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AI and the Threat of Nostalgia Culture
The rise of AI content risks overshadowing original creative works, potentially leading to a market collapse for writers and artists if consumers prefer nostalgia-driven remixes over new expressions.
What happens if the spread of AI slop crowds out the market for original writing and art? It’s easy to read that as the goal of OpenAI et al. Sam Altman would much rather you pay him $20 a month to have his bot tell you about what new albums you might like than have you pay Rolling Stone and its stable of writers $20 a year to do the same. And given that most of us have a lot more we’re interested in than just new albums, and ChatGPT will readily tell us about all those things too, while Rolling Stoneoutput is rather more limited, it’s easy to see how that $20 a month can be tempting. If enough people are tempted enough, then every subscription that might’ve gone to a publication goes to Sam Altman instead.
The trouble, of course, is that to know which new albums to tell you about, ChatGPT needs to be able to find content about new albums, either in its training data or by searching the web and ingesting what it finds. And while plenty of people will LiveJournal for free, to get good original content to ingest, that good…
