Meh, it shouldn’t be normalised, it’s degrading and copy cats will absolutely do it in non consensual ways. This is well into the realm of BDSM, and needs clearly established consent, not some move that people will pull out at random because they saw it in a screen

Nevertheless, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – as well as Nvidia and AMD – are a very long way from simply going under.

Not really, once you look at the startups like OpenAI they have enormous expenses that depend on constant debt and investment funding, and the cost and risk of sustaining that debt can easily reach a point where they struggle to get new investors to foot the bill.

The whole market is based on a belief in a huge pot of gold some time in the future, and it is driven by unfathomable amounts of debt to keep the machinery running towards that goal. Once the belief in the goal getting reached gets broken, the change in momentum breaks the whole system.

That includes the big players, huge amounts of their balance sheets, including claims of revenue, are circular trades between themselves. Even google claims revenue from asset price growth in their AI subsidiaries.

Once it shifts from investment to repaying bad debts the numbers will look completely different for all the big companies involved. We’re talking potentially bail outs basically across the board

Then you’re getting into the infinite monkey theorem, and one important part is that for the random monkeys to create works of art like Shakespeare you also need a reviewer to determine when the output is interesting, in that case you are really shifting the burden of creativity onto the reviewer

What are the practical differences between them?