Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
There were trends in the past like the magical girl trend, giant robot trend, space opera trend, and high fantasy trend, but those always pulled from things like Japanese women's rejection of staid maturity, Japan's manufacturing boom and the rise of complex electronics, Star Wars and the exocolonization hype of the late 1970s, and Dungeons & Dragons and Wizardry. There was always something new outside of the sphere that got integrated into it. Nowadays many manga are copies of copies, where the things they're copying pulled from games like Tera Online, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dragon Quest, and from landmark '90s manga and anime like Yu Yu Hakusho, Record Of Lodoss War, and Tenchi Muyo. Especially in the last seven or so years these properties are so many layers removed because of the copying that they don't know why certain plot tropes or character archetypes exist and thus don't know how to use them (or more importantly subvert them).
Sturgeon's Law obviously applies, but currently many of the best examples of ongoing manga and anime lie within a fraction of the diversity that used to exist. Comparing 2024-2026 to 2004-2006 (which was considered a dark age in anime and manga at the time) provides a pretty stark example. The same thing happened with American comics in the 1990s and 2000s before the indie comics boom following Diamond Distribution's years long fight with the industry. While kids don't have a reference for what's good or not because they don't have a back catalogue of experience to compare to, adults absolutely do. And adults are the ones that drive a majority of sales considering the anime boom started in the mid 1990s. They won't read or watch something that repeats a well worn premise but worse. So we might be about to see a collapse of manga as the snake reaches the end of eating it's own tail.
Understanding is a combination of consumption and reflection. There is simply not enough time to do so. This is driving a push towards content that is so simple to consume that it takes no effort.
There is a bit of a parallel here to what LLMs have done to software. They have sped up the act of writing the code, but have done little for everything on either side of the code writing.
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
The hate for technological advances is so strong that we're wanting... Entertainment austerity for poor people?
Oh my God.
This community needs more hope.
> extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
You're telling this to someone who is Meisner-trained, who acts and performs, who has directed, shot lots of films, and who is heavily involved in the arts. A24 is my jam, and even that's not enough to sate me.
I sincerely hope this isn't a performance.
I want better. Both as a consumer and creator in the arts.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.
Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.