Imagine you want to see a version of Star Wars where the rebels suffer a definitive and final defeat.
Imagine you want to watch Succession but with Shiv coming out on top.
Imagine you want to read a version of a company’s marketing material that answers your specific questions and objections or that makes an unbiased case between a solution and its competitors.
Although writers are worried that AI will replace them, that’s a failure of imagination.
AI may ultimately “replace” the very idea of content created for and consumed by a passive audience.
But replacement may not quite be the right idea. Remixes play an important role in some genres of music. You lay down a basic track, and then allow other artists to run with your ideas. Fan fiction plays an important role in some creative genres, too.
You could imagine the world of “content” as a world of limitless remixes and adaptations. You could see it as a profusion of creative potential where “creators” are something else entirely.
Or, it may be that people simply create their own content entirely. I suspect not—they still want that seed idea to spark them, they still want that sense of intersubjectivity. For now, at least.
Maybe ultimately (and frighteningly) it will be that we each are living entirely in our own simulations rather than the hypothesis that we live in a simulation collectively. Not The Matrix, but billions of them, all different!
