13 A tsunami of content

Nothing illustrates the shift to abundance as powerfully as the enormous rise in creative content - music, books, videos, films, TV series - that have become available to all of us with the advent of the Internet and the smartphone. This overflow of material is both wonderful and overwhelming. And we are on the cusp of a new wave, of a veritable tsunami of software-generated material, with the advent of AI programs like Chat GPT.  What new strategies can we develop to enjoy this overflow of material, instead of drowning in it?

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and in this episode I want to look at an abundance of content.

How are we going to deal with an abundance of content, with thousands of TV series, with hundreds of millions of songs, with billions of pieces of texts? And as this abundance is still growing enormously, how do we deal with the overflow of information and creativity? How does that change the way we can experience it, enjoy it, and choose from all these possibilities?

One aspect of this shift to abundance is not just the abundance in financial terms, or in terms of possibilities for our lives, or natural abundance, but it's also the abundance of the things we create; and how the strategies that worked for us in the past, when there was far less access to human creation, to human creative content, how those strategies need to change in this era in which we're overwhelmed. There is an overflow of creative content.

So this is going to be the 13th episode of Cornucopia. This is the first talk of a new series. The last time I was recording things, I was walking in Spain in January. It's now May, 2023. You can hear all the birds around me. This is the place I often go to walk. I always do more or less the same circuit, but that allows me to focus on thinking, and on talking to you.  and not trying to find out where I'm going. In the meantime I've been to Australia and there I walked in rainforests with unbelievably tall and lush trees, and wild animals roaming about like cassowaries and koalas, which you could spot in eucalyptus trees and pythons hanging low next to the path. This water catch ment area where I'm walking here, everything has been planted, designed to be the kind of forest that people use to walk. There's nothing really original. But, of course, it's all alive: there are trees, there are birds, there are deer frolicking about. While I was walking in Australia, I really wanted to be in the rainforest. I didn't particularly want to be thinking about an abundance of content, but back here, this is a good time to start thinking about this issue. 

First of all, let's get a sense of this enormous explosion of creative content that we've been undergoing. Now, people of my generation will probably remember that when they grew up, that there was just a few channels on television, that you could choose something on channel one or channel  two, perhaps there was a third channel. Videotapes had just started and were incredibly expensive. It is true that you still had enormous possibilities. The school library had more books than you could ever read. You could still listen to different kinds of music. There were radio stations. There were all kinds of possibilities to experience abundance.

For people from an earlier generation who'd just known one wireless in the family house and an old phonograph, the kind of access that we had to songs and to books and stuff was already an enormous growth. Since then, we had the computer revolution, we had the digitization of forms of content such as music a nd photographs and films.

I often use the example of music, going from a small record collection to a streaming service with a hundred million songs. We have the example of TV moving to cable, for example, in the United States with 80 channels, and then 300 channels where you could watch six channels of golf, watch golf all day if you wanted to. And then of course, the explosion of YouTube and the idea that anybody who wanted to put some video online could do so, and that you could watch it for free, or with ads. 

In the old days you used to have an expensive camera - or even a cheap camera - to take photographs, but they had to be developed and each print cost you a certain amount of money. This became digital, and then you could store more and more pictures on a memory card, and eventually you could just do that on your mobile phone. Where in the past we might have taken 10 or 20 shots over the course of a holiday, we now take 20 or 30 shots over the course of a day, or sometimes even off over the course of an hour or, if you're an influencer, over the course of a few minutes. 

The amount of photographs that you have on your digital devices, the access that you have to music, the access that you have to TV series and streaming services, the access that you have to self-produced video and music that you find on YouTube and on SoundCloud. And the same thing with books: in the old days, there was a lot of fiction, there was a lot of non-fiction. But with the capacity to self-publish things and to self-publish things digitally, for example on Amazon, the amount of new books that are being published every day has also grown exponentially. 

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So everybody who's lived through the last few decades has experienced this very rapid growth in creative content. You can imagine that the strategies that we need to enjoy all this creative content, to make choices in what we are going to read, or listen to, or watch, or what we are going to store and look at again, that all these choices are very different from the kind of life that we lived 10, or 20, or 50 years ago.This shift to abundance, this enormous abundance of creative goods, which has a lot of positive sides, which we'll go into also means that we have to recalibrate, that the strategies that helped us in the past, that made sense to us, that made us happy, that gave us a sense of wellbeing, are probably not the strategies, and the approach,  and the way to enjoy this enormous abundance.

I've been thinking about this for quite a while, like most of these things that I talk about on these walks, but the reason to talk about it today is actually that we're justed at the beginning of what I think is going to be an enormous wave of new content. And that, of course, is caused by these AI programs. We don't have to go into the details of how Chat GPT works, how large language models work, but, basically, they have access to an enormous base of writing and images at the moment, and perhaps in the future of music and other forms of content. They can match things according to prompts that you give them. You can say: “write a Shakespearean tragedy in the style of Ernest Hemingway, including some Muppets - or something like that. Anything that you can imagine you can ask it to do for you. And because this is so easy to do, the creative tool has got an enormous boost. But also, and this is a little bit scary, I think, or a little bit overwhelming, the capacity to create a lot of content. 

