[periphrasis]

I don’t disagree about the artistic merit or lack thereof of most “content”. Will AI produced content be worse than 98% of what’s on Netflix? Probably not! But this will drastically change the economics of content creation, such that something that has the chance to be actual art will be dramatically more expensive than that which can benignly occupy a user’s attention as they alternate between staring at a screen and flipping through their phone. Give it a generation, or even just a decade (look at how rapidly audience tastes have degenerated since 2014 or so) and no one will be able to conceive of “content” being anything else. Who is going to sign on to fund popular entertainment with artistic ambition, eg The Fabelmans, or art house fare, eg Tar, in such a world? Such a future, a world without popular or even middle brow art, is dystopian to its core (and indeed it may already be our present) which is why I fail to conceal my contempt for the aesthetic values of anyone who would eagerly embrace it.

[basch]

Does “art” occupy much of the collective attention to begin with? If we look at best picture nominees by box office gross, something like 6/10 weren’t seen by anyone to begin with, and that was an unusually low percentage historically.