AI doesn’t increase the value of content, it makes it meaningless by destroying scarcity.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
A lot of people right now claim that they cannot tell apart AI output from human art, while many of them seem to grow rather agitated and stressed after repeated exposure. I bet they're going to be forced into exclusively making art manually, or viewing exclusively human art at some point, and through that ways, AIs could increase value of human made data.
I find it funny that wishes for AI arts always seem to be more anime and end to Marvel slop. They want human slop go away thanks to AI slop? I'm not meaning to call out someone for contradiction or inconsistency - as I do understand the sentiment. But it gives me chuckles.
everyone likes their own slop, hopefully
You could make the same argument about musical instruments, or being able to record and playback music, dj tools, etc.
I think what you get is the power law distribution for tons of content. Some of the stuff is still mega valuable, but distribution just gets more and more important and it’s harder and harder to break through. This is what the “democratization” of any previously difficulty-gated endeavor does.
More niches will be created, more fragmentation in tastes, stuff like that. Not just completely valueless content.
Incumbents and platform providers get to win through it all though, because humans still want to fill their time.
The latter would mean everything quickly looks and feels the same.
I also believe some barrier to entry is needed for good art, people are inherently lazy and AI lets us get away with "just good enough" - see llm assisted coding as an example
Novel in what sense? Most creative endeavor is not completely novel -- it's usually a combination of pre-existing styles, taste, patterns, and other inputs.
> The latter would mean everything quickly looks and feels the same.
I think human preferences will be a good guard rail against this. The reward will be greatly reduced for creating mostly the same things, just like real artists in real life.
> I also believe some barrier to entry is needed for good art, people are inherently lazy and AI lets us get away with "just good enough" - see llm assisted coding as an example
That's a pretty deep philosophical question -- "good art" is also a hell of a rabbit hole to go down!
Guess we'll find out :)
Firefly is the exception. Luckily they managed to wrap it up in Serenity.
Yes there will tons of garbage, but of course there will be the 1% of the 1% who spend the time and efforts to, perhaps, create something of equal and perhaps better quality than what has come before.
Most art is in some way or form derivative of another work or a combination of somesorts. I enjoy derivative works. To me, AI already has value. I don't seek endless gratification through originality.
Even TikTok's main fuel are likes and shares. Isolated material will just cease to be interesting, because it's from your own imagination.
It’s reaching, of course, but imo the best shows are those that have small, dedicated, fanbase. If it’s small it means that the show has enough personality to drive other people away.
And that’s fine. Popular stuff is popular mainly because of lack of controverse.
No more Disney-fication, no more Marvel / Star Wars "mass media slop". We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests. If you have a passion for Egyptology and Atlantis, you'll be able to watch a steampunk adventure about the Egyptians waging war with the Atlanteans. But perhaps with the serious tone of "The Wire". That would never have been greenlit before, but it'll soon be possible.
Good creators will arise just like good indie music, indie manga/comic, and indie game creators. Discovery will be the problem to solve for creators. There will be an abundance of talent that is finally able to create their vision rather than nepotism their way into one of 500 limited annual roles of autonomy.
Small creators who grow large like VivziePop [1] and PsychicPebbles [2] will be the model for the future of content. They start small on YouTube, grow large, and eventually have their own large-scale distribution and franchises.
The creative world is about to get orders of magnitude better. Not 2x, not 10x, but easily 1,000x.
I hate most movies and tv shows, but love the medium. The problem is most content produced just isn't my vibe. I like super artsy stuff, but also have particular tastes. That's going to change dramatically. Stuff will start fitting the shape of my interest graph.
I'm so excited.
Lol. Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations?
Also, an average person's "long tail" is incredibly boring (I know mine is). You will need someone to create a next Breaking Bad, or a next Discworld, or... Your slop-generating machine will not be able to generate it from a "long tail"
Doesn't matter one bit, just like mp3 and torrents didn't stop digital music.
If you care, there are already "ethical models", there are synthetic datasets, and soon rights holders will be licensing training data.
But it literally doesn't matter. The entire world will be on board soon. IP holders included.
> Your slop-generating machine
I'm in the industry. We're not talking about LLMs powering this, but writers and directors and VFX artists.
Hollywood is switching to AI rapidly. The problem for the studios is we don't need them anymore. They only existed because distribution and capital were hard. That isn't the case anymore. A skilled team of five can make content on their own.
mp3 and torrents are storage and distributions mechanisms, not production ones. This is an inappropriate analogy.
As much as the RIAA hated digital, they eventually caved.
