the future of online creators

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Dunno… all the writing I’ve read about the dire future of creativity is based on this AI stuff just sort of magically hanging around while the industry pushing it is on its death drive. I do not expect the current suite of generative software to stick around - sadly, I fear it won’t disappear entirely but this idea of all ā€˜content’ being subsumed by AI slop in the long term does not seem likely to me.

It is certainly interesting to me how universal this mode of thought is - that the wave of AI is inevitable and its prominent role in our future certain. Have we learnt nothing of crypto and NFTs? It’ll blow over! And be replaced by something even worse!

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Part of the reason TikTok saw use as a search engine (2022) is because at that time it was more difficult to generate inauthentic video. That’s especially relevant in categories like reviews where there is a lot of inauthentic content.

Maybe we will see a shift to live video in the medium-term.

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From reading the blogpost, it sounds like the title here is using ā€œonline creatorsā€ particularly to mean ā€œpeople who make and post videos on Youtube/Tiktok/etc. for ad reads and subscriber money,ā€ which is a much narrower slice of the pie. That was also always already a tough business, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to tell if more people wash out. Not necessarily saying otherwise, just that’d be hard for me to gauge from here.

Anyway, I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m with @rmf in questioning the narrative of inevitability.

@memo Live video is no guarantee of anything either, unfortunately.

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I’d love to read more about this sometime… its something i think about a lot. I’m sooooo so tired of everybody at my work insisting that almost every job is going to be replaced with AI soon and there’s no point denying it or fighting it. (I work in manufacturing too, so everyone saying this is really smug about it :roll_eyes: like ā€˜lmao those dumbasses getting degrees in things that obviously wont exist in 5 years :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: unlike me’ )

Plus, not questioning the ā€˜inevitability’ of it all just gives these companies more power to do whatever they want. If every infringement on our lives/creative activities/whatever is met with a resounding ā€˜well yeah, of COURSE’, why the hell would they stop?? Like nobody is holding me at gunpoint to use midjourney instead of doodling or to brainstorm with chatgpt.

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I’m with you on that. The link goes to a podcast, but if you’d prefer something in print, the guests for that episode have written a book called The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.

For other commentary more generally, I’ve also got more links in the See Also section of the Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame.

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OMG I love your Garbage hall of shame! I had heard of a few of the stories, but a lot of these were new to me. That one about Air Canada made me laugh, but unfortunately I agree with the people who said they didn’t have much faith the result would be the same in our country. Claiming that you’re not responsible for the info on your own website really takes the cake!

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I can’t bring myself to feel particularly sad that social media influencers might get replaced by AI.

In terms of things like, say, bloggers just genuinely enthusing about their interests, I don’t think AI can fully replace it in its current state.

I have always considered the term ā€œcontent creatorā€ to be pejorative. To me it means someone sitting in a ā€œcontentā€ sweatshop churning out drivel to generate pageviews and clicks. I never refer to anything I create as content. It is my writing, my video, my podcast, my episode, or whatever.

Sorry - this is a bit ranty. But I think words matter.

I also never say I ā€œconsume contentā€. I read, I listen to music. I watch videos. I am not a consumer, I’m a human being (as far as I know).

End of rant. Thanks for putting up with me. May turn this into a ranty blog post.

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@ConcreteLunch I think it deserves to be said. ā€œContentā€ used in that way is a marketing term – a term for things they can place around or between ads. We don’t need to indulge marketers by adopting it.

And thanks @frugalgamer! Offloading responsibility is the logical endpoint of treating a chatbot like an ā€œintelligentā€ agentive being, so that’s something to watch out for (and a pretty embedded feature of ā€œAIā€ rhetoric).

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I only ā€œcreate contentā€ in the bathroom.

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Same here. I do see a lot of ai related videos rolling around on social media that are influencer like. I’m not entirely sure what software that they’re using to mimic influencers, but it could be Google’s new ai video software(VEO) or CapNCut.

I don’t see AI ever replacing blog owners or community owners ever though. Their systems aren’t able to take away actual creators specifically as we’re able to create better things that they can. Actual creators will always remain at the fore front.

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