I think instead we’ll see an advantage for content creators that are charismatic and have brands built around their personality.
If I could just generate a new Star Trek TNG episode each week that was 100% convincingly done, I would absolutely pay for that product. Or if I could just generate a new Pink Floyd album or whatever, and it’s convincing enough—that would be great.
I do think that 100% will be hard to convince though, simply because you know it isn't true. The human mind will be looking for the trickery, even subconsciously.
I guess it could be like "Nothing, Forever" where there's one main feed everyone shares, or they could have AI-powered chatrooms/forums "watching" alongside you, but both feel like missing the potential/point to me.
(OP here) for what its worth, Wondercraft actually agrees with you here. it says so right on their landing page + I ask him about it in the interview. However in this case I may actually be more bullish* on AI audio than he is.
*since a lot of HNers seem to be taking a very strong negative reaction to this suggestion as some kind of civilizational collapse, I do want to say that while I may not personally care about having AI Steve Jobs drivel on with AI Joe Rogan for 24 hours, I could see SOME version of this thing doing well among the general population in the future when they get the format and the topic right (eg start with meditation, language teaching, whatever else niche long form audio/video thing that doesnt actually really need human input, then go up from there).
(I don't know about you folks, but my wife and I definitely wasted a few evenings watching that particular frivolity when it was a thing!)
It could be easily tested and proven by content creators.
Many content creators have mastered a style or format (BuzzFeed, Mr Beast), and maybe that style or format is at a point where it is a formula that AI can help with parts of, or completely with.
It really depends on what content you're talking about.
Movies: the movie industry is big, glitsy, expensive, and makes a shitload of money. And they like all of that about their industry. The reason the mainstream movies cost so much both to make and to sell is that they are effectively the "luxury car" of media. While they might try and make AI tools a bigger part of workflows (which is one of the reasons SAG-AFTRA is on strike, they already are trying to do this) no company on the level of Fox or Warner Bros. is going to make a movie written entirely by AI, or even worse, an AI generated movie, and sell it as such. It would tarnish the brand.
TV Shows: trickier. Depends on the studio. Lower-tier smaller studios might start leaning on AI tools harder to help them compete with bigger operations, but still, the notion that people would seek out and consume a TV show (or any media really) that was entirely AI generated only makes sense to me if the people are looking to experience AI generated art, for it's own sake. And we MAY get a bubble of that, briefly. But I suspect what AI is going to dominate faster than anything is:
Social media gristle and Influencers: I think this is where we're going to see AI explode. We already have tons of very bizarre and yet seemingly profitable businesses that just run warehouses of video production teams overseas, that churn out all kinds of stuff: sponsored instagram videos, 5-minute-crafts type junk, those weird facebook videos where it's just some dude going "oh just wait till I take this off and it's gonna be amazing" for several minutes. That's what AI is going to dominate really, really quickly. We've already had cases of entire youtubers with multiple channels turning out to be a marketing team manufacturing "genuine feeling" content to promote whatever products, and imagine if you could automate it. You could construct an entire backend that would just accept sponsorships, work them into videos with surface level readings of current social media trends, render it and barf it out onto the various platforms and promote with ad services.
And like the barrier of quality is so fucking low for that stuff, nobody will care if there's weird fingers here and there, minor grammatical errors or even if you use really old school text to speech. Just put a pretty face up there and hey, if whatever character you come up with doesn't catch, screw it. Burn the build, restart with a different one and repeat until you can go viral.
And I think it's extra applicable there precisely because no one chooses that, and yet most people consume at least some level of it because it's so ubiquitous on social media. There is TONS of this stuff and the only way to lower the barriers of entry further to it's production is to make it so you don't actually need a pretty woman in a bikini to sell your crypto coin exchange, or some business casual douche to sell your LinkedIn alternative or market your podcast app or whatever. You just enter the commands, generate the slop, and upload it.
A while ago, I was looking for something gardening related.
Stumbled onto an article that read like a mix of: written by an Indian person (no offense!) with poor grasp of English, copypasta from Wikipedia or wherever, and repeated 3, 4, 5 times with different wordings.
Whole site was like that. I'd think "link farm" as description wouldn't be too far off the mark.
But you know what? It did show up in search results when searching the web. And while the content was crap, re-worded & redundancies removed it kinda answered what I searched for. Would surely not be the 1st visitor whom this applied to. And probably some tracking info was collected & sold as result of me reading that page.
No doubt there's countless such sites out there. And AI will easily replace most humans involved in its creation.
So I'm with you there: AI will EAT the low-bar-to-entry part of web content for breakfast. Higher up the stack? We'll see.
Mind you, this is going to make our already barely usable internet utterly INTOLERABLY clogged with repetitive, derivative, bottom of the barrel content... but we've been trending towards that anyway. AI is just going to slam it's foot on the gas pedal. The value of internet advertising is about to crater again and I don't think it ever fully recovered from it's last cratering.
Edit: let’s assume this becomes possible in a century. Easy solution: a verification system that ensures that the official Joe Rogan Show is authenticated by the real Joe Rogan. No one will care about a computer copy version.
Second, just the idea of consuming content solely created by AI makes people squirm even if the content is good.
I personally think it is also a pointless endeavor.