I hate the word content. It's like saying "I'm eating a product" when you mean to say "I'm having a peking duck." But having to say content is largely a failure of language than intent. It's the only word that's capable of encapsulating every form of media you consume.

Generative AIs (DALL-E, ChatGPT, Character.AI, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, et al) hit us like a ton of brick this year. The content they stand to generate will approach infinity.

Lay people still think it's kinda cute. I don't think they appreciate the gravity of the implications. There are two angles from where I think about this.

As a creator

When machines crank quality media that matches human professionals, competing for attention with computers feels hopeless. Quantity alone has a quality of its own.

Team-organic-human tend to be rather confident that only they are capable of producing works of great quality. I think this is misplaced. Competing on quality will only get more difficult.

The way forward has to be very much like the chess scene these days. Upping the game requires human and machine combo.

Given enough time, machine models will start to incestiously feed on the stuffs they generated themselves. The feedback loop will be interesting to see.

As a consumer

This I'm the least optimistic. Filtering signals from noise will get even harder, difficult enough as it is.

For that reason the default move is to bias towards classic materials. I wish it isn't so. It means contemporary media will take so much more time to establish its seminalities.

Human tastemakers and curators would matter even more. Team-human will like this, but I think the jury is still out on whether this will turn the way they hope.

I'm pessimistic as a consumer not because generated content are inferior in qualty, it might turn out to be superior. But I'm skeptical about how True they can be.

In the long run I'm not certain that narratives will continue to be shaped by only humans. When machines make up new thoughts for folks to think that's a new frontier to behold.