AI takeover the plugin industry

[SampleScience]

I've always been skeptical of all the AI hype out there, but now it's different. What I'm seeing and what I've tested shows me that making a quality audio plugin isn't hard anymore. As long as you have the idea, you can make it without any programming/scripting/UI design skills.

I have to be honest, I'm shocked! I knew it was coming, but I thought we had another 10 years or so ahead of us. Now, I think we have 2 years at best.

I've been making a living creating plugins since 2015 and it's been great. Making a living from my passion for sound design, UI design, and tech felt like living the dream. But now the dream is over and I have to wake up.

Even sample-based instruments from acoustic instruments aren't safe anymore. During the last 2 years, I've spent a lot of time learning how to do this and now I don't see the point anymore.

More recently, I thought about increasing my skills by learning HISE scripting inside-out, but seeing that people can just take a screenshot of my plugin's page, paste it into ChatGPT, ask it to create a prompt to clone it in Codex, and get a decent clone in a matter of minutes, I think it's time to call it quits. In a matter of hours, the same plugin can be polished to the point where the user will have a customized plugin for their own needs.

I can't compete with that. It's just impossible. No matter how hard I work on a plugin, if it becomes a success, it will be reverse-engineered.

So what's left? Hope.

Hope that at some point the AI industry will collapse because it's not a viable business model. If that happens, I'm pretty sure everything will go back to how it was and AI plugins will disappear like a bad dream.

I've done a lot of experiments with local LLMs and they are nowhere near the frontier models. Fairly close depending on how you use them, but they break quickly the longer the conversation gets. And the results are inconsistent. Even with a $10,000+ computer setup like the one I have.

The overabundance of new plugin "companies" and the lack of editorial filtering from the media outlets that cover the industry make it much harder to break through and get actual sales.

So here are the questions: has the AI takeover affected your business income? Can you see it in your stats? Or is it business as usual? Are there solutions I'm overlooking? Things that are obvious? Let me know.

[David Healey]

@SampleScience said in AI takeover the plugin industry:

a quality audio plugin

How do you know the quality if you can't read/understand the code?

@SampleScience said in AI takeover the plugin industry:

So here are the questions: has the AI takeover affected your business income? Can you see it in your stats? Or is it business as usual? Are there solutions I'm overlooking? Things that are obvious? Let me know.

No it hasn't affected my business - at least not negatively. Most of the mass spammed AI plugins out there are slop anyway.

It has opened up another revenue stream for me because I've had a few requests to review other people's AI generated code - as the AI gets better though I expect this to be less important.

The software is not the product, it has never been the product, everyone who sells open source software knows this. And this is why the most pirated software companies in the world are also the most successful.

The software is a part of the package of value the user gets. The reason they pay for it is all the other stuff that comes with that: bug fixes, feature updates, secure downloads, tech support, trust, reputation, the warm feeling you get from supporting a small business, etc.

All those things are only enhanced by AI. The more slop that's out there the more your products will stand out - even if your products are created by AI, you can provide all that other stuff that fly-by-night "developers" aren't providing.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey said in AI takeover the plugin industry:

How do you know the quality if you can't read/understand the code?

I think you place too much emphasis on the creator reading and/or understanding the code. That will become a thing of the past very quickly. In some areas, it has already.

@David-Healey said in AI takeover the plugin industry:

The more slop that's out there the more your products will stand out

What concerns me is that whole plugin market will collapse because people will be able to build whatever they want whenever they want it. We will survive by delivering what AI slop and vibe-coders can't. Whatever that turns out to be.