MEA CULPA. In 2023, I wrote that even amid the AI tech bubble, “human-generated content” would still be king. Now, I’m not so sure. (The irony—or appropriateness—of Newsweek being where Cliff Stoll’s infamous, premature burial of the World Wide Web appeared is not lost on me.)
While it seemed clear in 2023 that AI was an overhyped parlor trick that was not yet ready for prime time, one shouldn’t underestimate the persistence of try-hard technology companies or their investors to push the “next next thing” on the consumer, with propaganda like “AI won’t replace you, but the person using AI will” acting as the coercive and purely speculative FOMO that has always made any tech hype cycle run–this is where we’re collectively moving, get on board or get left behind.
If you were a technology company right now, why wouldn’t you want to double down or triple down on this messaging? In the time since 2023, Nvidia has risen to king of the corporate heap, outpacing the former one-two punch of Apple and Microsoft to become the first company to a $5 trillion market value, purely on speculation that its chips would power the inevitable AI boom, however and whenever it arrives.
If you believe in research from operations with names like “Menlo Ventures,” then that shift in AI adoption is already here, with more than half of American adults, or 61%, reported to have used AI in the first half of last year, with nearly one in five relying on it every day. In the enterprise, demand is certainly there when it comes to purchasing and building new AI infrastructure, but the jury is still out on what that spend will accomplish, other than reducing some administrative burden.
That is, assuming you don’t have to call humans back into the office to check the work of the AI checkers and undo the mistakes of AI that routinely churns out information that is 60% inaccurate (perhaps not accounting for an individual’s own “fake news” spectrum based on their own political bias filter).
What that use actually looks like is also a little more opaque. According to a recent survey cited by the Wall Street Journal, two-thirds of nonmanagement staffers report that they save less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI.
AI also enjoys the advantage of generational indoctrination. According to a recent study from Pew, just over half of U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and anywhere from 10 to 20% say they get their news and even emotional support from AI.
That is even as the current AI landscape remains a minefield of dangerously inaccurate and exploitative content for adults and teens alike, operated by feudal lords of technology who are looking for cheap, quick and easy ROI. Elon Musk’s Grok has generated some traffic and headlines in undressing internet frens, either at their own behest or at a stranger’s. Even as X is now trying to install guardrails (with dubious efficacy), especially to protect minors, this may continue to present something of a nettlesome legal entanglement from authorities and courts from around the world, especially if Musk enlists Grok to file the legal response, to say nothing of this offense to basic decency and legality.
In its more innocuous applications, AI image and video generators are getting quite good, light years ahead of the vague blobs, six-fingered hands and illegible writing pervasive just two to three years ago. If these image generators continue to make similar progress—think of those fake selfie videos checkmarked accounts routinely post on X declaring “many will claim this isn’t cinema”—they might be a new iteration of the JibJab videos that were so popular in the mid- and late-noughties.
Of course, JibJab was primarily a “viral email” product that never made the leap to the next true technology revolution, which would be a mobile internet fast enough to support both consumers and producers (or, if you prefer, “creators”). If nothing else, it promises a cleaner version of Photoshop that can be used by just about anyone.
Whatever cheap, ephemeral and superficial joy this new form of media and content sparks—or whether it can finally offer a definitive answer on who would win in a fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, or Wolverine and The Hulk—it will probably do little to change the impact of a human creator telling a story or expressing themselves to a human audience to create a human connection and cultivate more human inspiration, especially when that creator’s biography is intertwined with their output.
We won’t mourn a data center in the same way we do a David Lynch or Rob Reiner. A machine won’t spark a chain reaction of introspection that leads to a better treatment for breast cancer like Tom Stoppard did. “AI won’t replace creators, but the creators best utilizing AI will” doesn’t have quite the same ring, even if AI ends up creating a seismic shift in the technical approach to producing creative output.
More than that, the best art and creative work finds a way to push the boundaries of how we think and feel, not act as a tailored piece of content that pats us on the head. Ultimately, It doesn’t exist to flatter us, but to challenge us.
There is still too much money on the table for technology companies to abandon the gambit, though, and they might cite the law of Henry Ford and Steve Jobs or whomeverabout faster horses when doing so. Just as often, though, the market actually inverts this aged chestnut, as tech barons release unpolished products that act as their own bleeding edge market research, chasing whichever direction consumers go and how they opt to use this technology.
The technology spend is “too big to fail” and there are still novel enough applications that the rest of the decade will be defined by the continued integration of AI across nearly every sphere of modern life, regardless of the ultimate success or failure of that integration. Some industries may fall and some may shrug, and they will probably do so based on how AI can be properly capitalized or weaponized by those who have the means to do so.
But regardless of that success or failure, our relationship with content has irrevocably changed. As much as we may speak of training the AI, decades of life on the internet, particularly the “algorithmized internet,” has also created a model where even the earliest form of networked AI was also training us. According to research from Deloitte, at least for the two youngest generations surveyed, there is parity between consuming traditional content like movies or TV (via traditional or streaming means) and social media or user-generated content, and it is in the latter where AI content is already proliferating most, perhaps with mixed results, but it is happening nonetheless.
What does that mean for us as a species defined by our thinking, feeling and, ultimately, erring? The philosophers and poets and theater ushers might be in more trouble than the businessmen, and you probably don’t need a study from Deloitte to tell you that. Engaging with what is now that most 21st century of constructs, “content,” will perhaps become a more incurious and personally curated experience, the kind of experience that algorithms have been training us on for the last few decades, accelerating in the last decade in particular; no wonder so many are nostalgic for 2016. Ironically or predictably, the omnipresent internet has turned us into decision-tree automaton consumers, not all that different from an LLM.
Before full automation came to our online lives, the fictional robotic future created by very human minds was one driven by nightmares of the machines turning our nuclear weapons against us, sucking the energy out of us like literal batteries, or some other violent means of humanity’s end. But maybe the machines have chosen to eradicate us with something gentler, a form of love bombing as we sit curled into a fetal position with our phones, a very polite euthanasia as we amuse ourselves to death.