content has become fully commodified and lost its intrinsic value
 

Podcast Excerpt from 'This Week in Google 752' - Jan 24th, 2024

The following is a segment from the TWiT.tv podcast "This Week in Google," episode 752. This conversation provides insights into the future of media and the evolving role of the internet and AI:

Jeff Jarvis:
“In a way, the whole internet is old media. Because the whole internet is built around the attention economy. And so we have to break out of that. I think there are new generations of advertising that you can imagine. Plus we are wildly inefficient in this industry. Everybody copies everybody else. The original value isn’t as much as they think.”

“Content is the old media. And we’re still in that phase, I think, where we’re trying to aspire to ‘what it was’, rather than radically thinking about what it can be.”

Leo:
“What will Journalism look like in 2050?”

Jeff Jarvis:
“I don’t know, It’s not going to be something you can think of now.”

Leo:
“Do you worry about the influence of AI on all of this?”

Paris Martineau:
“I mean, I think it’s an accelerant in some ways, and I think if you go back to the Sports Illustrated example (that they are going out of business, as are most old media companies are failing right now). When you have companies that see what they are producing as solely content to garner eyeballs on ads. You will have incentives to have AI create that content for as cheap as possible. Which is what happened to Sports Illustrated before the fall.”

Leo:
“That’s the contextualization that matters. If you think what you’re doing is serving a community, and building a community, and being part of a community. That’s very different than you’re serving content to sell ads.”

Jeff Jarvis:
“Content is now fully commodified and it’s lost its value as content. That’s my theory. It’s just gone. And AI just accelerates that. So, who wants to play in that game at all anymore.”

i'm literally watching this Rick Beato interview right now talking about the death of rock and roll after the big corps took over in the 90s.

every creative industry dies at some point when the corporate giants find value and buy the artists and producers. Rick talks about how every record started sounding the same because creative decisions were made at scale, and songs were produced at scale. few original sounds were discovered after the late 90s. AI will make that worse.

its funny, i worked for a radio station in the 90s when radio died, i worked for a magazine publisher in the 2000s when magazines died, i worked for an ISP when cable started taking over, and now i've been in porn for 20 years, which is slowly dying.

i'm looking for my next failing industry :1orglaugh




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