty bad investment generally but I can’t stomach being 100% out of cash either.)
I am still squeamish about the market and the AI bubble as well as the commercial housing market but I am humble enough not to try to time the market and at my age I can just wait out any downturn or crash that isn’t completely apocalyptic
aiislove
5mo ago
Hahaha, oh no, I’m nowhere near three fingers level mastery at Japanese or French culture, I probably couldn’t even pass as a New Yorker or a Southerner, as a midwesterner myself. I mean, mastery of a culture to the degree that you avoid the three fingers incident in Inglorious Basterds is nearly impossible, which is the biggest takeaway of that scene for me anyway
aiislove
5mo ago
Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.
I speak pretty good German and Spanish, my French and Japanese are ok enough for tourist purposes. Every educated person in Germany and Austria speaks perfect English, the only use I get out of my German is speaking to Turks in Germany and Hungarians/Eastern Europeans, Romanians and Turks in Austria. Spanish is more useful in Spain and probably requisite in central/South America (barring Brazil and a few outliers) but admittedly I haven’t been there so I don’t know. In France you are expected to speak French and English ability is associated with upper classes- so people will be embarrassed if you expect them to speak English, but in response to your point being that French is necessary for important badassery, in my experience anyone important enough in France and broader Europe already speaks English.
In Asia it’s even less required to speak a local language. In most of Asia they will be surprised if you do. Japanese don’t go to Korea and speak Korean, or Japanese, they speak English. Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English. And so on and so forth.
As an aside, a little while ago I was thinking, oh it would be so useful to have a watch that displayed live translations of whatever audio was in my environment or people I was speaking to in English. Then I saw a piece in I think the WSJ saying the new AirPods can translate/interpret people speaking to you in foreign languages. I thought that was cool and useful though I worry most people you speak with will still think you’re being rude for speaking to them with headphones in, plus it won’t talk to them in their language so I think the watch visual interface solution would be better. I also worry about the barrier to integration of cultures being too low. Now every immigrant with $120 (or whatever AirPods cost) can get translation of whatever language they want, giving them an asymmetric advantage over people who aren’t using the technology.
aiislove
7mo ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal
aiislove
7mo ago
Oooooooh this comment is so far away from my personal suspicions and understanding of things that I'm fascinated to see it written out like this. Apparently you are anti blank slatism and I am very anti blank slate as well but we seem to have completely opposite assumptions and terminal end goals in this.
the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans.
I don't see this at all. In my views, blank slate progressives are the ones who absolutely prioritize the "Soft Status" of my original theory over any kind of hard status. They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites, and this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it. This is what gives the progressive stack its power- to paint the minorities as the eternal victim. Instead what I propose is that black people have their own strengths, which are not the strengths of the PMC class, and that this is actually completely dignified on its own terms, and to try to prop up the academic achievements of a people not predisposed to these strengths is firstly humiliating toward black people, secondarily dehumanizing toward them, thirdly a waste of time, and fourthly demeaning to the rest of humanity as well. Indeed the arrogance of the white progressive that it takes to even imagine doing this makes me queazy and begin to imagine them all as Icarus circling ever closer toward the sun without an ounce of suspicion that their wings are about to melt.
An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil
This doesn't make sense at all to me... If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks. On the other hand I believe white people, and indeed Asian people, intuitively hold the belief in their inferiority when they find themselves as victims of black crime or feel anxiety when black people are around, because they are bigger scarier and more aggressive etc than smaller weaker people. My family has lived in the midwest for generations and the ones who kept living in increasingly black areas were buying more and more guns and becoming increasingly paranoid of black crime because they lived with its effects every day, meanwhile my family members who have moved out of those areas simply don't live with that fear and paranoia to the same degree.
So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior
I can imagine becoming this person only if I was absolutely positive that my group (whites) was superior to black people. If there was a 1000000% superior race out there and I was running around telling people how much I loved them, that would be so crazy. If there was a group that I saw as inferior and I ran around telling people how much I loved them, I would be getting so many brownie points from everybody. Which describes progressivism more accurately? I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority, and of the inferiority of blacks. Anything that would truly point to an axis of power that holds blacks as more powerful (say in sports achievement) can only shake the foundations of the progressive worldview. They need to have a perpetual victim.
This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization.
