I have always thought that most, if not all, people that called themselves “content creators” are not providing much value. And in aggregate they are probably net negative due to their spamminess.
Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned.
All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.
I expect this theme to continue and expand across many "jobs". There are a lot of people who are just plugging numbers into spreadsheets all day and you would think "yes but when something doesn't fit they have to be smart and use human intelligence to fix the problem" However if you see what happens in practice all they do is send an e-mail to someone else saying there is a problem. ChatGTP can do that part. You don't need many of these pencil pushers
A friend of mine started working for a company a while back. He met a woman there whose job involved some very tedious tasks, manually typing things from one software into another.
Thinking he'd do her a favour, he wrote a python script to automate it, so she could spend more time on the less tedious parts of her job.
Turns out there weren't any. He had automated her entire job in 15 minutes.
The irony is these types of jobs are usually in companies that aren't going to spend any money to invest in the back office tools/processes their employees use on a daily basis. Any AI/ML tooling is so far away from that type of company that those jobs might be safer than others.
Content creation very much follows some pareto rule where the good 80% comes from only 20% of creators, or something along those lines. It means the 80% of creators producing bad/unuseful/spammy content are in trouble because what little work they were doing can now be automated. This will lead to an explosion of the already very saturated world of bad/unuseful/spammy content.
My prediction is that this will strengthen the huge market share that the big institutional providers of content had pre-internet. In the those days, they had effectively full market share because access to smaller creators was just too difficult. Then the internet happened and small creators could reach consumers and vice versa and it was easy. Market share started to shift somewhat to smaller creators. But... with automated AI crap content it will severely distort the signal/noise ratio when looking for content -- making it again very hard to find small creators of quality content. This difficulty will lead to people sticking to the big institutional creators.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips (one of the biggest tech Youtube channels) posts vids where he upgrades his rigs, such as one where he goes through setting up a server that can store a petabyte of videos because they are spending another 100k on new cameras so that they can shoot in 8k raw.
And he isn't the only one. If you look at LGR, a nostalgia tech Youtuber, he has also upgraded his setups over the years, though less so than LTT.
Until recently I was watching Yannic Kilcher on YouTube, he posted over the span of a few years hundreds of in-depth paper reviews. He is technically a "content creator" but for me his videos were as good as lectures from famous universities.
Yes, the term technically include book authors, artists and others as well, but those people don’t normally call themselves content creator. In fact I think that highlights the difference between the mindset: the “content creator” is all about pumping out quantity of content, quality be damned.
All of this is just a long way of saying that the decreased income security for “content creator” is less about the ability of ChatGPT, and more on the uselessness of a lot of “content” out there.