When a small company makes a product, they are happy to make something useful in exchange for a living. When big tech makes something, you are the product and they just want to use their economies of scale to squeeze you dry, making you think they have something useful.

People talk about AI now as if it is a great tool for them. Maybe it is, but in some years it won't really be a great tool at all except at keeping power in the hands of the most wealthy.

For example, I have a small hobby business with a few friends. One of them suggested that we put up a stall at a major upcoming exhibition.

I've never done one of these before, so I asked GPT o3 to help me figure out what instructions to share with my fabricator. The output was so good that the fabricator said I'd made his job 5x easier.

Once I got the 3d render, I asked o3 to help me figure out how to draw more attention. It gave me display ideas for different budgets, copy ideas, and layout ideas.

The display ideas were fantastic and it would have taken a few hours of brainstorming to come up with them.

The copy ideas were also really good. I've worked as a copywriter in the past and gun to my head, I could maybe get about 10% more juice out of them. For the average business, it was perfectly fine at first pass.