It’s not just the cost, it’s what humans are drawn to. If you sort content by what leads to maximum engagement the stuff that comes out on top is absolutely no

It’s not just the cost, it’s what humans are drawn to. If you sort content by what leads to maximum engagement the stuff that comes out on top is absolutely not informative, intelligent, or positive. You get repetitive addictive filler, inflammatory fear/hate/outrage porn, and lurid tabloid style trash. When you scroll the limbic system appears to be in charge, not the neocortex. The lambic system seeks only dopamine. The easiest path to dopamine wins. This means that on an ad supported web content like the above will swamp everything else. There is zero incentive to produce anything else. AI can now produce maximally engaging content on demand, so the future is Twitter or TikTok but largely without human creators. The future of the open web and free apps is a Skinner box full of AI generated outrage porn and silly filler that scrolls forever, only pausing for ads. The dynamics can be very different when people pay directly for content. The neocortex appears to get more involved in buying decisions than passive consumption. But very very few people pay for content so there is either not much of this or it will have to be expensive. We may be going back to the days when actual knowledge and quality discourse was costly, not because of the cost of printing it but as a filter mechanism to find it in the vast sea of trash. The net was already headed here before AI. Generative models will just accelerate this.