What happens to anything that allows easy content creation with minimal effort and that is released for masses? What happens when something that earlier required tremendous amount of effort is suddenly achievable more efficiently, even mass produced? It loses value.
Post image created with NVIDIA Canvas. Cool tool that allows you to paint sceneries:
Created with NVIDIA Canvas
AI is able to generate beautiful art & imagery and now with Sora even realistic short videos with only a text prompt. When it comes to images and graphics, AI has already kind of ruined the marvel and excitement that digital art used to made me feel. As the tech advances it’s more difficult to feel the “Someone made this, wow!”-effect. You automatically start to question: Maybe AI did this? And at this point, the content loses value. Sure, the usual supply & demand mechanics work here too. Content majorly loses value when you start to see incredible visuals everywhere and it is easy to mass produce. They start to lose their attraction and their status of being something special.
That is the main reason I haven’t posted a lot about the incredible capabilities of AI in creating beautiful graphics and images. It’s all very impressive, but you lose interest when you realize how easy it is to produce the content. “Ok cool” – is the main reaction I feel, I personally don’t get lured into making tons of AI generated images. You try it a few times, then lose interest. It certainly is useful for some professions but not in mine as I’ve been focused on less visual projects.
But this post isn’t supposed to be a bitter designers post about AI, this post is just a reflection of how I see things at this point of time. This post is about how we perceive and experience content online.
How smart phones disrupted photography?
We don’t even have to go that far back in time to see similar trend on devaluation of content. This happened when smart phone cameras started to really compete with digital cameras / even SLR cameras (SLR is still king I believe). Anyhow, smart phones brought great photography capabilities for the masses. Photography used to be something that was too expensive for the public and required more know-how. Same applies to graphics and visuals AI is capable of doing now.
Sidenote: Does anyone use a standalone digital camera anymore, has this product category been basically killed at this point by smart phones?
This has been old news already and is easy to witness: just go to Instagram. Sure they may be heavily edited but there are plenty of actually great photos too! People genuinely take beautiful & stunning photos with their phones. And there are millions and millions of photos that are accessible to anyone. It can all be overwhelming and it keeps getting harder to feel the “Someone took this photo, wow!”-effect. You feel more and more “Ok, cool” when you encounter beautiful images. So the value of the content has decreased drastically. Sure, if you know something has been created by a friend then the value skyrockets 😉
End of ramble
I’m still grateful to all the actually talented creators. I still value your efforts, it just gets harder and harder to differentiate between AI generated & human made content. This post doesn’t cover the positives sides how AI is able to empower content creation which can very beneficial.
What has this post lead to, is the devaluation a real thing or is that just me? Do I have a point? Is this whole post just pure cynicism?