The Rise of Generative AI: Opportunities and Risks in the Creator Economy

The Rise of Generative AI: Opportunities and Risks in the Creator Economy

I am a self-confessed technophile. Tech advances both fascinate and terrify me for their disruptive potential.

Five years ago, in 2018, I wrote that the most significant challenges and opportunities in our economy would come from AI. Forward to 2023. Generative AI has captured our collective imagination! Befittingly; AI was the talk of the town at the Page Spring Conference for marketing and communications professionals in NY. 

However, the challenges and opportunities of Generative AI, as I envisage, are beyond content. The wave of disruption is at the heart of our work - Creativity!

SignalFire, a venture capital firm, coined the word Creator Economy. Their report analyzes creator platforms' growth and the pandemic's impact on the Creator Economy. 

The Creator Economy has been thriving with a valuation of around $14 billion annually, thanks to digital channels enabling independent writers, podcasters, artists, and musicians to connect with audiences directly and earn their incomes.

However, the advent of generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Midjourney threatens to disrupt and simultaneously boost creative work. The rise of generative AI models is revolutionizing the creative industry.

In this blog, staying closer to my profession, I shall visualize scenarios of how generative AI may affect creative work; and highlight the potential risks and opportunities for businesses.

An Explosion of AI-Assisted Innovation

Generative AI models can help augment our performance in creative work, leading to more efficiency and productivity. We can retrieve knowledge and contextualize and interpret it using simple prompts. People can learn the skill of "prompt engineering" and ask the machine the right questions, allowing them to produce more relevant and meaningful content. This can be facilitated by having people speak instructions to a computer via advanced voice-to-text algorithms, which will then be interpreted and executed by an AI like ChatGPT.

Platforms enable independent creators: Substack, Flipboard, and Steemit, which facilitate individuals to create content and become independent producers and managers of their work.

This scenario can help speed up innovation and enable people to engage more in creative work. Tools such as GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer, and DALL-E 2, an image generator, can make coding and design easier for novices. However, humans still need to correct and edit the newly generated content, which may lead to more people entering the creative industry.

Machines Monopolize Creativity

The second scenario raises concerns that algorithmic competition and inadequate governance may lead to the crowding out of authentic human creativity. A tsunami of algorithmically generated content may drown out human writers, producers, and creators, and some talented creators may opt out of the market. This raises an essential question of how we will generate new ideas.

Recent lawsuits against prominent generative AI platforms allege massive copyright infringement. Intellectual-property laws have yet to catch up with the technological progress in AI research. Governments may spend decades balancing technical innovation incentives while retaining authentic human creation incentives.

The proliferation of low-quality generative AI content could devalue authentic human content, disincentivizing original creators and ultimately leading to an innovation slowdown. This may result in a decline in the human production of new art and content.

This scenario could also mean fundamental changes to what content creation looks like. If production costs fall close to nothing, that opens the possibility of reaching specific — and often less included — audiences through extreme personalization and versioning. As a case in point, Buzzfeed recently announced it would personalize its content, such as quizzes and tailor-made rom-com pitches, with OpenAI's tools. (However, they don't plan to use generative AI in their newsroom.)

A Hybrid World of Human and Machine Creativity 

In the third scenario, people and AI may collaborate well to produce content. Humans bring unique creativity and problem-solving skills, and AI will contribute data-driven knowledge and speed. In this scenario, generative AI can help generate initial ideas, which humans can refine and develop, leading to higher-quality and more innovative content.

Businesses must prepare for the changing creative industry by investing in AI and ensuring they have a diverse talent pool, including individuals with various technical and creative skills. They must stay current on the latest technological advancements and know their potential risks and benefits.

Human-Made will Command a Premium.

The rise of algorithmically generated content could lead to a "techlash," causing people to crave and pay more for authentic human creativity.

While generative models can be impressive, they often produce inaccurate text that sounds legit but needs to be revised with errors. As a result, humans might demand greater accuracy from their content providers, relying more on trusted human sources instead of machine-generated information. Human-made content could command a premium due to its uniqueness and awareness of social and cultural contexts across borders and time.

Content moderation needs will likely explode as information platforms get overwhelmed with false or misleading content, requiring human intervention and carefully designed governance frameworks to counter misinformation.

For example, take the rise of deep fake videos, images, and voiceovers that can manipulate content to deceive people. As more people become aware of this technology and its potential negative impacts, they will seek authentic human-made content they can trust, leading to a growing demand for fully developed human content and potentially a premium on it.

So, what does this mean for us?

Well, it's crucial to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate the potential impacts of generative AI. By prioritizing authenticity, accuracy, and cultural awareness in our content, we can remain competitive and capture a premium for our work. Let's embrace the uniqueness of human creativity and continue to innovate with generative AI while being mindful of the potential risks and taking steps to mitigate them.

How to identify and manage creative risks in an era of generative AI? I will write about them in my next post.