Maybe the algorithms will be so good, and enough creative people will use these tools to generate truly exciting content that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise but it just looks totally dire to me for creatives at this moment.
The "content" industry (books, music, movies, all of it) has a systemic issue of which we are only just seeing the beginning. Namely, there is now so much content, and it is all so easily accessible, that the relative value of any one piece of content has fallen way, way down. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in a lifetime, and only so many humans on the planet, and growth in that aggregate content consumption capacity has been far outstripped by the growth in content production capacity.
There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content than you can ever consume - and an increasing proportion of it is available very cheaply, or even free. Anything new faces an uphill battle against everything old - and now, against AI too.
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better (and it may never get better).
The value of generic / impersonal content is rapidly approaching zero. The only thing that still has value is a particular creator of interest posting their next video — like your favorite YouTube channel, you’ll watch that.
It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. It’s something like ‘releasing content that is personally signed’ where the person’s signature has value to a certain audience. The audience is ‘captive’ because they can’t get that ‘personal signature’ anywhere else. Even AI can’t deepfake it, because the perceived value of it is specifically that it is coming from a particular real human person.
Correction: pretend to be a real human (or even a hyperreal human), not to be a real human. This is the game YouTubers and Instagram influencers have been playing for over a decade - there's a team of people building a brand around the face of the vlogger/influencer, making them seem like a really nice and interesting human, where in fact the opposite is the case. The point of it is to exploit human vulnerability to parasocial relationships, creating a captive audience primed to be receptive to the deluge of advertising that follows.
Yes, this is one of the few ways for "content" to keep value these days. Which is ironic, given that the net value of it to the consumer and society is squarely negative.
Are you sure about this? How are you measuring quality?
For me, if something resembles advertising I consider it to be of very low quality. There are some exceptions, for example some of the movie work by Roy Andersson, but they are very few.
As far as I can tell, ad-discourse and ad-style permeates pretty much everything in contemporary "content". Every time I go to my library and open something older than me the language is like a fresh air, it's clear that someone put some intellectual work into it and there is a distinct character to the text, personality imbued by the typographers, authors and editors. This is very rare on the Internet, and whenever I come across it the typography is usually ad-adjacent anyway.
I hope this is the start of walled garden human internet. Web-rings, moderated forums, ect.
A common cyberpunk trope is a trashed net and a private net.
People who pay for content demonstrate that they have disposable income and are willing to spend it, which makes them prime population for advertisers to target. By paying, they're distinguishing themselves for the net-near-worthless population of free users. There's a huge pressure for advertisers to tap into that juicy population of paying users; it takes only so long before any given service succumbs to that pressure.
The problem is with the spam and slop.
Any sucessful walled garden will need to keep this crap out. banning adds is just one way. Content review is another.
There are some, but it's a rounding error compared to the ad-funded slop. Basing your business model around advertising creates strong perverse incentives, pitting you against your users/customers. Sometimes, a company gets enough return on advertising investment they can fund side ventures off their marketing budget - this creates an UBI-like low pressure space for quality content to grow. But stuff funded directly from ads? It's safe to assume the content there is secondary at best, and exists primarily as a vector to bait you so you can be exposed to ads.
> banning adds is just one way. Content review is another.
Right, but they're complementary. Content review gets easier when you cut out 99% of crap at the source by fiat, and with a hard line drawn, the reviewers are much harder for marketers to compromise either.
Agreed. Walled gardens cut out the crap. Invitation only.
For a real world example, just look at the scientific journal system - researchers pay upwards of $5k to publish (after spending however many tens to hundreds of thousands on the science, out of their own pocket), readers can pay $50 per article or their institution can subscribe for tens of thousands of dollars (if they're lucky and have a good negotiator). Journals do nothing of value aside from hosting the PDFs (which absolutely does not cost $50/download) and facilitating anonymous peer review (which amounts to sending emails to a few academics who will review it for free, at no cost to the journal).
Even content that is worth paying for, like research, will quickly reach an equilibrium that maximizes profit while minimizing effort.
They are willing to view ads (proving they value the material) but as a rule are unwilling to pay any cash.
Then they will complain that the internet is full of trash content that doesn't suite them.
This will happen regardless if you paid for content or not. The natural world is filled with parasites, it is an effective evolutionary strategy.
That's completely the wrong framing for this idea.
The problem is that you don't know if it's valuable until you've bought it, unless the seller gives it for free and just trusts you to pay later in the event you did.
If I see a new-to-me fruit in the supermarket, I can buy one to see if I like it, and I can be reasonably confident that my first taste will be a reliable indicator of if I should buy more.
People used to do this with entire newspapers, but (1) newspapers have been derided for taking nonsense for basically as long as we would even recognise them to be newspapers in the modern sense, and (2) dividing them up into separate web pages per article makes the challenge greater, as it's gone from 50p for the entire broadsheet based on the front page headline as an advert, to a "please subscribe" banner after seeing the headline and generic intro paragraph for a random article you were probably linked to because someone else thought it was interesting.
Not that there is no sub-groups that will happily pay.
For all their problems, I trust numerous media brands to not give me slop: The New York Times, The Financial Times, Monocle, Matt Levine, Linus Tech Tips, The Verge, hundreds of YouTubers and Twitter users, even Hacker News. Let media companies and creators who want to set fire to their good names get on with it, because it'll hopefully mean anyone doing a good, consistent job will rise.
Caught red-handed faking test results, the official response "if we actually did the tests we wouldn't be able to publish videos fast enough"
I still trust LTT more than a channel pumping out faceless review videos or one so unknown that there aren't enough viewers to even provide any scrutiny. To butcher the eponymous Linus's law: given enough eyeballs, all mistakes are shallow?
The other part is that practically speaking, there's enough good free content in most fields that paying doesn't get you anything better. It's not surfaced well enough by the algorithms, but it does exist, and it makes it so in most areas, there's very little reason to pay for anything.
Might not be the main reason, just that these unsatisfied users are so vocal, idk.
You literally can't evaluate content before you consume it in it's entirety or the at least the amount you wish.
Given that copyright should be abolished, adverts should be banned and content industry should move to entirely post-paid voluntary financing.
Something like gaming piracy where you play the whole game for free and if you really liked it you "buy" "a copy" to support developers and their investors.
1. People could forcibly seize and redistribute content already made in years 1980-2020. Even that would be better than slop.
2. People could read only those - like scientists or open source and public domain authors - either funded by the state or otherwise willing to publish their works for free at high quality without the monetization slop text. The content exists, but monetized slop hides it.
3. Actually good AI can compress multiple slop articles into useful, non-sloppy content.
I'd be perfectly fine if the internet consists of just math textbooks and science papers, and actually good articles automatically distilled from slop.
It has the potential to give us what we need.
The problem is that slop hides all that!
The problem with public domain stuff is that there is more than enough of it, but you cannot access public domain information because monetized slop has superseded it in the search results.
I believe that automated AI engines will eventually help individuals find non-sloppy public domain articles, or assemble them from slop directly.
But piracy is always a good option.