Comment by petercooper

Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.

That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)