That worldview can only be corrected with more real world experience, acceptance of nature, respect for humanity and differences, and less ridiculous hubris, rather than a thin veneer of science and shallow morals that teach us something outside the realm of physical experience and history.
aiislove
7mo ago
My rankings are subjective and I'm not married to any of them. If we all filled out the chart with the same people we'd probably all have everybody in (slightly to wildly) different positions, especially considering different people move throughout their lives and as others pointed out can depend on the situation or social surroundings.
Also, come on. Is Ellen really more powerful than Oprah? No one thinks that.
I think that, if I was serving them in some context I'd probably give creepy Ellen whatever she wanted while I'd be inclined to openly roll my eyes in Oprah's face. I think Ellen commands more respect than Oprah based mostly on their vibes and appearances. Oprah seems more haughty and irritating while Ellen seems like she'd keep the interaction on a more professional level which translates to more soft power.
aiislove
7mo ago
Lots of women have the same thing going on - they may want to be rich, clever, happily married etc. but in the moment they are far more emotionally validated by evidence that they are hot.
Are you sure about this? Do any women on this site want to share their experiences? I genuinely don't know if women think this way, because if I swap the genders it seems 100% true but I suspect women are less obsessed with being hot than men are, and are happier with soft status qualities like wealth, cleverness and happiness in marriage and so on. Personally as a man I don't really care about the secondary soft status I just want to be hot and loved for my intrinsic qualities rather than any sort of skill, virtue or prowess
aiislove
7mo ago
Ah, yes, I just skimmed this page but it seems like this is very much what I was trying to describe. I was wondering if anyone else had teased it out before, I'll look into this. Thank you
aiislove
7mo ago
I am not married to the quadrant names, I had considered Barbarian for that quadrant but thought the term was more politically charged than Caveman which is more politically neutral so I went with that one
aiislove
7mo ago
Oops, I meant Charles III. My bad
Not all starlets migrate that way, I even said that Britney went from Princess to Whore and is either at Whore or Hag. Anyone can go any way on the chart depending on the way they move in terms of hard and soft power, it's just easier and more common for people to follow a certain path, because of age and experiences that lead to a certain direction of progression. You could say it is "the same status" in the sense that they are on the chart in the same way or you could say it is "not the same status" in the sense that it is different qualities leading to different positions in different times of their life etc.
I’m writing this post on the behest of @100ProofTollBooth who asked me to explain my industry (e-commerce) and AI’s effect on it. I apologize in advance if this is not interesting or not what you had in mind when asking, but since I’m easily flattered I’m happy to talk about myself for a bit.
So to explain how I got where I am now I need to explain my background. I have a BA in fashion design. I started a fashion line around the time that I graduated college, which was very fun and somewhat successful. I sold some of my designs at boutiques in NYC and Asia which had always been a dream of mine and that was awesome. I maintained the line for about 7 years until 2020, when a variety of factors pushed me to end the line. It was partially covid making things weird and difficult, it was partially my waning interest in the aesthetic I was working in, but most importantly I was itching to travel and leave the US for a while which would be impossible while I was chained down to a studio with a proper line. So I pivoted around 2020 to focusing on my side gigs. I had done a bit of freelance design for a few brands but I really disliked working with other people (even if one of the designers I worked with was a dream designer who I still respect a lot.) My brand I had managed entirely online through a direct to customer model (outside of the wholesale boutiques I mentioned earlier.) So I was familiar with e-commerce through that (as well as having shopped online since 3rd grade as a customer- I still have the same ebay account I opened when I was 11, I’m proud of this.)
Anyway, while I worked on my brand I also dabbled in the Print on Demand industry. The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble. (More on that later.) But anyway, as I wanted the freedom to travel and fulfill orders while making money away from a studio, I decided to pivot away from my physical brand’s business and move entirely into print on demand. This was a combination of through platforms like Redbubble and traditional marketplaces like ebay, Etsy and amazon.
Today I make over 90% of my yearly earned income from print on demand items that I design myself. Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever. All of these things are not very exciting to me so I am glad I can innovate on design and product offering as a designer rather than having to think about marketing (I hate advertising, I do not pay for ads for my products, I block every ad, I feel like dying when I see an ad irl etc etc)
Hopefully this all makes sense, I am being slightly vague in certain specifics just because it’s a highly competitive industry and I don’t want to be too helpful but I think you can get a broad sense of what I do from the above. Now to respond directly to @100ProofTollBooth’s questions, paraphrased slightly for format reasons:
A) What is my perspective on my industry?
