>
With the recent trend of designers submitting their meticulously labeled designs to FigmaOh god. I must have had this thought many times, but the way you structured this sentence finally made it click loud and clear for me: the AI revolution feeds on the previous era of user-generated content.
We've all spent the last ~two decades "submitting our meticulously labeled" content to all kinds of platforms. While it quickly became an open secret that those platforms are taking on the hosting and delivery costs in exchange for exposing us to ads (and profiling us to get a better deal on those ads), I'm not sure if anyone predicted that the user-generated content itself will become pure gold. Right now, every platform that owns a large amount of user-generated content is sitting on a mother lode: a corpus of labeled examples of a type of content, ready to be fed into ML models for training.
Random examples off the top of my head: Facebook could train a ChatGPT on its own corpus of posts and comments, but could also make a model that generates plausibly looking digital records of populations, complete with personality quirks, relationships, photos, etc. Hell, if they get their VR fairy land off the ground, they could actually populate it with such virtual people - solving the problem of NPCs in games being obviously scripted and boring (and also solving the "chicken and egg" problem of a social network by using AI as ultimate astroturfing/sockpuppeting tool).
Makes me wonder if we'll see more and more barriers popping up on those platforms, to make it difficult for competition to just scrap the content at scale.