Will Generative AI Destroy or Unleash The Creator Economy?
Are the majority of creators in the New Rat Race?
Promising new business models, financial independence, recurrent online income, and escaping the 9–5 the creator economy was already in a precarious state before ChatGPT was unleashed.
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Sometimes referred to as the ‘passion economy’, the creator economy is an amalgam buzzword for influencers, thinkfluencers and many genuinely great and industrious workers who all work a form of Uber gigs for digital content — many since the fall out of Covid job losses.
It purports to allow people to monetise their passions or creative talents in a way that was hitherto impossible.
However, rather than creating new business models the majority of ‘creators’ are living on subsistence wages. The overall number in the creator economy is hazy, but it appears only a tiny minority earn a sustainable living from their work.
According to Shopify research, on Spotify, 98.6% of artists make just $36 per quarter, and on Patreon, only 2% of creators earned a monthly minimum wage.
The vast majority of creators are stuck on a treadmill of creating more content just to stay in the place. The crypto/NFT marketplaces that were supposed to give creators more control of their royalties have lost 97% of their trading volume and value since the peak (nor did they ever work as advertised).
It appears the creator economy is actually just the New Rat Race for Gen Z and millennials.
Proponents will say this is just a transition stage to a fully-fledged creator economy and this income skew will improve with new technology, such as crypto social media platforms and NFTs.
That was before ChatGPT was let out into the wild.
Chasing the Digital Dragon
Ironically, author of the gig/creator economy bible The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss revealed recently that his personal assistant quit from burnout after years of 80+ hour weeks (once staying up a full 60-hour shift doped to the gills on military-grade sleep suppressant pills).
Medium is full of authors in a similar vein to Ferriss on an endless loop of productivity and life hacks — until the next person finds a better ‘system’.
For example, the top Medium writer/life coach Tim Denning publishes up to 3 articles a day giving answers to everything from financial markets, running a six-figure online business to “the real reason young men are depressed”, leaving little time to actually practice what he preaches.
Having spent years as an editor in a newsroom I can tell you no journalist is expected to produce even one story every single day, let alone 3.
It is ludicrous to believe that these authors have so much insight that they have to shout about it 7 days a week.
Generative AI Encroaching on Creativity
Back to this generative AI which describes artificial intelligence making everything creative from photos, videos to architecture designs — even music.
By all accounts it’s incredible and it’s going to fuck up a lot of jobs and hit the gig/creator economy first and hardest.
Will you really appreciate a human-made meme more than a ChatGPT-made meme?
Creator jobs generative AI can already do:
Stock photos
Marketing and content marketing
Creative writing
Logo design
Fundamental programming
Music production (e.g. for ads, videos)
Making short videos
Of course, there is the potential that creators can work with generative AI to expedite their creations. This has been happening for decades in music production where Digital Audio Workstations like Ableton and Pro Tools have given teen bedroom DJs the tools to produce sounds better than an Abbey Road production 20 years ago.
Lowering the barrier to entry to music production has resulted in a flood of electronic music artists in recent years, but it will not produce the next Beethoven and 99% will be forgotten about in 10 years. It has just extended the long tail of music.
This is just the first generation of generative AI, like IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine designed to play chess better than any human. Deep Blue lost a few rounds to grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 96 but by 97 the tech had improved and it beat Kasparov in a rematch. Today the top chess ‘players’ play in machine-to-machine tournaments.
It’s more than likely that very soon ChatGPT will replace many of the menial digital tasks that we’ve been outsourcing to freelancers on Fiverr.
(Un)Productive Work
However, I believe there’s even more fundamental flaw undermining the creator economy — most of the work is not useful and non-essential to life.
At the current juncture of civilisation we need more food producers, mechanics, fixers, engineers, inventors — not photographers, podcasters, meme-makers, NFT developers, videographers, musicians, or writers.
Said another way — I may be a great amateur tennis player, footballer or golfer but should society pay for me to play these games all day even though I never made it to a professional level?
The creator economy will in likelihood not provide a viable income for but a rarefied few because it’s not useful work.
As we consider the prospect of generative AI obviating millions of people’s jobs in the digital economy in the near future we should zoom out to see where we stand in the timeline of civilisation.
As the anthropologist Jared Diamond wrote in his meta-history ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, for the majority of existence every human/citizen was a prosumer, producing at least some of the food they consumed. Food collection was a part of everybody’s job description.
It was only with the intensification of food production and energy breakthrough by means of domesticating crops and animals that humans could support non-food producing jobs such as scribes and accountants etc. which, in turn, led to the intensification of populations and the emergence of cities.
Civilisations collapse when, among other factors, the urbanites in the cities become too much of a drain on resources and food and there are too many social elites in paper/pixel-pushing jobs doing unproductive work.
Today we live in era when:
There are millions of bullshit jobs
A small minority of people are food producers
Diminishing returns on food production efficiencies
Max population to the earth’s carrying capacity
Majority of population live in cities
In other words, we need more people to do productive work: the trades, growing, farming, building and fixing infrastructure. Most of the work in the digital economy is pixel-pushing i.e. bullshit jobs. This is in part why tech companies, supposedly the height of efficiency and sophistication, could cull 100,000s of jobs in one swoop.
Economic Evolution
A first principle of evolution — in civilisations and all species — is that what’s generally good for the whole is bad for the individual and vice versa.
This evolutionary impulse to pass on our genetic code to the next generation often to the detriment of the individual is evident in nearly all species: Bees that die after mating, spiders that let their young eat them, ants that self-exploded to protect the colony.
Today most work is non-essential to the continuation of the human species — in fact it’s counterproductive — and detracts from doing productive work like farming, growing, inventing. Often the only person who benefits from the non-essential work is the person doing it, who’s rewarded with social status and money.
Consider the billions of people employed in pixel-pushing activities that are an act of self-preservation for numerous actors:
for the individual who has to pay a mortgage and maintain social status
for the company which has to comply with hiring diversity and administration
for a government who buoy employment figures to get re-elected
Consider what percentage of these professions work could be deemed essential to life: business consultants, marketers, administrators, advertisers, journalists, photographers, bankers, lawyers, pharma reps.
Fractal Communities
The ‘creator economy’ by definition is a digital economy and doesn’t benefit creators of physical goods, food or artisans.
However, I do see alternative and localised currencies playing a part in the future for creators, both online and offline.
A graphic artist who streams a DJ’s track may choose to tip him in a currency that he earned for contributing his graphic design skills to an digital art project, a currency which has no value to anyone apart from a few fans of that art project who may, in turn, buy that currency from the DJ in the DJ’s preferred currency.
These are what I describe as ‘fractal communities’. Subsets of global communities that exist both online and offline. Similar to being part of your country’s Facebook group, then your city, your town, your local business group, hobby group etc.
New currencies or new ways of trading value and time are emerging between these fractal communities to trade among each other.
Conclusion
Even before ChatGPT was unleashed the creator economy was on the path to become the New Rat Race for Gen Z and millennials.
Rich tech-savvy countries have been outsourcing mundane menial work for decades — data entry, web building, manufacturing — but Gen AI is outsourcing human creativity and productivity that will increase output but it probably won’t lift all boats.
If you are considering going full time as a ‘creator’ consider how many millions across the world have the same idea and the network effects of a digital economy skew the majority of rewards to an every smaller cohort i.e. a longer tail of wealth distribution.
Consider offsetting the creator work with timeless useful work such as mechanics or carpentry that will always be needed.
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