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> artisans, even digital ones, make society better

The word "content," when applied to digital media, usually carries some implications of artlessness. Content is something that fills a container.

Music that moves you and changes you is art, and is unlikely to be automated any time soon. Music that plays in an elevator (or fills the silence in an elevator) is Content, and is highly likely to be automated soon.

A lot of 'content' to me is worse than elevator music. That at least tries to somewhat improve my experience (though you may not like it). A piece of 'content' as an intro to a recipe is there primarily to make the page longer and contain keywords for SEO purposes, but it makes my experience worse.

I don’t know about that. The way I hear it used, every YouTube video is content, even the very good stuff. HBO and Netflix are content. NBA Games are “live content”. It’s just a catch all for digital media

Well to the suits at ESPN, HBO, Netflix, and YouTube, those video files are indeed content. They are the contents of their platform.

But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.

Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.

Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.

> if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense

This. And when I hear creative types use the word "content" to refer to their own work, I feel pity for them. And am much less inclined to check their work out, because it it seems that their mindset is to produce a product rather than art.

Especially if they refer to their audience as "consuming" their "content".

People do use it that way, which is a real shame because -- like the commenter you're replying to -- "content" to me implies something inferior.

> It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.

Live performance hasn't gone away. I live outside a village (in Ireland) with around 1000 residents and there's live music in one or other of the pubs 4 nights (or more) a week

Irish trad scene is unique in this regard. There are Irish trad sessions everywhere in the world (I was able to visit some in quite faraway places like Moscow, Istanbul or Santiago de Chile), and in Ireland there are a few in every village, and then some.

But that's just it, Irish trad. Frenchies have something similar with balfolk, but not so epic, and while there are other strong European folk scenes, none of them is on the scale of Irish trad. Alas.

Source: I play jigs and reels for fun.

It's not just trad though really - there's a bit of trad (and a fair few ballads) in my local pub but you could also hear pretty much any popular song from the last 50 years.

(... for anyone who's curious - "trad" usually means traditional dance music like jigs and reels, "ballads" mostly means Irish-y sounding songs sung in English)

Although circleofavshape's observation applies equally well to my part of the US. Even very tiny towns around here have live music multiple nights per week.

The past 30 years have resulted in an erosion of in-person experiences. People used to be social: clubs, bowling, movies, whatever. Now people even work from home.

People prefer to be in their houses on their computers and to interact with “others” (people, bots, videos of people doing things) from their favorite chair.

I don’t think in-person experiences are coming back any time soon unless there is some sort of major cultural shift that nobody could predict. A lot has been written about this trend.

The problem with in-person experiences is other people. If we could solve that problem, the experience would be greatly improved. :)

More likely outcome is that people will consume even more content. Because it will be more addictive and tailor made for them.

Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.

But is the idea of "content" really all that?

When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI.

But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say.

Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".

Context is certainly important. Atleast for people who lived through times when art took human effort and was rare.

But what if upcoming generations see it just as something antique? Old concept thats dead because their concept of art/media has always been tailor made and generated for them.

Also who says the AI wont also generate the context. You will get some medival music with authors backround and everything. You might not even know the person didnt exist. The way AI is developing now nobody will care about AI just making things up on the way.

> I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked

Probably not.

If I like some content, why would I care it it is "fake"?

> My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I am not sure I agree with this. The barrier to entry to selling your own music (streaming, youtube) is so low that we see more and more people giving it a shot. Maybe they are not professionnel with a title, but they are musicians. Sure, maybe there are less orchestra performers but there are far more (smaller) groups to choose from. Did they really disappear?

I think that's because for most, it's moved from being a profession to a hobby. Many hobbyists dream of turning their hobby into a profession, and work towards that, yet for most it remains a hobby.

> but they are musicians

I think the GP meant professional musicians.

Recorded audio didn't replace the musicians creating music. It replaced the ones playing it - for example the pianists at the restaurants or the clubs.

In a modern Casablanca remake Bogart wouldn't say "Play it, Sam", he would just select a song from his Spotify playlist and hit play.

In a similar fashion, you don't need to hire a full band for a wedding. A single DJ will provide enough entertainment.

I would say there will probably be more demand for live music since at some point YouTube music will probably have a channel that just makes up music on the fly based on what you like. So your computer can produce any sound or mashup that you want. But there will never be ai live music in the same way as people unless you have undetectable robot people.

It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). > Well, and because people love it, many will still be passionate musicians / writers / language savants. They just won't make a living out of it. And thats ok. The intrinsic motivation to do those things is recreational and the focus on monetization contributed to the "content is plague" trend in the first place.

There's also what society values. While I'm no art historian, it looks that after the invention of the camera, painters shifted to different styles that were not replicable by cameras (e.g. landscapes and portraits to abstract), and high society began valuing the new art, while continuing to value the old, the new shifted aesthetics.

I think that as we're progressing into a world where anyone can press a few buttons and get a dubstep banger in 30 seconds, culture will place higher value on different types of expression and experiences.

"We went to see a band play an entirely improvised performance, capacity was limited to 20 people and all recording devices were confiscated upon entry."

> How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creator?

I can tell you don't use TikTok and don't understand how quickly the trends adapt and depend on human understanding of hyper niche cultural trends.

Nothing about GPT indicates it can engage in this without heavy human interference.

At most it'd at least depend on being able to replicate human generated videos on prompt (which it's far from doing without horror show uncanny valley but sure... one day eventually in the indefinite future, which is the least interesting problem) let alone all the niche cultural stuff... and critically reputation signals already strongly required. Humans are deeply intwined in all of these, with automation playing a marginal optimisation role not anything near replacement.

Cheap imitations will remain a novelty for a long time. Just like how deepfakes and GPT news articles were oversold as a serious problem in the near term but haven't borne out beyond niche failures and journalist FUD posting.

If anything, Tik Tok trends are perfectly imperfect, which makes them feel more like what can be generated from any 13B or better LLM.

People are bad at modeling and scale. LLMs don't suffer from that, but the way people interact with LLMs obviously doesn't indicate they can conceptualize what a billion people interacting with the same model with the same parameters and having a billion unique experiences implies.

How we interface with LLMs is a deceptive reflection, and if you don't recognize the depth in them, you'll be caught off guard when you fall in, or something larger than you expect comes out.

Musicians have also had incomes become way less evenly distributed, after recording started one star could reach millions, before that you needed to see a musician live to hear music. Tim Hartford did a good pod cast mentioning this.

This "content" industry is a very recent phenomenon.

It used to be that if you wanted your voice to be heard, you had to either have something unique to say, or some unique way to say it.

We'll likely revert to the status quo - only people whose content will be consumed online will be original voices.