To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking.
If you just care about average content then yes, you can probably live on slop. But do you want to? Because no one is forcing you, there is still high quality stuff out there, produced by people with good taste, and it'll remain like that forever.
It's a good read, thanks for sharing. But the flaw in it, is the fact that you think that the world is built on merit, i.e. Good Taste, as you call it.
And while sure, merit / good taste are important, but if you look at the mainstream it's filled with average. Now, from the consumer side you can claim "what do you care about the mainstream, just look for good taste, and you will find it", and I agree with you. But I do not speak about the consumer side, but rather the producer side. As a producer, I want to produce "good taste", but if there is very little demand for good taste things, I might struggle to sustain myself while producing based on merit.
In the end, the reason enshittification exists, is because "good taste" stuff became too popular and the authors decided to capitalize on it (can't blame them when you have a mortgage to pay, and family to feed), and turn it into "mainstream crap".
I guess the point I'm trying to make, is that creating good taste is not easy. And it will become even harder as the mainstream will expand and capture AI generated content, leaving people who believe in creation based on merit, fighting for the crumbs.
The world is built at a balance between good taste and good economics. AI slop is still slop. Reminds me when there were massive booms on outsourcing software to low cost labor markets. Most of the software born out of those markets was slop and not much different than what we see today. Good taste still matters in most work. I am pretty big proponent of AI but I don’t think AI can write a book that I enjoy. Similarly I don’t believe AI can write software end to end without a humans input of good taste. Sure you can brute force it but like those early years of outsourcing I bet it won’t be maintainable or well running.
This might be one of those “the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent” cases, though.
And for arts and entertainment, where the long term value is less important economically than the immediate click, AI slop is good enough that the percentage of people unable to tell the difference means there’s no point in creating any more except at the highest end or for the love of it.
I’m watching people listen to AI-generated music and not notice (or even prefer it over human-produced music). I’m watching people on FB who can’t tell the most ridiculous AI-generated imagery from reality.
It may not be good enough for you or me; but the average consumer is not all that discerning. They’ll choose whatever gives them a dopamine hit.
I think we are thinking about different things. Slop content has existed long before AI. I agree on the music front there is a possibility but I don’t see it much different than all the low effort lowfi music that flooded the study stations. I don’t see a future yet where engineers or other folks making tasteful content have to worry about their job security. When that time comes there are going to be real concerns from more than just the creative types.
To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking.
If you just care about average content then yes, you can probably live on slop. But do you want to? Because no one is forcing you, there is still high quality stuff out there, produced by people with good taste, and it'll remain like that forever.