Producer Responsibility in the AI Era: Lower Barriers to Entry, Higher Barriers to Trust
As AI lowers the barriers to producing services and content, platforms are becoming increasingly relentless in filtering out low-quality goods.
To raise the average quality of their marketplaces while reducing the cost of moderation, they assign individuals reputations and trust scores, then track those signals over time.
And when someone crosses the line beyond what a platform is willing to tolerate, that person may permanently lose the opportunity to participate in the market. Look at cases involving YouTube and other services operated by major tech companies, where platforms have gone to considerable lengths to identify and block accounts created to circumvent previous enforcement.
Do not become so focused on the immediate profits AI might bring you that you make the mistake of permanently losing access to major markets in the future.
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Unlike the legal system, which is supposed to operate on the presumption of innocence, platforms often seem to operate on something closer to a presumption of guilt (...). And by taking advantage of their dominant position, they can impose harsh consequences while offering little or no meaningful path to restoration.
They have no shortage of producers waiting to participate in their marketplaces, so they have little reason to be accommodating. Once you have been “flagged,” getting back to where you were before can be extremely difficult.
Just as you may hate seeing YouTube flooded with AI slop,
other people may also have no desire to use the sloppy apps and services you made with AI.
And yet people become so eager for immediate profit that they say they should just ship something first and worry about the rest later.
Since when did a minimum viable product become a model in which the user is expected to bear the risk?
“Companies are sloppy too. Even famous telecom companies get hacked all the time, lol.”
“Plenty of professional developers skip that stuff too.”
The argument that “other people do not do it either, therefore it is acceptable for me not to do it” is something we should have outgrown in adolescence.
Wasn’t this argument already defeated by your mother or your teacher years ago?
— “If they do it, does that mean you should too?”
When you are buying something,
you complain that it is cheaply made in China, that the seller is a scammer, that refunds are impossible, or that the merchant is unreasonable.
So why are you so much more forgiving when it comes to the quality and legitimacy of the courses, e-books, or apps that you sell yourself?