So for example, how do you write a book? Well, in the old days, writing a book took quite a bit of effort. Even if you came up with a good idea, and even if you could write, you actually had to compose sentences and string them together. Even if you just wanted to write any book, any string of sentences, you had to do all of it yourself. Now you can just come up with a prompt, and the whole work of writing the book can be done by the software. 

It's the same thing, of course, with very good translation software. In the old days, you had to do a translation by hand, by head. You had to come up with every sentence. And now the matching of the translation software, for most purposes - I would say everything that's not poetry or literary stuff, and even then - is actually very accurate. Accurate for, for most purposes. Which, on the one hand, of course, is an enormous boon. It's wonderful: text can now be rendered in basically all the languages for which there are matching data sets. At the same time, if you are a translator, then you've just been replaced by a piece of software. 

Even apart from the way that it will disrupt our work and livelihoods , just think of the enormous amount of content that you can generate. You will be able to write articles, essays, books at the touch of a button: all of that is going to get an enormous boost. Think of YouTube: if the tools for making your own video clip - which still require you to do a little bit of editing and filming and thinking at the moment -, if all of that can be done through a prompt, you can see again that this is gonna get an enormous boost. Maybe a tenfold boost, maybe a hundredfold boost, maybe a thousandfold boost. 

So with texts, with videos, with images, with music. You can ask the software to compose a piece of music in the style of this or this composer, but not just one piece of music or ten, a hundred thousand, a million, it doesn't matter: the number has become irrelevant. And so, I do believe we're at the beginning of this wave of artificially-generated content.

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Creative people, I think, will immediately see the generative capacities of this tool, the capacity to use it and to make more beautiful things. But from our perspective as consumers, there is a wave of content coming towards us. We're standing on the beach and it's like a tsunami. We see the water receding, and I don't think we're quite ready for this wave of content that is going to hit us once the water's receded, and the big wave that was coming towards us now hits the shore. It's a violent metaphor, but we can get washed away if we get inundated with this content.

From the perspective of us as human beings, as consumers, I think there's also a balance that has shifted quite dramatically. One way in which we define abundance and scarcity is as a balance between resources and needs. Scarcity is if you have very high needs, but you have very few resources. Abundance, on the other hand, is the opposite situation, where the resources are so much higher than what you ne ed. 

And in this case, you're gonna get this enormous tsunami of content, partly of software-generated content, whereas the need for this content, the need for us as an audience is probably not going to change very much. If everybody becomes a novelist, and a music producer, and a film producer, and a photographer, and a painter by prompting a piece of software, who is going to be reading this, who is going to be looking at the pictures, who's going to be listening to all that music? When something like this happens, something which is disruptive, because the capacity for generation, the capacity for growth has jumped quite suddenly, then I think we need to reassess how we look at things, in a fairly fundamental way, in a fairly dramatic way. 

Let me take one example of which I know a little bit because I used to be in that field. Let's take the example of academic writing. When Chat GPT came out a few months ago, of course the first worry of educators all around the world was: students are gonna be able to use this. If we set essays, students are just going to enter that prompt and the software is going to do the work for them. 

When something is so disruptive, it's always easier to see how it will affect somebody else's life. So, as a professor, you worry about how the students are going to use this for their writing, and perhaps it doesn't occur to you to think about how it's going to affect your writing, how it's going to affect the world in which you produce text.  For many academics, especially in the liberal arts or the social sciences, it's all about producing texts. Having peer-reviewed essays and publications is how you make your career, is how you get promoted, is what you put on your cv. It's what we use for rankings. There's a whole ecosystem of status, which is built around producing texts. The difficult thing for all of us is to look at how much of the work that we do, that we've been trained to do, that we had to acquire a skill to do, can now easily be copied by a piece of software. 

How do we deal with this? How do we live in this age of abundance and see this enormous availability of creative content as something wonderful, as a boon? How do we learn to enjoy it instead of being overwhelmed by it? How do we shift the strategies that made sense for us in a world in which a lot of this content was much more scarce, was much harder to get hold of, to a world where it's omnipresent and it's everywhere, and there is an endless amount of it? 

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And so my thinking here, which is also very much a work in progress because I'm also confronted with this enormous growth in content all around me, also the kind of content that I produce - is to think of it fundamentally as a shift from quantity to quality. We can really address the imbalances between scarcity and abundance, between what is available on the one hand and what we need on the other, with a shift from quantity to quality. 

Think of the example of the academics. So, in the past, the amount of labour involved in producing a text and making it available for publication was enormous. In my field, in philosophy, if in your lifetime as an academic you published one or two books and one article every few years, that was seen as a good production. You would perhaps go to one conference a year, where you would meet your colleagues and you would read papers to each other and you would discuss them. Now this is a romantic view that we perhaps only find in the movies of what it was like to be an academic in the decades before I became one.

When I was a young academic, 20, 30 years ago, we had software, and it was much easier to publish more articles and people expected the production to go up. In some fields, there was the expectations that you would publish a book every few years, that you would publish a number of articles every year. So academia has been, I think, already beset by this explosion of content, where I would say that the quality of the articles has gone down because people have had to write them much faster, because they've taken one idea and spread it across five or ten  articles instead of concentrating it in one article. 

