When I open up a streaming service or YouTube feed, the sheer amount of currently existing content that I am compelled to click on is endless. I had no choice but to develop a thoughtless reflex to "not recommend" anything novel outside of my current sphere of topics or whose thumbnail screams "content" to me, or my sleep schedule will be perpetually ruined.

Now the opportunity for all 8 billion persons on Earth, regardless of experience, to create their own fascinating, epic, emotionally fulfilling and artistically relevant pieces in addition to the above only gives me knots in my stomach.

I don't understand why an accelerating explosion of ideas that nobody has ever thought of suddenly being realized is supposed to be an unequivocal good. You can have all the entertainment in the world, but human bodies will be chained to physical and biological limits for the time being, namely 14-16 waking hours a day. And some people like me have a much harder time regulating their attention spans as is.

To me, this intense focus on AI-related tooling in the recent past serves as a reminder that if it were possible for humanity to fill every last parcel of physical space with objects of our own creation, we would do so. I think it's just human nature; planting our objects on Mars would only be the first step of millions if it were feasible.

The digital world also suffices. It will be filled to the brim with a set of beautiful paintings of mansions with flowered gardens and fountains, painting, oil on canvas, 4k, detailed, thomas cole, trending on Artstation.

I also have to wonder what the effects will be on the culture of the humans steering the tools. I'm not sure what to feel about the connotations around the concept of "art" gradually coming to mean "the product of those with powerful enough GPUs and ten minutes of spare time a day." I don't know how else to explain it, but feels like something important is lost in the process.

It's like how when you try to practice drawing with pencil and paper, some people tell you that learning a skill like drawing is meant to be a journey, and is a process that requires patience and hard work. The implication is that it's supposed to instill virtue within the creator, so long as you're interested enough to embark on that patient, thoughtful journey for however long it takes. Now it feels like that promise has been invalidated within the span of a few years and a pile of tensors.

My worry is that the fascination with art produced algorithmically will cause people to stay in their rooms, and lose a desire to become more in touch with the outside world. It's common practice to
go outside and sketch objects in the real world, using your eyesight and making spatial comparisons to what's on paper. That becomes archaic if the computer can do everything for you.

(I'm also biased in saying this, since I was never capable of enjoying the process of manual drawing long enough to see passable results. It doesn't give me a good feeling to know that I'll never be able to produce art with my hands that an AI would hypothetically never be able to produce.)

One other thing that's only tangential: Assume that any given platform like YouTube could somehow solve its biases and moderation problems, maybe by becoming a public service of some kind. Even with the "best" possible algorithm built for the sake of creators trying to build an audience, what happens when there's now billions of people vying for a slice of your 16 waking hours? An endless stream of fascinating, insightful, fulfilling information that never ends, personalized down to every single fleeting interest and sense of taste you've ever had.

This makes me uncomfortable.

In the present day, the hardest truth for me to swallow is that even without the ills of any given algorithm, what addicts me is ultimately the product of hundreds of other people's passions and drive for a fulfilling life through creating, out of a pool of millions that just happened to miss the mark of my profile of interests. Individually, the act of creation tends to be labor intensive and no single person contributes significantly to oversaturation, but the sheer number of people with the capability of telling their stories begets my perpetual insomnia.

And I'm not sure there's any chance of a solution, if this is something that will even be recognized as needing to be solved at all. I just hope that I never stumble across the perfect stream of content, because once it has been created, I will never be able to take my eyes off it.