AI has taken away the one thing starving artists and academics and professionals had - exposure.

The goal of AI (especially when combined with robotics) is to reduce labor’s price to zero (except for the “founders” who want to take credit and get their exposure). Until it reaches zero, ordinary people will adapt to make a living - meaning protecting knowledge and art and data behind clever paywalls and passwords and silos (maybe more bands will auction off one of one vinyl albums like the Wu Tang Clan). One strategy for individuals and companies of earning revenue on the internet and social media has been to give away a lot of value and expertise for free, build a community and following, and then monetize your brand or special widget or most protected trade secret with a product or service you charge for - that won’t work anymore because AI won’t promote your brand. For people who are retired or have a lot of money, it might not matter if an AI takes their knowledge and gives it away freely without remuneration or attribution. But for people with little money, all they will be left with for a while is their physical labor - shouldn’t they get a choice of whether to train the AI? You can see this in the music industry - musicians can’t make money from releasing music, they can only make money from touring, teaching, and working for others (most successful indie musicians still have an 8-5 job - they tour on their vacation or after work). Eventually robots will come for all physical labor too.

I’ve been shocked most at how many people have expressed that they are glad artists and musicians and experts won’t be lauded anymore and that everyone should be able to be an artist or musician or expert (without the effort of course). I had the opportunity to see Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood in concert recently and there was a moment where I was 10 feet away from Thom and my eyes got a little watery - will people cry for AI music?

And who will support AI artists and AI coders when they need help or when a data center goes down or when they can’t make a living? I don’t see that same community lasting.

I remember when the promise of algorithms was that it would help us discover great new music. But over the past 20 years, I’ve missed radio DJs more and more. With AI coding, I expect it to go the same way music has gone with pro tools, auto tune, and nu-metal. We’ll get the software application equivalents of Nickelback and Creed.

Maybe long term there’s a utopia somewhere in all of this, but it feels like everyone who ever did any research or crafted any essay or made any art and published it to the internet for mere exposure was ripped off by big tech. It’s even bad for the people who published well thought out ideas and arguments that are outliers or subtly different from the norm, who only did so to advance the idea or argument, only to have AI compress their thoughts into the most distilled generic noise of what’s popular.

The same way industry experts sell $5,000 courses for their expertise and market like a pharmaceutical company (asking vague questions and then positioning their unnamed/vague solution behind a paywall) everyone will now guard their knowledge - allude to it or release a small taste of it or a corner of a painting or a snippet of a song or a piece of a code solution, and then charge higher prices for the full thing. Economically they have to in order to pay for the advertising since AI reduces organic exposure.

This new world of generative AI reminds me of Rick Deckard finding the toad in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. He sees it and marvels at it until he realizes that it too is fake like everything else. That’s what I foresee - widely available superfluous content and siloed/guarded expertise.