AI and the Scarlet Letter | Shimmy Says Ep. 45

Every new tool wears a scarlet letter at first, not because it's broken, but because it's misunderstood. History always decides this the same way the output wins. The only question is where do you wanna live?

Hey everyone, it's Shimmy and welcome to this week. Shimmy says, I'm glad you're here with me. You know, what a crazy week.

What a crazy week. There's so much going on. Originally, if you would've asked me on Monday, I would've told you we were talking about TBOs today.

You know, forming their own first, their own social network, then their own religion. Now, I saw a thing where they're actually starting a site where they can rent humans. Bogle mind boggling.

But I want to talk to you about something else today. I call it AI in the Scarlet Letter. Let's talk about it.

How many of you remember reading The Scarlet Letter in school? I see some of you aren't raising your hands. Look, the fact is, I don't even know if kids read in school anymore, but if you remember the Scarlet Letter, the poor lady had to have that a, the red a because of what she's done.

But there's something that's been bugging me a while, and it, it has to do with the output of ai. Because, you know, in a world where AI can seemingly generate anything in everything, there seems to be a scarlet letter attached to anything and everything it does. It's a stigma that somehow AI generated output is less than inferior, cheap.

You know exactly what I'm talking about because some of you are guilty of it. I'm probably guilty of it sometimes too. Some of us, for a certain percentage, we, and when we hear, oh, I did this in ai, or this was helped with the creation of ai, or this was done by ai, a lot of people just tune out.

They just say, I don't care whether it's good. I don't care how good it is. You know what?

It's ai. So therefore it's bad. It must be junk.

It's less than, it's not human. It's soulless. And what I've come to understand in talking to people about why they say that is it has very little to do with the quality of the output.

It's really about fear. And you may not wanna admit it, but I'm telling you, it's about fear you. It's fear of what can happen to you.

Are you gonna have a job? Are you going be relevant? Are you gonna be left behind?

Are you gonna live below the AI poverty line? Now, I don't know how long this current, let's call it scarlet letter phase, is gonna going to last, but I do know one thing for sure it's going to pass. 'cause it always does.

The reason simple, the rate of improvement we're seeing in n ai generated work product is absolutely smoking The rate of improvement in he human generated work, it's not even close. Now this doesn't mean that humans don't matter. They're not important or they're not running the show.

It just means that the curve is real and eventually output and quality when arguments over prejudice and ignorance. We've seen this movie before. Now for me, it started a long time ago, believe it or not, when I was a little kid and I was a little kid once, um, the phrase made in Japan meant something derogatory.

When you had toys or items made in de de Japan, it meant it was cheap, low quality disposable. You didn't expect it to last. It was like tin po shaky electronics and those silly Godzilla movies where you had some big rubber lizards stepping on cardboard buildings.

But you watch the movie anyway 'cause it was pretty good. Um, but nobody bought Japanese products for quality. They were made in Japan.

But then fast forward a few years, all of a sudden Japan is making the finest quality products in the world. They become world renowned for their craftsmanship. For the, the Toyota Katza, right?

The, the manufacturing, just in time inventory, precision design. Cars that run forever are electronics that define the category. Sony, Panasonic.

That stigma evaporated. Well, it, it really didn't. Eva evaporate, it moved, it moved from Japan to China, right?

For many of you out there, over the last, I don't know, 35 years, if you're that old, made in China, connoted a another similar kind of thing. Cheap, copied, they stole our IP and they made a a, an inferior copy of it. Knockoffs disposable junk.

You know, over the last five, seven years, something happened. That stigma disappeared too. All of a sudden today, China produces some of the most advanced electronics.

I I couldn't do the show without Chinese electronics vehicles. Electric vehicles, industrial systems. That scarlet letter's gone away too.

And you know what? AI's right on schedule, it's scarlet Letter's gonna disappear too. Let's talk about software.

When I first started hearing about AI writing code, it was terrible. It didn't get the syntax right. The logic was all wrong.

There was no APIs. We didn't have MCP. Anyone who tried it back then remembers thinking, you know, this is cute.

But I would not put any production level AI generated code out in production. But here's the thing, ai, it really is learning fast, really, really fast. And today we estimate 60% of all the code generates coming from ai.

Plenty of developers will tell you that AI generated code today is roughly on par with human code, average human code. Not elite, not as good as the best developers out there, but it's usable. It's shippable, it's product adjacent if not product ready.

But here's the scary thing that maybe no one's told you. Human code quality has basically stated a straight line for a long time. X amount of vulnerabilities per x amount of y amount of lines.

AI code quality, though it, the quality keeps going up, the vulnerabilities keep going down. So it's roughly on par with human generated code now, but it continues to go down and when it goes down, it's gonna be better. I know, I know I hear some of you already saying it, but shimmy, but shimmy AI will never code as well as the best developers.

I agree today it won't. But what about tomorrow? What about the day after that?

That Scarlet Letter isn't gonna be there for? Because here's what always happens. Once a tool reaches a critical mass of adoption, once it becomes responsible for a meaningful percentage of the output, acceptance follows.

Not because people fall in love with the tool or forget the scarlet letter, but it's because results matter. Results and profit beat ideology every single time undefeated. And that scarlet letter then starts to fade.

And we're seeing the same thing, not just with code. Now we're seeing with written content. You know, I still see some content sites out there.

