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Comment by mudrockbestgirl | Hacker News Reader

Big changes in what content we trust and consume online. I predict that all content-driven sites (YouTube, News, Social Media, forums, reviews) will be dominated by AI-generated content in the near future. This content is directly monetizable via ads/followers/points/second-hand-accounts/etc, so it's a great opportunity for people, particularly those in developing countries, to abuse as long as it lasts.

So far that's pretty obvious, but it's interesting to think about the second-order effects of this. It means that the current ad-based business models with open access no longer work. Instead, it's all about trust. People will be willing to pay for communities that guaranteed to be "human-only" and where content is created by trustworthy sources and trust is quantified and monetized somehow. This also includes verified credentials of posters, pseudonymous or not.

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> It means that the current ad-based business models with open access no longer work

No longer work for who? Viewers appear to be perfectly happy watching AI-generated content; advertisers are happy to have their brand appear next to it (so long as it's not objectionable material), google are happy to get advertising dollars and AI creators are happy to have a low-effort way to produce content.

I think it'll suck the funding out & reduce the number of effective professionals in the space even further.

> People will be willing to pay for communities that guaranteed to be "human-only" and where content is created by trustworthy sources and trust is quantified and monetized somehow.

This has been a pipe dream for decades, and I fail to see what's going to be different this time; modern AI is not meaningfully better at generating low-effort posts than content farms are.

> Viewers appear to be perfectly happy watching AI-generated content

That's true now because it hasn't proliferated yet, but I don't think it will be true for much longer. I think there will be tipping point. When AI-generated content competes with AI generated-content to game the ranking algorithms driven by AI-generated user accounts that write AI-generated comments you end up with something that's not optimized for human end-users anymore.

> modern AI is not meaningfully better at generating low-effort posts than content farms are

It's not better, but potentially 100x cheaper. Not yet, but soon. That means a single developer in a 3rd world country can do the work of a content farm. Maybe you're right and that won't change anything, but I think it will.

> It's not better, but potentially 100x cheaper. Not yet, but soon. That means a single developer in a 3rd world country can do the work of a content farm. Maybe you're right and that won't change anything, but I think it will.

That's fair. It's not meaningfully cheaper for text, because text is cheap and easy to vary automatically, but making video easier to produce will change the dynamic a little.

To see how that might pan out, I'd compare it to the world of text posts, which have been cheap and easy to automate for some time.

EG reddit has heaps of bots making pointless comments so that they can establish a pattern of "looking real" that lets them participate in (paid) upvote farms.

>People will be willing to pay for communities that guaranteed to be "human-only" and where content is created by trustworthy sources and trust is quantified and monetized somehow.

And then someone will let in an AI and spoil it all.

I could totally see this. Scheming for access to “human data” not just “user data”. It also seems like a lot of people would mostly opt out of AI content for entertainment purposes, and instead seek in-person human community (surely still augmented with AI).

And then the droids will enter.

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