The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else
therationalist.substack.com
therationalist.substack.com
The thing that makes this very suspicious is the continuous repetition of the same content, the anonymous writer and the fact that the only other article in this publication is about a tool that’s even better than GPT-3.
GPT-3 certainly has the effect that I have a hard time trusting that anonymous articles that are repetitive are not AI generated any more…
Update: I posted the exact same comment on the article and the author deleted it within two minutes. instead of responding. So yes, it’s likely I was on the money. I re-posted the comment. If it’s not there, you know that this comment is uncomfortable for the author for some reason.
Update 2: my second comment was removed within minutes as well. There’s a commenter claiming they are the author saying they used ChatGPT to generate parts of the article. Does not explain why they keep deleting my comment and not disclosing that this article is AI-generated.
Update 3: posted a third and final comment asking the author to not delete this comment and answer if the article was verenigde by ChatGPT. Comment also deleted within minutes.
This all underscores how it’s becoming hard to trust anonymous authors even now, and how this will just get worse.
If a GPT3 article can generate so much discussion on Hacker News, without most people realizing we are arguing about the output of an AI, GPT3 is ready to go mainstream.
As for the erroneous citation to Forbes: there were two links, one to Forbes and the other to Digiday to backup the next point in the outline I wrote. While transferring the content from Huggingface to the substack editor, I missed that in the proofreading.
Also, this is a good example on why anonymous accounts writing content will be trusted less. You say you used ChatGPT for parts of it. Unclear on what “parts” mean and how much input you had, versus what the AI wrote.
It’s a reason for people to stop reading anonymous authors, or articles that don’t make it clear that it’s not an AI writing part of the article.
I’ll be honest: I feel duped reading a wall of text to realise it’s at least partially generated, and this whole article could have been the prompts you used to generate it.
[1] https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B [2] https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/bloom [3] https://www.jasper.ai/ [4] https://openai.com/api/ [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...
Why have you deleted every comment on your post mentioning GPT-3? There were at least 4 or 5 comments mentioning it and you've deleted every one.
Just using the same language as the deleted comments.
https://openai.com/api/policies/sharing-publication/#content...
- This looks machine generated
- Hi! I'm the person who wrote this by using a machine to generate 'the words' but the important parts are original
- Oops, didn't cite my/its work
Especially in the context of an industry of content creation falling over.
Thank you both!
What is the next step then? A more formal reputation system? How long until reputation is just another traded commodity?
Edit: You can try it here https://huggingface.co/spaces/THUDM/GLM-130B. I tried it. I was not impressed.
For bonus points, the writer cites sources without linking to them, including Forbes—the worst pay-to-play publication out there.
The second half of the article seems more authentic though. I'm not sure ChatGPT would come up with "the middle class comes from economic friction" (paraphrasing).
[1] https://therationalist.substack.com/p/glm-130b-an-open-bilin...
https://therationalist.substack.com/p/glm-130b-an-open-bilin...
Not to nitpick, but did anyone really believe that becoming a tik tok influencer was a reasonable career path for more than a couple hundred people? I don’t see how most middle class people would’ve been helped by the creator economy
He’s right in being skeptical that “people” (who?) thought that “being a creator” was a viable career path, as the article suggests was the case.
Being a content creator/influencer is a viable career path. There are creators with disabilities, creators that never speak, creators that never show their face. Not everyone makes great money but for many people the money is enough.
"The importance of school is secondary because I am easily going to become a rich and famous YouTuber or TikTokker."
Source: Many school teachers.
Yes, there are huge swaths of the population that are, to put it politely, low information and unsophisticated. Everyone comes around to the disappointment of the situation at their own pace.
Art and entertainment has had more supply than demand for at least a century because it is a great life for self-directed creators.
When a youngster tells me they want to be an influencer for their profession, I simply ask them "who are you influencing, and what sort of credibility do you have in order to influence them?"....seems to get the kids every time - they haven't put 2 and 2 together. The credibility needed to influence comes before everything else, and people really don't understand that, for some strange reason.
The original influencers were people who were already doing cool stuff and just decided to film it and post it on Youtube 10+ years ago. Shit, the electronic musician, deadmau5, was streaming his production sessions online in like 2007 or 2008. To me, that's a creator - someone who creates for a profession and would be doing so regardless if social media existed or not. The guy was also an early influencer in the music tech space because he would talk on his streams "hey yeah I've been using this plugin or that piece of gear in my latest tracks, here's what it sounds like, and here's how I use it". I dig that, that's legitimate - you have a professional talking about tools used in a professional environment and how to use them.
Nowadays everyone seems to think that because a few hundred bots have followed their Instagram account, they are entitled to make millions of dollars by posting stupid dance videos or copying the latest trend.
