Comment by wokwokwok
4 years ago
> the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people
That’s not what they predicted; the “we just get more content! People won’t lose their jobs…” argument aside, the market that is willing to spend money on content seems reasonably likely to drop off.
People will continue to want content, yes.
People will continue to buy content, yes.
…however, it seems difficult to believe that as companies that can produce the content significantly cheaper and at higher volumes emerge, traditional providers of eg. stock photography, will manage to convince people to keep paying the same amount for it.
I personally predict a wave of race to the bottom startups that cheaply generate content, driving the costs to consumers down. Yay.
However, companies will accordingly reduce their spend, and move off of traditional providers onto the “super cheap” new comers, resulting in an overall collapse in the total spend on content, even as companies get more for the money they do spend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this.
If the marginal cost of producing X drop to virtually zero, people don’t just consume more of it (well, maybe a bit more), they mostly just spend less money and buy the cheapest product.
"Stock photography" covers a lot of ground. I don't see company art directors shifting to generative AI--at least not yet--for a variety of reasons, including legal concerns. However, you'll probably see a lot of use for people looking for graphics, any graphics to illustrate things. But for content like that, people today are probably mostly using Creative Commons or (more commonly) just grabbing stuff of the Internet.
That's a statement about 2023. I don't pretend to know what will be the case in five years.
A stock photo agency can exist even if the cost of acquiring a particular picture is exactly zero.
Their paid service would be / always has been curation and selection. Customers rarely need a random picture (else they just use unsplash), they need a particular picture conveying a particular idea / mood / style.