This think-piece has been sitting as draft for some time, trying to escape. The presence of something potent can be felt, but ultimately I'm still sticking my hands out trying to touch something in the fog of confusion.

What started out as trying to answer some malformed questions about infinite content turned into a search for good questions around it instead.

What it is has something to do with this:

When you have a million people trying to tell a story at once, you either get an unnarratable meltdown, or invent narrative protocols capable of containing the complexity and scale.

Spoiler alert

By the end of Marvel's Loki season 2, Loki is given the power (or burden) of keeping together all timelines in the universe. Loki is now effectively the god of stories.

So what does it mean? I'm not talking about how MCU will work going forward. Look at it one way, it's a cheap retcon device.

But it look it another way, just the concept alone can be profound. I'm asking you to imagine being an entity that oversees all stories.

What would you choose to care about in Loki's position? When anything is made possible, what would matter to you?

Infinite stories

Now that machine-learned models are not going away, the act of storytelling has now gotten cheap.

By that it's not just stories in the Yuval Harari's sense (which include collective fictions like money and religions). The actual production of quality conventional fiction is driven down to the ground.

There's only one possible outcome from this: stories are so abundant that they are demoted to being mere content.

What's the difference? Stories are attempts at the truth; content are made for dopamine-hit.

"So we just need better filters," some may say. But I'm not sure if it's the same age-old problem anymore.

Filters (better search engines) solves for quality consumption. Fundamentally I'm questioning the whole act of consumption. Is there a point to consuming any single narrative when it's going to age out and rapidly overtaken by infinite other stories?

Going a step further, I'm casting doubt into the act of making art altogether.

What were stories for?

And by contrast, what are they for now?

Stories existed before media came around. The same stories shape people, provide them points of references and unite them. Like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok), stories themselves are a form of higher-level language.

So what happens when there are infinite stories? Do they still serve the same purpose? If not, what changes would they affect?

In the present day, for infinite stories to become common points of references, do they all have to be the same? In other words, must they be simply infinite renditions on the same story?

Do we end up getting only Hero's Journey kinds of stories, only with different skins?

If this is the result of narrative protocols (by Venkat above), does contributing another entry into the infinite list of hero's journey stories still meaningful?

If I have to be generous, rendition varieties occupy the same level of value as a Linux distro. It put together pieces of components in a unique way that's valuable to a handful of people. Ultimately it's still using the same Linux kernel / telling the same story.

The more stories they are, the more they look the same.

What's valuable now?

If storytelling is now cheap, does superior value come from putting together infinite stories?

Meta-storytelling? What does that look like?

How is superiority measured? However it is, I don't want it to be social validation (eyeballs) or simple dopamine-hit.

Here's a candidate: originality & uniqueness.

This is not as trivial as it sounds. It's said that nothing is ever truly original. If everything is derivative, chasing originality becomes much more than an ego-trip.

The capital market certainly does not reward originality as its own quality. A movie is usually acclaimed for its execution along some lines of conventions. A 100% original movie down to how it handles dialogues and characters would make no sense to anyone.

So what if in a machine-learned world, we end up valuing originality for its own sake (as long as it's minimally legible)?

The human-played game becomes about making things that machines could not make sense of. As soon as there's enough of something similar out there for the GPUs the process; AI models can make the same thing; the game would be over. Time to switch medium.