Maybe it's just part of being a teenager, but it's amplified dramatically I think by the fact that there are countless successful teenagers / early adults on the platform and these kids have parasocial relationships with them.
Even the 1%'s success is shaky. It's based on fashion, hysteria, playing engagement games and algorithms snowballing them into power. It cannot and will not ever work for a huge group, that's just not how attention is distributed. It's by definition winner-takes-all.
I think there was a trend towards "I want to be a programmer, cos they get paid loads and have free food", but don't know whether that's still with us.
I'd blame this on a mixture of unfounded optimism and, for my generation at least, literally everyone offering the career advice of "Do what you love and it'll all work out great". Nonsense but sounded plausible at the time.
That being said, 'winning' doesn't necessarily mean having this be your entire job or revenue source. I think we're progressively going to see more 'portfolio careers' or people holding multiple small jobs. I've seen many folks have small ish followings (say few thousand subs on YouTube), but that's enough for them to generate good leadflow for a consulting business that sustains their family. Put another way, being a creator can just be the marketing or top of funnel for other activities.
If we view it solely as a full-time job, then it probably will be a privileged few <1% that 'win'. But if it's part of a larger portfolio of work, then the creator economy opens up a lot of new possibilities for people.
It is my entire job, brings 25% of what I used to earn 8 years ago (never mind what I might be earning now) and I still call it a win ;)
Then, I would argue, you are not a creator, you are just running your own ads for your actually business on YouTube. This is not to say that it is a bad choice, you might really enjoy it, it might be more cost efficient than other ways of advertising or whatever.
You are creating content to drive traffic to a service or product. Are influencers not creators? Is making an ad not creation?
Interested in your definition of creator. Thanks!
Yes. Microsoft also has specific "evangelists" that create content. Briefings, presentations, talks, videos, blog posts, etc.
However, we no longer have a community of people growing food, making clothes, building and fixing houses, making metal tools, shoeing horses, etc.
Cannot eat a blog post about food, cannot wear a photo of someone wearing expensive clothes, cannot live in a photo of a mansion.
There are still bespoke furniture designers out there, but it's very competitive in the same ways other arts are.
It also has not been proven that we, as humans, are able to "scale up" as you say in a sustainable manner.
Basically there are trade offs between population level, standard of living and sustainability. More of any one of those will require us to make do with less of one or both of the others. A more efficient economy can give us more to distribute between them.
That’s broad strokes. There are cases where some efficiencies compete with some standard of living concerns for example. It would be a poor world in which there were no artisanal crafts.
* Eg I can easily find numbers for mean AdSense payments, but not median, nor, more importantly median including those creators who don't meet AdSense minimums.
Of course it depends how we define it. If the definition is some mid percentage by income then it would be fairly consistent over time because the absolute criteria would be constantly changing. However with those measures someone can maintain the same standard of living in society and leave or enter the middle class as demographics shift around them. If we use a more absolute measure that better tracks demographic change over time, such as having one third of income available for discretionary spending, or criteria such as home ownership or type of work done so we can better track changes over time, then more than half the worlds population is now middle class.
The creator economy was once hailed as the solution to economic inequality and the savior of the middle class.
How would that have worked? You can not run a world on entertainment.
The only ones I can think of are professions with some physical constraints. Eg where the product requires the professional to be physically present. Eg surgeons, luthiers, sports therapists.
I hear that something like this is happening with vets.
Most content is arbitrary anyway so no real cultural value discovery is occurring with these algorithms IMO, just chance and feedback loops.
That's the wrong interpretation. The reason why the top only fan girl gets 10x more revenue than the penultimate only fans girl is because she's marginally better, so more people flock to her. This works because her marginal cost of production is zero, so her having 10x the fans doesn't cost her 10x the work. The same applies to other professions where the marginal cost is zero. I doubt the average NFL player signing multi-million dollar contracts are hundreds/thousands of times better than the amateur player, but because sports leagues wants to hire the best, the top players get a disproportionate amount of money chasing after them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
But that is objectively speaking.
Objectively we all have great tools:
* Free Will
* Agency
* Locus of control
and more. Choose wisely.
I've been working on a platform to help creators diversify their revenue streams and focus on developing their community as an asset on top of just creating content. The hope is to try and bring more predictability in their ability to monetize. http://sociables.com/creators
Unlike some companies that look similar, I think Substack is not delivering a lot of value in terms of discovery. People come to Substack for Bari Weiss and not the other way around. It is not Medium, the low value domain of people who want to put low effort into blogging, where people are blown away because they got 70 views on a post. (Prediction: Medium’s user base will defect once somebody comes up with a platform that uses LLMs to write their blog posts for them)
Substack would like to grow to be more than e-mail newsletters but the creators and users will have a say in that.
‘I wrote a post using GPT3 and it got to the front page of Hacker News. Learn how you can do it to build your following as a creator!’