Item — HN Reader

I want to take a step back and reflect on what this actually shows us. Look at the examples Google provides: it refers to the generated objects as "products", clearly pointing toward shopping or e-commerce use cases.

It seems like the real goal here, for Google and other AI companies, is a world flooded with endless AI-generated variants of objects that don’t even exist yet, crafted to be sold and marketed (probably by AI too) to hyper-targeted audiences. This feels like an incoming wave of "AI slop", mass-produced synthetic content, crashing against the small island of genuine human craftsmanship and real, existing objects.

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It's sort of sad how these tools went from "godlike new era of human civilization" to "some commodity tools for marketing teams to sell stuff".

I get that they are trying to find some practical used cases for their tools. But there's no enlightenment in the product development here.

If this is already the part of the s-curve where these AI tools get diminishing returns...what a waste of everybody's time.

Recently I've been seeing a lot of holiday lets on sites like Rightmove (UK) and Airbnb with clearly AI generated 'enhancements' to the photos.

It should be illegal in my view.

Yeah - and honestly I don't really get this. Using GenAI for real-world products seems like a recipe for a slew of incoming fraudulent advertising lawsuits if the images are slightly different from the actual physical products yet presented as if they are actual real photographs.

The gating factor here is the pool of consumers. Once people have slop exhaustion there's nobody to sell this to.

Maybe this is why all of the future AI fiction has people dressed in the same bland clothing.