IP vs distribution vs the means of production.
I'm happy to discuss all of these things, but let's stop flip flopping around.
When the means of production are easier, that changes the supply and demand curves. There's more supply and lower cost, but that opens the gates to larger and new work that hasn't been possible before.
We're entering an era where ONE PERSON can make a Pixar film. That's astounding and amazing. Every artist can become a Makoto Shinkai [1] and make their own Voices of a Distant Star [2] in their garage. All by themselves.
We're going to see an explosion of creators like Makoto Shinkai, Vivienne Medrano, Joel Haver, Zach Hadel, et al.
Garage Band and Indie Music and Steam Greenlight and Indie Games is exactly what is about to happen to art, animation, and film.
Distribution will be hard, but the market for indie creators is exploding. And the work they produce is so much better than Hollywood slop. They put their heart and soul into their work, and you can tell. It's direct and intimate.
I am one of these creators, and I am telling you: this is a good thing !
Your correct, but you're conflating the "source and generation of music" with the digitization of distribution specifically to the RIAA's role. From your original point:
> > Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations? Doesn't matter one bit, just like mp3 and torrents didn't stop digital music.
I'm saying the two (production and distribution) aren't equivalent for the parties involved. The RIAA faced an existential criss with digitization because their purpose (license and distribute music) would cease to exist under mp3/torrents. The RIAA does NOT represent the artist and the threat here is about the artist. In fact, the RIAA would LOVE to do away with artists and find a cheaper means of production if the could...it means higher profit margin for them.
The OP's point was that the new wave of art has to originate from somewhere. The distribution partners don't care how it gets produced, they just want to own the distribution. The artists are now in a existential crisis, not the RIAA. The RIAA at least had a migration story; e.g. from physically printing vinyl, providing capital for music studios, etc. to becoming glorified lawyers and promoters in the supply chain. The artists do not. Hence, the parallel is inappropriate and doesn't capture the essence of the predicament, which is artists are in existential crisis with no clear migration path.
And a skilled team of one can also make good, creative and unique content by themselves (I'm thinking mostly of the kind of things that end up on YouTube, Nebula, etc.)
> Hollywood is switching to AI rapidly.
I'm curious as to what people think the long term prospect for this really is. If it's true that the number of people involved in the creation of this content goes down then does it get cheaper and more available? Faster to create? But to what end? Who's even paying to engage with it? Presumably not the people that used to work in the production of those things, because they've been displaced by the content generation machines. More and more content will be sold to people that are perhaps less able to afford it.
This is quite literally what the Marvel / Star wars mass media slop is, a sort of syncretistic version of every pop culture phenomenon scientifically engineered down to A/B tested audience taste. It's excatly what you're complaining about, never-ending banal stuff. It'll be Disneyfication on steroids.
It's a sort of media masturbation, hooking your brain up to itself and feeding it its own output, what the large studios are already doing with their franchises, just on an individual level. You'll basically sit in your own never-ending Marvel hell, basically D.F Wallace's Infinite Jest.
Art is obviously the opposite, something external and disruptive, a creative act from someone who isn't you.
I always imagined it as a single media item with one theme that itself was so ridiculously compelling that viewers couldn't look away (more like a film, perhaps something analogous with the size of IJ itself), but now imagining that it was a practically-infinite stream of short-form content that you didn't even find truly valuable but were compelled to keep watching anyway makes it seem much scarier.
This isn't inherently a bad thing but I don't believe it's without its costs, one of which being that with everyone watching (potentially) completely unique media there'll be no shared cultural artifacts to communicate with others about.
VivziePop may have started as a small creator but the recent creations such as Hazbin Hotel have now become things where the enjoyment can be shared with other fans, which in some ways is the secondary purpose of all media. Media enjoyed alone can still be rewarding, media enjoyed with others can be much more than that (except for going to the cinema with strangers, that can disappear immediately).
It seems like a common idea that if we can just generate a practically-infinite stream of media then we've solved some kind of problem with there just not being enough "content" (I hate using the term in this way but it's concise), and while I do sympathise with the points of view from people that can't find things they like, I also don't really believe that "Content is a problem".
More variety itself isn't a problem, but I'm not convinced that in general there's a _lack_ of content. Humans have already reached peak saturation in terms of the sheer amount of text, audio and video that's created every day. No single item of media is itself a problem, but perhaps the total aggregate of everything isn't helpful.
Is it possible that part of what creates quality is having to collaborate with others? Would Star Wars have been as good as it was without Marcia Lucas?
Can't wait to create shadowrun movies for example :)