They put big banners, 100% human content, no AI used in making this content. And they wear it like a proud badge. Their own scarlet letter.

I don't know. To me that feels quaint. You know what?

Maybe even a little arrogant. 'cause look, there's always gonna be craftspeople who make things by hand, one at a time. God bless 'em.

We love getting handmade stuff like that. And their work is valuable. It has value.

But you know what? Since like the early 19 hundreds mass production didn't ruin ruin society, it empowered it, it gave rise to the middle class. It, it gave everything, right?

Today we want scale. We want mass production development. Co-development is no longer a cottage industry either is developing content, either is developing art, music, and film produced by AI is going to be the defining success story of this century.

Just like mass production and assembly lines or the defining success story of the last century. Go to Dearborn, Michigan. Go to a Ford factory.

See for yourself, I'll tell you this, as someone who writes constantly and has been evolving in, in terms of my use of ai, let me be very clear what I think it can and can't do today anyway. I don't think AI's writing the great next or the next Great American novel or anybody's novel, not great, not today. But can it write your next email, your next blog post marketing copy or internal memo letters?

Hell yeah, absolutely. And when I say AI writes, I don't mean it writes it in a vacuum. You just don't say ai.

Write me a letter. That's the biggest mistake I see people making over and over again. I see 'em making it here at Techstrong.

I see 'em making it at other companies. I see 'em making it. Everyone I speak to, AI output is only as good as the person guiding it.

I said it before, I'll say it again. It's humans. Humans who provide the spark.

You know, borrow a line or paraphrase a line from Billy Joe. AI doesn't start the fire my friends humans do. It's that spark.

A good writer using AI will still produce better prose than a bad writer using the same tools or a bad writer. Not using ai. AI amplifies your thinking.

It amplifies your talent. It doesn't replace it. Let's move on from writing.

Let's, let's go to something even more creative. 'cause here's another area where I see craziness, right? Synthetic music, synthetic art, synthetic video.

So-called synthetic, meaning it's made with ai, it's made by ai. You know what? I've seen some people say it's soulless, it's cold, it's slop, it's fake.

I saw a guy on on LinkedIn today who you know, posted an AI picture and put a little disclaimer, this isn't a real picture. It was created by ai. I don't care who created it.

It's still a real picture. It's just not a picture created by a human. And that's okay.

But it doesn't make it any less real. So most of the critics who, who you know, call this stuff slop, fake, soulless, synthetic. I don't know how many of them actually have listened to some of the best examples of synthetic music.

Watch some of the best synthetic videos that AI's popped up or spend time with the art. That's AI is churning out. 'cause if they did, they'd be uncomfortable about admitting something.

They'd have to admit that some of it is just pretty damn good and it's getting better every single day. That's the thing. It keeps getting better.

Second, just like I said with code in writing, the quality depends on the human behind it. A musician with skill is gonna produce better AI assisted music than someone without it. A designer with a good eye is going to create better visuals and designs than someone just clicking in random prompting.

Tools don't erase talent, they reward it and enhance it. And AI is create. AI is creating the next generation of talented tool users.

Today, AI is not creating the next Picasso painting today. No, it may in the future though, given a human's input and spark. But for a lot of what we do, 80% of what we do, social graphics, marketing visuals, short form entertainment, storytelling, TikTok videos and all of this IT friends, it's already more than good enough.

It's already more than good enough. But I hear what some of you are saying. You're saying, shimmy, we're overwhelmed.

We're adrift in ai slop. There's too much AI generated content. Hey, you know what?

We're not wrong. You're not wrong about feeling that there. No doubt it's a flood.

It's exhausting. Especially some of the stuff that obviously is AI and people try to play it off as not. But let's be honest, let's be honest with ourselves, content overload.

Don't blame it all on ai. That didn't start with ai. It's not gonna end with ai.

AI just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning. And right now, AI creation feels more to me like a kid with a new bike. If you were ever a kid and well, you were all kids once, some of you may still be kids, but if you ever got a new bike, you remember what it was like the first day you woke up after you got your new bike.

You couldn't wait to get out there. Hopefully there was no school. You rode it everywhere.

You showed it to everyone, you just kept wearing it till the tires wore out. Just couldn't stop riding that bike. But that face passed eventually, right?

They were gonna go through a similar thing here with ai. I think instead of trying to use it for everything, we'll use it for the things that it makes sense to use. And that's where we're heading.

And it won't have the scarlet letter. So what won't pass is we need to rethink how we filter, how we prioritize, and how we make sense of all information. How to pick what we should use AI for and what we shouldn't.

And here's a really delicious irony into this whole thing. AI's gonna help us do that too, because it has that kind of ability. It is total disruption.

So here's my shimmy takeaway on this Thursday, guys. This scarlet letter phase of AI is not the destination. It's no more on a mile marker, on a really great looking highway in the near future.

The idea that AI generated output is inferior is going to feel ridiculous. The made by AI label is going to fade way into the background and be forgotten. Just like so many other maiden labels before it were the people who embrace AI will move faster, they'll create more, they'll compete at a different level.

Those who don't will live, as I said before, below the AI poverty line, AI poverty. And that's not a threat, that's not a hype. That's history.

And that's how things work. The only real question to you guys to watching this is where do you wanna live below the AI poverty line or above it? That's shimmy and I'll see you next week.