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Mr. @0xbitcoiner as always looking out for my stuff (#1459955) and reminding me when they're live. I finally got around to write up my remarks on this one:

I loved writing this thing. And for once (in like a hundred articles...) I was actually excited and happy to see it in print (well..., digital). If you've been following along the Den journey on SN, you could have predicted the theme and the arguments.

Same old, same old: scarcity, infinite generation, economic valueSame old, same old: scarcity, infinite generation, economic value

"Easily Replicated Abundance Meets the Economics of Infinite Content"

There’s an obvious self-selection in the current labor-related worries coming our way: It is precisely those of us who have invested most in this credentialist commentariat, who have sacrificed our lives and oriented our identities around the very cognitive and generative skills that LLMs now so effortlessly replicate. 

It’s no longer that hard to have ChatGPT write like me (just train it on my past writing), Claude to code like a programmer with a decade of experience, or have a combined AI effort produce a beautiful, two-minute, period-piece ad spot for $100.

In The Great Harvest, a recent and ironically mostly AI-generated book, Adam Livingston captures the white-collar workplace revolution underway: It’s “not that your career will vanish overnight but that it was always just a fragile assemblage of solvable problems, [… your job] was actually a collection of separate functions waiting to be identified, isolated, and optimized away.” #1425743

I have been thinking about this bit, too: given infinite generation, why is any content creator/writer/artist paid anything at all...? Best answer I have so far is "social anchoring" and "contract rigidities"/tradition.

With the marginal cost of producing videos, images, music, or words going to zero, we should have expected infinite content and next-to-no meaning — see YouTube, TikTok, or Twitter. 

One interesting twist to this, too, is that to the extent a writer is early to the AI game, their output might increase... but when everyone else catches up, the sum-total of output increases — and unless there's a corresponding increase in consumer demand (for reading, for putting money behind high-signal subscription etc etc), the price (=what a writer gets paid) has to fall or the quantity (rejection rate) has to rise.

I just don't see any way around that.

One way out, then, is to recreate the gatekeeping — not in production, that ship has sailed, but in attention and awareness. We might look to respectable minds, like we once did respectable labels or studios or outlets, not for reporting what is in the journalists’ style, but what matters. Trusting in their vision of what matters, using their long and somewhat obsolete experience as a filtering mechanism against the information overload we’re otherwise doomed to.

_al-riiiight, schtackers_ -- lemme know what you think