Let’s play a game of two extremes.
On one side sprawls a pantless man, alone, in the dark of his mother’s basement, a half-melted tub of ice cream dripping onto his raggy T-shirt, while chatting in his favorite Discord as he watches the anime the server is devoted to.
On the other side, a shirtless man—inebriated, high, and just all around wasted—is crammed into a living room with a dozen other similarly smashed individuals, each squinting their eyes to watch the NBA playoffs over a haze of cigar smoke wafting through the room.
The game is this: Which of these is the better media product?
From the moment we boot up a device, every single app and piece of content contained therein is in a death match for your eyeballs. If you removed the cigars and Rocky Road, the better media product is determined by individual preferences. Whether you prefer Naruto or the Brooklyn Nets is dependent on personal taste. You can’t watch both simultaneously—every time you watch anime versus the NBA you make a trade-off.
This leaves media companies to compete, not solely on the basis of the quality of the content, but on all the extra stuff surrounding content. The ability to build fandom, to have some sort of monopoly, even just to be really good at marketing, all these things are how companies stand out.
AI may 10x this dynamic—let me explain:
What AI disrupts
I’ve written in the past how companies do three things:
- Create stuff
- Acquire customers to buy stuff
- Distribute that stuff
The internet broke category three by making distribution free. Suddenly, all sorts of previously enjoyed advantages disappeared. Regional newspapers were no longer the only game in town. Sports franchises had to compete for fans with every other team in the league. On it went. This ended up empowering players like YouTube or Google that were able to aggregate attention and then distribute it in whatever manner they deemed fit.
AI breaks category one by dramatically reducing the cost of content creation. This will exponentially increase the volume of content being made, hurting existing publishers even more. I’ve argued this since fall of 2022.
However, in my excitement, I missed something.
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Some interesting stuff here....but I'd caution that the "personalized newspaper" has been just around the corner for four decades, starting with an MIT Media Lab project in the 80s. Also, don't forget the sentiment in 2010 was that by end of decade, the New York Times would be a small walled garden, read only by a small slice of the coastal elite. There's probably a gradually, then suddenly element to all of this but I'd venture the gradually phase lasts a LOT longer than most on tech Twitter think
@mikemallazzo there is a good chance of that! To me this feels like a downstream effect of AI. If you believe the AI exponential curve will continue at its current rate then this happens very quickly. If you believe we are about to hit another AI winter, then this is just hyperbole. Personally, I'm in the former camp, but this is definitely not a sure thing.
@ItsUrBoyEvan I think there's a third path where AI exponential curve continues but a decent number of media brands stay counterintuitively resilient against it. I mean look at some of the people the NYT and WSJ employ to write op-eds despite the wealth of far better thinkers like you who could do so much more with the platform. Vertical media I think willl be fine-- to your point, those brands are just communities of like-minded professionals with content a veneer anyway.
Local/investigative can't really get more fucked than it is already, at least in the context of for-profit media (like four reporters cover the whole city beat in Chicago) so not sure there's a huge threat there
It could broaden the scope of journalism. If only the facts are needed for a spreadsheet a reporter could go to more city meetings and cover more events & then expand the base of what gets covered. Not sure of the revenue model for this
@joshspilker Yea there is a very positive version of this. If reporters can focus exclusively on fact cultivation they probably are able to do better, deeper work. I also worry about the revenue model—until people are willing to pay more for news, ads will be the dominant modality and I don't see this changing the user preferences.
We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the settlement free internet; where risk is one-sided. The power curve won't exist; it will be a right-angle with the middle hollowed out. Coming back from SXSW where I attended many AI panels I am more convinced than ever that we need to implement an economic system of incentives or disincentives to smooth the curve and remove bias; but more importantly to foster sustainability and generativity...of humanity. http://bit.ly/2iLAHlG