404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism

What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation.

this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

  • Cruxifux@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How can people see people getting away with these idiotic grifts and being rewarded for it and think this system is salvageable?

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    So for the time being, we’re primarily targeting enterprise customers that have a significant need for Kaedim’s large-scale production capabilities.

    Would it be fair to say that this is a strong indicator for snake oil tech?

    Enterprise gives the buyer / user separation advantage. They sell it in to the people who like to hear words like “productivity boost” etc who then dump it on their employees who have to deal with it and pretend it works

    • self@awful.systemsOP
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      1 year ago

      “snake oil you’re forcing your employees to use” is a fairly eloquent summary of the enterprise software space as a whole

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        Working in UX on B2B SaaS in a startup hunting for their first clients really does open your eyes to the theatre of catering to a “user”.

        Serverless lambda react typescript client-side rendering soup that would make the average corporate dell optiplex meltdown before you’ve finished typing the url

  • Evinceo@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    404 really gunning for household name status. I hope they can sustain this level of effort, the space really needs journalism like this.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    It is like crypto! Where exchanges don’t really use crypto internally because it is cheaper to just have your own local database, not use blockchain at all and just write to the chain only when needed. Same with web3 stuff.

    • self@awful.systemsOP
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      1 year ago

      this feels somehow even more dishonest, like one of those smart contracts that promises a ton of automation but it’s all predicated on a human-driven service giving you correct answers, and the whole thing breaks down when that service does

  • kuna@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    I know that labor is undervalued under capitalism, but I’m still surprised they managed to undercut something made with stolen art and sweatshop labor.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Well 2d is vastly different from 3d, and the latter is also quite a lot of work. Techbros just didn’t really know about this and assumed that magical chatgpt could also do 3d.

      Move fast and break your investors money.

      • self@awful.systemsOP
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        1 year ago

        all they had to do was talk to a single engineer with CAD experience to find out how much effort goes into turning a 2D blueprint into a 3D design, so of course they didn’t