Boon of AI Art & Music

I am excited about AI-generated art and entertainment. In general, AI-generated content.

For a while now, the Internet has been nothing but SEO-powered experience. Meticulously planned ads placed all around the sites that you visit, subscription-based model diluting the idea of purchasing and owning a product, and social media sites full of business people disguised as influencers trying to sell you products. It felt like a huge mashup of billboards rather than a community of individuals.

Enter the AI era - content creation cranked up to 11. It's not so much of a concern if people will be fooled by it or not as they already are being fooled. It's the fact that digital content will lose its value. Over-saturation gives birth to exclusivity. And I believe, the exclusivity will be contents/entertainment more tied to the physical world. That would drive social interaction among people and which is I think will be a boon for the society.

Over-saturation gives birth to exclusivity.

You can already see it happening bit by bit (no pun intended) - vinyls records and DVD sales are going up every day. Sure, they are eventually digital content but they are more "real" than simply streaming bytes over the Internet. You can also feel the ushering of brick-and-mortar stores. Burned by Amazon products not matching their descriptions, people nowadays started to prefer checking out the actual product by visiting a nearby physical store.
Covid might have exploded the usage of Zoom and video calls but it also gave us a glimpse of how we still long the feeling of physically being in the same place together. And now that it seems like we are getting over the pandemic, people are rushing over to travel and visit their families and friends.

I am personally getting into printed photos again. The quality of the paper has improved tremendously and they do not degrade as fast as the older ones. Also, printing them forces me to carefully organize and rate the photos. It's akin to buying CDs and vinyls - you only buy music that you really enjoy. Maybe it's placebo, but owning and holding a physical content makes it so much more valuable than its digital counterpart. As with a painting where you can see every brush strokes, it is inherently more valuable than the printed version.

The Internet is slowly becoming what Twitter has become - an abyss of bots interacting with each other. And just as the usage of Twitter dwindled dramatically, so will the usage of Internet. Don't get me wrong - I love the Internet and the whole idea behind it but I worry about the current direction it is heading towards.