And the imbalance between writing articles and reading articles has also shifted dramatically, because if you're busy producing your own writing to keep your job, you have less time to read other people's stuff, especially as they're producing five or ten times as much as they did in the past. So, one of the solutions in the past, of course, has been:  don't look at the quantity of articles that is being produced, but look at the quality. How do we value this person as a researcher, as a thinker, as an academic? 

This seems very simple: instead of going for quantity, go for quality. But, it really is a fundamental shift. The more you think of it, the more I think it makes sense. It makes sense in other aspects of the shift of scarcity to abundance as well. If you had to deal with a scarcity of food, if in your life you have felt hunger, if you have been confronted with the threatening situation of not having enough to eat, the way you deal with that threat is to make sure that you always have a lot of food at the ready. There are stories of families who've lived through famines in times of war, and who now have in their garage enough food to last for a whole year, because they are so terrified, so traumatized by this experience. 

In a world of scarcity where there's not enough access to things, to food, to content, the natural desire is to have more, is to have more in terms of quantity. The quantity is the main driver, is the main concern. How do I augment my record collection? I also want this record by this band. I also want this version of a symphony by a different orchestra. I also want to find out about new composers or new violinists or whatever. 

But if everything is available, then the strategy is going to have to shift 180 degrees. It's the opposite strategy, really: of all the available symphonies and violinists and bands and live versions, what is worth listening to? What has the quality for me, what is the most interesting thing to spend my time on?

Some people conclude that the abundance on offer is the problem itself. Let's go back to a romantic world where we just had to write one article every so many years. We go back to this mythical past in which life was so much better because there was less to choose from. There are even famous books written about the fact that too much choice is making us unhappy. There is a famous TED talk about this.

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I think that this abundance is really wonderful. It's just that we have to learn how to enjoy it. The cost of making creative things has gone down dramatically. In the old days, it would've cost you a small fortune to put out a record, to put out a movie. You can now produce a fantastic piece of music with a laptop or even a smartphone. We have examples of movies that were shot on, smartphones, really wonderful movies. You have a wonderful democratization of content because in the old days there were gatekeepers: the publishing or the production house. And since that's gone down basically to very close to zero, everybody has access. 

If you like a niche product - I know somebody who loves thru-hiking: you walk from one part of a continent to the other part, and it takes you months and you travel over mountain ridges and it's very impressive. If that's really your thing, in the old days you could perhaps read about it in one or two books that were published about it. But now everybody who wants to write about their experiences can do so. And you can read blogs and people can self-publish books. People also make vlogs, they make video clips of their journeys. With the help of drones, they can make fantastic shots. Reducing the cost of the creativity has led to an explosion of content.

The explosion has gone in all directions. It's not just that we've produced much, much more of the same thing, we've also produced lots of different things. This explosion of creativity is an enrichment of human life. It's an enrichment of our experience of being alive to be able to hear all these different stories, all these different creations. 

How do you enjoy all this creativity? How do you swim in this sea of creativity without being overwhelmed by it? Well, I think it's to do with your filter. The filter of quality, the filter of choice. If you have a hundred million songs to listen to, but you only have say an hour a day to listen to music, then you find the best for you. You find the highest quality, and that may mean the stuff that you enjoy the most; it may mean discovering new things, perhaps with a guide, perhaps with somebody who has a playlist, perhaps on some recommendation, perhaps some algorithm will choose something for you, and you will find something else that pleases you.

Do that with any other creation, whether somebody painstakingly learn to do this by hand or got a machine to do it, or just made it by thinking of an interesting prompt and feeding it to a piece of software. The way it was produced matters less than the way that you are going to enjoy it.

We are going to have to reeducate ourselves, quite literally: we are going to have to learn anew how to produce things, but also how to be an audience. We were all an audience in a world of scarcity not so long ago. Now we're all audiences in a world of abundance, and that abundance is growing exponentially still. The filters that we employ to choose quality over quantity are the ones that are going to make us happy, are the ones that are going to allow us to enjoy this new world.

So I think that the way to enjoy this enormous amount of creative content, the one that we're already dealing with, but the one that's gonna wash over us in the coming years when the tools for creativity will have gotten such an enormous boost, is to really train these filters we have for quality.

There will always be much more than you need. The sense of plenty is also the sense that you can never really listen to all the music in the world, not even to all the good music in the world, not even to all the good music that you enjoy. You can never read all the beautiful stories, all the good texts that were written. The amount of lived time that we have has not changed significantly. 

We will also let go of judging things in terms of quantity, of being obsessed with quantity. The quantity of production is going to be the easiest thing in the world. We have machines, we have software. Now the onus is on us to be the arbiter of quality, to see what gives us joy. The capacity for joy in a world of plenty is enormous. But it's also a skill that we have to learn, it's a skill that we have to practice, it's a skill that we have to get good a. And it's an enjoyable skill to learn, after all.

I hope this has given you plenty to think about and to try out in your own life. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.