Hi everybody - earlier, I was using an AI assistant to help me with a routine coding activity. The assistant did a great job in providing the initial code and making changes based on my prompts. If this is what the future of app building is going to be like, sign me up! 😅

There was a moment, though, that inspired this post:

While I was chatting back and forth, I noticed something interesting about the code the AI assistant was generating. It looked a lot like something that I had created years ago, for it had an edge case that I created specifically to address something on kirupa.com. Nobody else on the planet would have a need for that block of code.

Out of curiosity, I decided to just ask the AI assistant for the source, and it happily had the following to say:

Because the AI assistant had properly summarized several of my articles and code snippets to answer my question, it was no surprise why some of the quirks from my code spilled out into the answer as well. Funny, right?

Now, why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because this interaction is a precursor to the kind of pain content creators (maybe sorta like us?) will encounter in the near future.

In the old days (like 6 months ago), if I had a coding task that I wanted to get some help on, I would have used a search engine and landed on an answer someone would have created. Let’s say that I do want to go with the article I wrote almost 13 years ago:

That this answer is from a known entity is obvious. Notice that I see KIRUPA in the search results. The URL and logo very clearly indicate that this content is something that I created. When you click on the link, you are taken to my blog, where you see everything exactly the way I intended for you to see things:

From here, you can browse through some of my other content. Interact with others on the forums. Choose to buy my books. Because you are on a destination that I fully created, you have the opportunity to explore and do things that would be mutually beneficial to both of us.

Let’s contrast this behavior to using an AI assistant today:

When using an AI assistant, I got the answer directly. I didn’t even have to sift through various results and/or visit some strangely named pixel-art-inspired site to figure out the answer myself. The AI assistant gave me the answer directly.

As a content creator, this entire AI-assisted workflow is downright devastating:

Each time someone asks an AI assistant a question, your content (and likely a mixture of content from other creators) gets summarized and presented without any easily discoverable link or reference back to the original sources:

This means that a consumer will never visit the content creator’s blog, never explore the content, never help them monetize, etc. The age-old social and business relationship between those who create content and those who consume content is getting broken.

As Generative AI continues to make fast progress in creating high-quality text, images, audio, and video, is the unique value content creators bring to the table even needed?

For the longest time, we had an arrangement that looks as follows:

We had the content consumers, we had the intermediaries (aka the search engines and social networks), and we had the content creators. Each group was reliant on the other for its survival. The content creators created the content the content consumers were looking for. The intermediaries helped connect the content consumers with the content creators and found clever ways to monetize this connection. There was an uneasy alliance between all parties involved, but mostly everybody was happy.

Now, imagine you are an intermediary in this world. In this legacy arrangement, you are nothing more than a highway that collects tolls usually in the form of advertising revenue. You do all the hard work to hand over a content consumer to the content creator. The content creator gets all the glory (aka valuable data 🧮 and money 💰) from the content consumer.

With AI, the intermediary is no longer relegated to just being a highway. They can be both the highway and a desirable destination. They now have the ability to entice content consumers to stay fully in their ecosystem without ever having to send them off elsewhere to a 3rd party content creator.

In this AI-driven world, content creators still play a role:

AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, and guess who creates the data? That’s right - it is our content creators!

There is a problem here, though. The incentives that drove content creators in the past no longer exist. Why create content to throw into a void with limited reach and monetization opportunities? To avoid this chicken-and-egg problem, the intermediaries have incentivized certain content creators like Reddit, StackOverflow, and others by paying them for their data to be used for training the AI models. This ensures the models have access to up-to-date new information in addition to the massive amount of historical data they already have from content created digitally and non-digitally over the centuries.

As a content consumer, your life goes on as always. You have questions. You get answers. Whether the answer comes from a human creator or an AI-generated creator, it doesn’t really matter to the average user:

As videos and images get more photorealistic, even the most discerning of us will be unable to distinguish real from unreal. In the near future, one could imagine that everything we read, all the images we see, and any videos we interact with are powered by AI models created entirely by an intermediary in real-time to personalize the content for what we are looking for.

For content consumers, AI will bring in a pretty awesome age where they have access to highly personalized and engaging information. For content creators, the path is unclear. There isn’t a class of unique content or topics that AI won’t eventually be able to match and exceed a human at creating. Even originality can be faked, so whatever content pivots creators make is likely to be a temporary relief.

As a content creator, the old ways of creating and distributing content will likely no longer work. What you need to do is find ways to connect with your audience directly:

What this means is going to vary depending on the type of content you are creating. Something to try include:

1. You can try to negotiate your way to be seen as a special data provider that gets compensated for helping train AI models

2. Create a newsletter, for they are having a renaissance these days as being one of the last remaining mediums where an intermediary is not involved in dictating access.

3. Focus on activities in the physical world that AI can’t quite replicate - at least not until the humanoid robots enter the picture in full force! 🤖

4. ???

5. Profit

The gist of it is that I really don’t have a good answer here. When in doubt, just try stuff and see what sticks. Even if you don’t succeed, you’ll have learned a ton along the way.

If we take many steps back, the world tends to gravitate towards solutions that provide a good user experience.

Having a unified chat window where an AI assistant takes care of getting me answers is arguably a much better experience than digging through links (many of which could be spammy) and finding the answer yourself. The technology landscape is filled with many examples of creative destruction where large groups of solutions where displaced by better things, often at great pain to the existing players.

It is a bitter pill to swallow that the creative destruction wrecking ball may be coming squarely at content creators like myself, but what it does mean is that I need to figure out a way to evolve and stay relevant. Until then, I have no plans of slowing down my content creation activities. I enjoy it far too much, and I constantly keep learning a lot of interesting things along the way 👾

If you have any questions or comments, post on the forums or ping me on Twitter / X.

Cheers,
Kirupa 🐙