Zach WeinersmithDo you you think there's a sort of... content creation apocalypse coming? Like this sort of thing:
1) People have limited eyeball time. You can increase it marginally, but certainly not an order of magnitude above what it is now (people have to sleep!)
2) Media creation has gotten ever easier
3) Because of 2, the total quantity of media creation has gone up
4) Because of 1, 2, and 3 there are far more people competing for a pie that can't grow much.
5) AI creation of music, video, text, speech has recently gotten very good. Not nearly as good as the best humans, but good enough, and about 0.1% as much work/money.
6) Because of 5, you'll soon see far far more media that's good enough, meaning better than, say, the old bottom 70%
7) That 70% will increase as the tech gets better and as people get better at using it. And, possibly, as people stop caring, to the extent they care at all now, about whether the artist is a human or not.
The result:
The amount of attention available is more or less fixed by the population of Earth and its waking hours. We're probably close-ish to saturation, at least in the developed world. But the amount of media is about to grow exponentially via automation.
So, how does this shake out? I dunno. Possibilities from the artist's perspective
1) The profession of artist becomes like the profession of hand making nails. Almost nobody does it anymore and in fact most people don't realize it used to be a human job.
2) Artists become like artisan makers of soap. Is the soap better than the stuff at CostCo? Probably not, but you're paying for a perceived human connection.
3) Artists like me who have long-standing audiences do OK, but similar to what we see in programming, the ladder upward gets wrecked.
For consumers, it's possible it's mostly upside in the sense of getting more stuff. The downside is something like brain rot on steroids. Like, social media has allowed media to adapt directly to the most addictable animal-like human behaviors (nipples! social judgment! cute thing! 3 seconds each!)
With AI, potentially we reach a kind of final climax of stimulus-reward in humans, and whatever we see now as widespread behavioral addiction problems goes off the charts, at least until some new equilibrium is achieved.
Less cynically, I suspect we'll also see some really cool stuff.
But I do wonder if the job of entertainer will simply be much more restricted and possibly much less fun. It'll be a small number of people operating content generating systems. No longer a lifestyle for weirdos.
Good morning!
Btw, as a point of comparison, my daughter and I were watching these documentaries on the history of special effects and LLM. She lost interest pretty soon after CGI came along. Why? Not because it looked bad. In fact it looks great. But the romance of the lifestyle was gone.
Special effects in the 70s and 80s were almost entirely practical effects. Lots of tricks, vast amount of knowledge, and also explosions. The result being a lifestyle in which a bunch of geeks got to hang out in a shop all day doing weird stuff.
CGI means it all looks better. It's probably better for the audience, but that old hands-on lifestyle is gone. I see something like this now happening en masse across many professions (including CGI design work!)
Last thought:
Arts as I know them have already been through several apocalypses, with the worst in my lifetime probably being the dotcom bust and then recently social media eating the world so revenue generation is far harder. But AI seems like something different!
My personal strategy is that while I intend to do comics until they're pulled from my clammy, dead hand, my business focus is more and more on books, which have more depth than AI can do for now, and which offer a tangible good. Wish me luck.
Final thought, because by God I'm supposed to be writing a book:
Stuff like this is why I wish people would stop insisting AI is all low quality. That's wishful thinking. I think at least the entertaining and journalism professions are under the shadow of a tidal wave.
The problem is not that AI all sucks. Veo3 is mindblowingly good and whatever Veo4 is will be better. The question isn't whether it's good, it's what to do. And I don't think we can wish it away any more than print artists and journalists could wish away the Internet in the late 90s.