I guess I can answer this from a few different industry perspectives. I will answer about fashion, about Print on Demand, and about e-commerce in general.
I think the fashion industry as a whole is not really terrible. I do think that the industry does drive innovation and prioritize creativity and artistry from people. In certain segments of the industry there is an attempt at conserving craft and tradition that I think is valuable. Being a female dominated industry it does have a tendency to foment woke witch hunts (John Galliano’s firing from Dior is still terrible, I suspect McQueen’s suicide probably had some degree of disillusionment from the politics of fashion for example) but people seem broadly to be over this currently and have some understanding of the cringeness of being that way.
The print on demand industry- as a designer, I value the industry a lot, as it offers me massive flexibility and a huge opportunity to make money without having to put in hardly any investment into inventory or development. I may only make a margin of 25% or less on each individual item I sell but the flexibility it offers is very good. Admittedly my switch from fully designed luxury goods under my own label to basically utilitarian POD items was a bit of a blow to my ego but the advantage of being able to get paid for very little work helps soften the blow.
Ecommerce in general. I think it’s good. It is basically a glorified Sears catalogue mail order service. It isn’t much different today from how that worked back in the 1800s. Amazon’s 2 day shipping is great when it’s available. Aliexpress and temu are really crazy, it reminds me of markets I shopped at in Thailand, where everything is incredibly cheap and abundant, of course giving those sellers access to the US market who are willing to pay American prices for their goods is a huge trade imbalance that benefits both third world middlemen and low and middle income Americans. Many Asia based drop shippers infringe designs that I’ve made and sell them on platforms like walmart.com. It is so ubiquitous that I have stopped looking and issuing takedown requests. I am not a fan and wish they would not do that.
B) AI’s effect on my industry
I suspect AI is changing a lot of things behind the scenes in fashion companies in ways that are not visible in their marketing, product offering or brand messaging. I have noticed a lot of shorts on YouTube are using obviously AI generated market copy which I think is glaring and tacky. I noticed this from brands like Sotheby’s and Balmain who should know better. I know there’s a somewhat trollish brand that is using AI generated imagery in their designs but I can’t remember the brand name (it’s similar to Praying but it isn’t that brand. Praying may use ai generated imagery too but I’m not sure.) Certain brands that are “edgy” can get away with using AI generation, a handful of other brands are getting screeched at by their social media followers for using gen AI, it just depends on the customer’s opinion when it comes to high end brands.
The first casualty of AI in print on demand was Redbubble. They had already been slowly tapering off the payouts and royalties given to artists but as soon as generative AI came out they clamped down hard, introducing a weird tier system. I had like 7 RB accounts at the time and they put 6 of my accounts in the crappy/low royalty tier, and one account in the high royalty tier. The one they put in the higher tier had like 12 rather bad, early gen AI designs, so if they were trying to put all the AI accounts on the lower tier, they failed. Naturally I only uploaded designs to the high tier moving forward, which they then deranked to the low royalty tier a few weeks later. They introduced a terrible system where the higher you price your items, the greater the take that RB takes from you, de-incentivizing artists to come up with designs that people are willing to pay more for. I have not uploaded anything to RB in quite some time as a protest to their system.
I will interject here and say that I do use gen AI for a small portion of my print on demand work. I would probably estimate that only about 10% of my yearly income comes from anything that AI has touched creatively in any way. This is partially because I have thousands of designs I generated before gen AI was even a thing that continue to earn me the bulk of my income, and partially because scaling gen AI is still quite slow and slower than scaling non-AI designs.
AI’s effect on e-commerce. Again I believe most of the innovation is behind the scenes here. I have used gen AI to generate product images on Etsy. These images look really good, in my opinion, but they have not increased my sales at all. In fact many of them are off-putting to people. The ones that do work are ones that look like casual iPhone photos. I can generate beautiful high end imagery of things and the crappy fake iPhone photo will outperform the beautiful one every time. It is just what the customer trusts, is used to, and attracted to. I don’t really relate but it’s not really up to me.
