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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

My prediction:

It will be like furniture.

A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.

Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.

There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.

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This. Except one should also disillusion themselves of the idea that there will always be a higher quality to the 'hand made' versions. AI will almost certainly outpace us in every way, including the ability to make something beautiful that looks 'hand-made', even with artificial flaws and illusions of the history and natural rugged beauty of the piece.

The only discernable difference that won't be replicable is a cryptographic signature "Certified 100% Human-Made!" sticker, which will probably become the mark of the niche industry.

Somewhat more accurate analogy would be the custom car market. Beautiful collectible convertibles with fine detailing everywhere, priced thousands of times higher than normal cars, that actually run far worse and basically break apart after a few thousand miles and are impossible to find parts for. Automated factories certainly could churn them out but they don't because they're impractical poorly-designed status items kept artificially scarce for the very rich to peacock with.

Except AI will probably still produce equivalent impractical stuff anyway, just because production (digital and physical) will eventually be easy enough that resources are negligible, and everyone can have flashy impractical stuff. So again, only that "100% Human!" seal will distinguish, eventually.

This prediction implies that people will value consuming tailored media, knowing 100% that it was generated because they wanted it (as opposed to because someone wanted to express something), with no deeper story or connection or exploration to it.

If people instead care about the creation story and influences (the idea of "behind the scenes" and "creator interviews" for on demand ai generated media is pretty funny) then this won't have much value.

Time will tell - it's an exciting, discouraging time to be alive, which has probably always been the case.

I think the proportion of people who care about 'the making of' type content is vanishingly small. Almost everyone is looking for a dopamine hit and that's it.

> There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.

This addresses one axis of development.

Meanwhile, there's lots of people around willing to express themselves for advertisement money.

Like with translation: We're going to see tool-assisted work where the tools get more and more sophisticated.

Your example with furniture is good. Another is cars: From horses to robotaxis. Humans are in the loop somewhere still.

The reproduction cost for the 2nd copy of media is near zero just like software. Handmade or customized furniture is more expensive because it takes more labor for each copy. With media, the cost is fixed, even if it is large. Once the first version of handmade media has been created, the owner is incentivized to get as much value from it as possible. The optimal demand curve is probably not a few rich people paying as much as possible.

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