Low-Fat Ice Cream

“Low-fat ice cream. We take something good, then make it worse so we can have more of it.”

I don’t remember where I heard about this joke but I like the tension it pokes fun at. Quality vs quantity, and how much worse we’re willing to make something so we can have more of it.

This is a subtle process when you’re thinking of automation with generative AI:

• The code produced by an AI will be worse than that of a capable human programmer but, oh boy, can you have a lot of it.

  • (Case in point, because it’s a Friday night and Halloween is coming up soon, I made this spooky Halloween mirror app in less than an hour without writing a single line of code myself.)

• Customer support delivered by an AI will be worse than if you had a highly dedicated account manager dig deep into the issue. But that’s not scalable if you’re a large company, and many people will take slightly worse support over a 60 minute wait. And modern LLM-based support bots will at least be better than the atrocious customer support bots that do nothing but direct you to the company’s FAQ.

• Art. Now that extra subtle. If you’re okay with generic, derivative, not-that-innovative, you can have all the “art” you want with the various image, video, and music generators. I just doubt anything AI generated will ever produce anything like Beatlemania.

There’s no inherent reason to reject lower quality. It’s good that we have more options than the ultra high-end. Just make sure that you don’t fall below the threshold of usefulness (like the pre-LLM customer support bots 🤯), and that savings are fairly split between purveyor and customer.