So, generative AI is still proving to be relatively ineffective for design generation, and for marketing purposes. But what I do use it for: brainstorming relevant terms and keywords, writing marketing copy (with good SEO. Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.) I built an app in Gemini ai studio the other day that will generate good SEO titles and brands and descriptions that output to CSV which saves me time uploading designs. Before I did this by copy pasting formulas in google sheets, this will save me quite a bit of time moving forward.
C) I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc.
It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that. In the beginning I kept thinking it was frustrating because I didn’t have any sales data to draw from- so I could be putting up 50 things that no one wanted and didn’t know it. I look back at those times and realize I was correct, that if I had sales data back then I would have been able to grow much more quickly. But now I have the sales data so I can use it to generate more and more desirable products for people. My sales history/data is the most valuable thing I am generating.
D) What the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do.
Hrmmm. You have to be able to spend a year or a few years making nearly no money from e-commerce. The first year I switched to all POD I only made like $9,000. I lived off money I saved from my earlier business endeavors. But once you have the data and the momentum you can just scale up and be successful in whatever niche you find profitable. Be willing to chase the money, none of the niches I sell in are at all interesting to me. At first this irritated me but I value my customer enough that I don’t really mind anymore. I mean I am grateful that there are people willing to buy the things I’m willing to design and that’s very valuable to me.
I guess the “chumps” and the “influencers” you mentioned earlier just lack the dedication over years to make it work. It’s not a get rich quick scheme (I guess it’s possible if you get lucky but it’s not likely to last over several years.)
I have always been a fan of really tedious games like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, or even worse, those desktop based games like Farmville or Factorio knockoffs. At some point in college I thought if I found these so addictive I might as well use that time and energy and pour it into something that actually makes money, and nothing is as tedious as managing a ton of POD designs across 15 different platform accounts, so in a way I did just make those tedious games into a career. By the way, at this point, my career is nearly entirely passive, I actively work on stuff for like an hour a week which is mainly ordering POD items manually from various producers. I could automate this but it’s still so little work that I don’t mind doing it myself. The largest bit of work for me is that once a year I generate and upload new designs which takes a few weeks of working every day. I’m afraid of automating this process because it violates terms for a certain site so I just do it manually still.
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I hope that answered your questions and gave you food for thought. I’m happy to answer follow up questions as well.
In return, you said you know about strippers, bars, hookers, and the nightlife industry. How do you know about those things? Do you work with them or just spend a lot of time with them? I’m gay, you have any insights or experiences or information that I’d be interested in as a fan of, um, gay strippers and gay bars? Also, I never heard the term Hick Hop before you used it. I was imagining it was like mostly a wigger thing but I see some black people involved in this. Where is hick hop geographically centered: The South, the West, Appalachia?
EDIT: I forgot I wanted to add another paragraph at the end that gave a more broad response to the AI question. I answered how AI HAS changed my industry from my perspective above, which basically, it hasn't changed it very much. But moving forward I can see a few huge changes on the horizon. Amazon has already started AI generating tshirt designs and selling them on their website. They aren't very good but neither are a lot of the traditionally designed designs that they sit next to. Amazon has been doing a similar thing for years - competing with their own 3rd party sellers by cutting them out and sourcing from the same suppliers the same items and usually undercutting them in bulk purchases. The fact that they are using AI to compete with designers is not a terribly huge change but is slightly different. You'd expect marketplaces like redbubble and etsy to be overflowing already with AI slop, but it's only encroaching on certain segments. Bad AI slop is unpopular and doesn't sell, good AI slop is good enough that you can't detect it. Glaringly bad AI goods just don't do well in the algorithm. I have seen crazy AI generated products marketed on platforms like temu but they were already pulling ridiculous marketing with photoshop so it's not a huge change there either. I imagine all these changes will continue to ramp up over the next few years and eventually either the algorithm will just hide anything bad and ridiculous or every website will break in a deluge of AI nonsense. I'd bet on the former for now.
I am not worried about AI in the near term, because we're going to be in the stage where early adopters/people who pay attention (like me) can benefit for a little while. I am small and light enough to be able to adapt to the changing landscape. Once large firms get very efficient at using AI in ecom, the situation might change, which is why I diversify my business as much as possible and, failing all that, have always saved a ton of my income and can switch back to a business with a larger moat at any time (I want to have a proper luxury brand some day using my own name, and I don't see AI making this impossible barring some postindustrial all knowing sci fi tier AI which I'm skeptical of coming in the next 5 years at least) or, barring all that, simply retire.
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