Art for art's sake will never die.

I like using the zero sum analogy.

If you bake 5 cakes and robots bake 100 cakes, you now have 105 cakes. Even if the robots bake fantastic cakes, I'm actually irrationally drawn to the human-made ones because they're more special due to being human-made.

That's no way to sustain an economy, sure, but if anything, things are even better now that there's an abundance of cakes and I can choose which ones I want.

Maybe early on, I'd prefer the robot-made cakes, but over time, I'll definitely start focusing on the human-made ones.

Similarly, art is not a zero sum game intrinsically. Now when there's a job to be done, yes. When you need 100 cakes and you can only bake 5 in the time it takes robots to make 100, clearly you go with the robots.

Similarly, if I'm looking for a good logo for a product, I'm probably going with a machine-created one if it's just as good or better than human-created ones.

As a writer, I absolutely will use natural language generation tools to help me write or even outright create stories for me, but that doesn't mean I'm never going to write again. If anything, having generative AI is only reigniting my interest in writing myself. I'd love to generate whole novels with AI from small prompts.... but I'd also love to generate texts to edit into my own style, or write in my own style and transfer it into another, or just write just to write. I'd love to see if I can learn from AI-generated text.

It's similar to how chess-playing AIs didn't destroy chess. If anything, human players became better by learning from superhuman chess AIs. A similar thing is happening in Go right now.

There will absolutely be a massive glut of AI-generated media. AI-generated movies, games, TV shows, books, comics, etc. But that's not going to stop dedicated humans from trying their own hand at it just to do it, and there'll be an audience for that.

People like saying "You won't be able to tell the difference."

But from my experience, 95% of people who use AI-gen tools actually do take the time to announce or mark that what they've made is AI-generated. I don't see that changing. Especially if regulatory laws pass.

And once these tools have spread sufficiently throughout society and human-made art becomes the new niche, it becomes the new hot commodity in and of itself. True, online you do have to trust what you're seeing is what it says it is, but I think there'll be enough ways to make sure in due time.

It's the more expensive things, like major motion pictures that require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, that I think will become slightly more obsolete. And even then, if the market still exists for them for whatever reason, who knows.

That's the big takeaway: "Who knows!"

I've been following synthetic media's rise ever since 2017. I called all of what's happening.

Nowadays, I've been shifting to a less "destroy everything" mindset to one that accepts that people will choose to maintain the status quo if it can be helped.