For a while, I've decided to not discuss AI but it's become evident that this is the tech that needs the most focus right now and as a result, exploring it and writing about it feels right.
Now, to get down to the topic, I believe that a lot of people will be disappointed as AI makes major real-world penetration, not because it will fail, value-wise, but because it will crush so many opinions of it, such as bringing about a “slop-economy” of some sort.
You have to love it when people look at a new technology and immediately think they can predict how everything else will be affected by it, simply because they can measure its effects on today's world.
It is comical because one thing they leave out of their assessments is usually that the very technology being examined here didn't exist within the timeframe being judged.
If I say that everyone will become creators because AI is making it easy to generate images and videos, I'm nothing more than a loud mouth talking out of my ass.
The reality is that a lot of people will attempt to use AI, but they won't go very far with it.
The reason why they won't go very far with it is because for them to truly gain meaningful output with it, long-term, they will still need something that's unique to a few humans and that's creativity.
Think about AI videos for instance. There's lots of it out there right now, some you can easily tell that it's AI and hate them, some you can tell it's AI too, but they are so good and you love them, and then there's the ones you can't even tell that it is AI.
You can see a video of a talking cat and dog, you know immediately that it's AI and hate it. Then you can see another video of a talking cat and dog, you know too that it's AI-generated but you like it, and then, you could see another video of a talking cat and dog, but this time, you think it's a professionally created animation, but no AI in the mix.
But the reality is, they are all AI but what makes the difference is who created them.
What this tells us is that while AI will improve efficiency of work, in many ways, the value created with it will differ across people and how we measure that value will increase and as a result, no average joe with a Chatbot installed in his phone will create a masterpiece worth paying millions for.
Creativity is still going to be at the center of everything else. Yes, there will be a lot of slop on the Internet, but guess what?
At some point, you won't even know it's there because the system will learn to get it buried so that what people actually want to see is what is physical.
It's funny that people think the Internet is some giant valuable content pile, when in reality, if you truly saw all that's on the Internet, you'd log off.
There's already a lot of shit here, we just don't see it because Google tries it's best to rank what matters when you're running a search, Facebook, Tiktok, X, YouTube, Instagram, etc, all use your data and try to show you what's most relevant and welcomed by other users with similar interests as yours.
The system will learn to bury the slop that will come from the bots and the low-value users just as it is doing today.
You'll hardly see content that doesn't truly impress you as we move into the next decade.