Creators in the age of AI

And what it will take to stand out.

Hi all,

Happy Tuesday from Napa where I’m on a 2-day retreat for women leaders in beauty & wellness. It’s been a nice respite in an idyllic (if misty) setting after bouncing between Sacramento, LA, and San Francisco for a few weeks.

Lately I’ve been evaluating how I’d like to reorient the newsletter to dive deeper into themes explored in the podcast for a more immersive experience for my readers, so I’ve been reflecting on different formats before settling, finally, on the simple One ~Weekly Article format so you get a better glimpse into what’s on my mind in the worlds of content, consumer, and tech.

Two weeks ago I was in LA where I attended The Information’s Creator Economy Summit which was an incredible collision of creators, founders, and investors in the creator economy. And I noticed one (rather unsurprising) topic was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Which got me thinking—

In a world in which generative AI has reached a tipping point with a swiftness that has surpassed the expectations of even the most ardent AI believers, what are the implications for creators specifically? For human writing, art, media online?

Some of the more obvious implications seem to be as follows:

• Efficiency. The business operations of creator businesses can benefit from the use of AI to streamline workflows, create automations and repurpose existing content.

• Scale. When these operational efficiencies combine with the content capabilities of generative AI, achieving scale as a creator through scale of output becomes theoretically easier.

• Commoditization. If barriers to content creation are radically lowered, then there will likely be a commoditization of content that will bland our feeds such that an increasingly larger % of content online reverts to the same mean, even if that mean is now slightly more polished and coherent.

Note that any conclusions on how AI will change the landscape of content must necessarily depend on how narrow or expansive your definition of “creator” is, since the work of a Packy McCormick is meaningfully different than the videos of an Addison Rae (though it’s certainly amusing to think of a cross-over of some sort).

That being said, there are commonalities among all creators and plenty of the same creative, economic, and even philosophical considerations are faced by the entirety of the category.

In particular, of the three above observations, the third fascinates me in particular because it gets to the heart of human creativity and its value in the age of machines. The open question now is: what value can human influencers provide in the age of AI if what they do is theoretically made infinitely easier, cheaper, and more replicable with machines?

So—a few thoughts (cursory, in progress, loosely held, etc.).

The most successful creators, especially on video-focused platforms like TikTok and YouTube, build their empires on not only on likes and views but on engagement and loyalty derived from the parasocial relationship.

As buzzy as Lil Miquela has been for sheer novelty, my guess is that the continued atomization of our digitized society will only deepen our yearning for “authenticity” from creators who strike that coveted balance of relatability and aspiration. In other words, we will continue to hunger for connection and we will attempt to address its scarcity with virtual substitutes, partly in the form of consuming media from the online personalities we like.

That irrepressible buzzword “authenticity”, then, will remain a precious multiplier on the asset of a large audience, and authenticity-as-currency will continue to rule the fates of creators, and will perhaps even earn a premium in the age of machine-generated content.

Also, AI chatbots are not fully reasoning or judging entities per se. They are generators of sophisticated text completion with varying degrees of accuracy whose ability to mimic but not yet fully replace human intelligence has been exponentially increasing. Which means it’s likely a matter of time before chatbot intelligence and human intelligence are indistinguishable in output (and in many situations they already are, though not uniformly or consistently).

But as anyone who has witnessed the hallucinations of chatbots is familiar with, that time is not yet now. ChatGPT still struggles, for instance, to perform basic math.

(This week’s interview with Rachel Woods, TikTok AI educator extraordinaire, offers a great breakdown of the basics of these chatbots, so give it a listen if you want a solid foundation of understanding before going into the deep end.)

What does this mean for creators? It means that while many a newsletter or Tweet thread will be the output of ChatGPT to keep up with the unrelenting hamster wheel of Content Marketing or Personal Branding, the best 1% of content across platforms is more likely to have that flair of style, quality of insightfulness, or unique entertainment value that currently remains beyond the capabilities of AI.

I might be able to ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Shakespeare to attempt to dissuade Congress from banning the app and get a surprisingly good result, but I cannot expect it to spontaneously come up with the sheer brilliance of Brutus’s line from Julius Caesar (Act IV, Scene III) that is tattooed on the inside of my right forearm (“There is a tide in the affairs of men…”).

If recreating human intelligence is a moonshot, artificially constructing human wisdom or artistic inspiration is a mission to the far reaches of the galaxy. Not to say we can’t get there (I prefer to err on the side of “don’t bet against exponential growth”) but we seemingly have considerable advances needed before we do.

Some may disagree. LLMs and image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion seem to have far exceeded our expectations for creative capacity. But their output, by definition, can only be a derivative of existing human thought, since they are trained on the stuff we’ve already produced. And the best of human creativity has that strain of originality that feels mysterious and unbidden.

So the creator looking to make passably good content in high volumes will find AI to be a boon, but because this capability is available to all, the commoditization will erode meaningful economic value capture over time.

On the other hand, a creator looking to use content as a vehicle to express originality of thought or artistry is playing a different game. It’s a game I think will gain more value and not less as we hurtle towards a world of near infinite AI-generated content.

(Not unlike, perhaps, the emergence of “artisan” or “hand-crafted” as valuable classifications in the post-Industrial age in which the manufactured has become less aspirational not based on quality but quantity and uniformity.)

Perhaps this is a romantic and archaic notion, to insist that there will always be room for human ingenuity in the AI age and that machines cannot replicate the most inspired of what humans can make. I’m willing to cede the latter as an inevitability over a long enough time horizon. Nevertheless, I insist on the former: that human creativity and wisdom will be possible for machines to mimic but not generate and will therefore always be prized. And that therefore society will value things—including media—not just based on their objective qualities but on their origins and also the degree of effort and care that produced them.

The most likely scenario in which we will soon find ourselves is that good content of a more utilitarian nature will be created at scale with breathtaking efficiency by AI, but great content (content whose unique value may even merit a less utilitarian descriptor than “content”) will necessitate the painstaking toil of humans. And most creators of media, from newsletter writers to TikTokers to even filmmakers will effectively become cyborgs of sorts: the human is at the wheel but with AI to assist and accelerate.

We have long since entered a Brave New World with technology and now that world is lurching into another historic upheaval—this time, one that touches every aspect of our lives. Few areas of human consumption, connection, and productivity will look the same and the world of creators is no different.

But for better or worse I’m an eternal optimist, and at least when it comes to what the future looks like for creators, my firm belief is that the very best creators who are endlessly propelled not by the hunger for fame and riches but instead by the sincere drive to add value to the lives of others through their brilliance, intelligence, humor, and artistry will always find an audience.

Machines will not jeopardize our endless appetite for the very best of each other’s gifts anytime soon.

As always, open to your thoughts, ideas, and recommendations.

Until next week,

Dulma