AI is coming for your rewards!
Look out the big bad AI monster gonna getcha!
I've seen a lot of discussion about this and I find it all a bit ridiculous. People on Hive seem to think that if something is easy then it must not have much value. Inversely, if something is hard it must have more value. A very well written 5000 word synopsis on XYZ topic has lots of value, amirite? It might take 30 minutes to read and 300 minutes to write but it was all worth it in the end, yeah?
Okay well what if no one wants to read your never-ending yammering?
Who has time to read a 30 minute post? Who is the target audience here? What's better? Five people reading the 5000 word post, or a thousand people reading a 500 word post? Surely it depends on a myriad of variables that aren't even possible to calculate within this butterfly-effect simulation.
Work smart not hard.
This is a term we've heard countless times.
It is a known fact that things that are hard don't necessarily have value, while things that are easy can have way more value than things that are hard. A lot of people have been talking about raising their own chickens because of the jacked up prices of eggs. I find it comical because I've actually had chickens and I know for a fact that even at the jacked up prices, backyard chickens aren't going to save you a dime. Nice try libertarians.
Of course the quality of the product goes way up when the product isn't being mass produced. This applies to many things, including eggs, and it's hard to put a price on such a thing especially when it's food and could end up having a direct impact on your health. Considering healthcare costs in America once again we move into one of those impossible-to-calculate butterfly effect situations.
Either content has value or it doesn't.
How the content is produced is extremely irrelevant. The argument that AI content is easy and therefore should not be rewarded is provably false across all metrics. Basic capitalism teaches us that consumers want the best product for the cheapest price, and they don't care what it takes to get there.
Statistically, no one is going to buy an inferior product for more money just because it was "handmade" or "locally sourced". Products like that will only be purchased if the extra price is actually accounted for with properly associated higher quality.
"Quality Content"
There honestly is no such thing as "quality content" on Hive in the traditional sense that we perceive it to be. The vast majority of rewards come from consistency and networking over very long periods of time. The quality of my content has not improved x1000 since I came to this community in 2017. And yet my post rewards have in fact gone x1000 or more. It's pretty easy to see that the quality of my content had very little to do with the rewards I was given in real time.
Of course there is a stacking effect.
Content that I wrote years ago may have been rewarded with pennies, but then again that's the only true path toward engagement and getting noticed and building a reputation around these parts. So again we become mired in this butterfly-effect of never knowing exactly how our actions and the work that we do here spiral out into the future.
Value of Blogging.
There is an argument to be made that perhaps the Hive reward pool is over-allocating resources to the blogging side of the network. This is a much better argument than "AI content bad". Are these blogs providing value? Are they getting attention from the outside? Are they helping the community from within? To a certain extent they must be... but again measuring that value and making a determination as to whether it is 'overpaid' or not is a very difficult thing to do. This is especially true considering we need the reward pool for other things like distributing stake for a more robust governance structure.
A few prominent members on Hive think we should outsource the blogging rewards (entire reward pool) to a second layer token. I still need to do a full post on this, but in conclusion that is objectively a terrible idea. Either blogging has value and it should exist, or blogging does not have value and should not exist. There is no scenario where it is worth it to outsource blogging to the second layer and it suddenly has value where none was before. That's ludicrous logic, especially when we take into account that a "comment" is simply a declaration that work has been done and could evolve into much more than just social media.
Even more alarming, these people often have a severe conflict of interest. It's not valid or even mildly appropriate for a top 20 witness to voice these opinions to the network. Why? Because they have a financial incentive to divert all available inflation into their own pockets while leaving everyone else powerless. Notice how these same people would never suggest top 20 witnesses be paid less even though they could easily afford to be paid less (especially if the reward pool disappears). Hell I have a witness outside of the top 20 that turns a profit even though it's shared between 3 people. What happens if Hive goes x100? All profit all day.
Would you buy it?
Would you buy a house for half the price if you knew that it was built by robots instead of people? Course you would. Capitalism. This goes for any product or service. The biggest consideration is, "Was this product built by slave-labor?" And yet I still see people buying Nike shoes. Bots will eventually do all the grunt work, that much is certain.
Now what happens when AI displaces the slave-laborers and the lower class becomes priced out of existence? This is the problem that crypto needs to prevent. Imagine the scenario where slave-wages are the preferable option. Such a dystopian future we are heading into. People as collateral within the economy are losing their value, and it's not a pretty picture. Automation and technology have been gutting the job market for decades. The situation will continue to escalate exponentially to be sure.
Conclusion
Can AI build an audience? Can AI provide value? Can AI do things better and more easily than a person? If the answer is 'yes' then it doesn't matter how much effort was put into the output. Value is value no matter how we slice it.
Thus far AI is just a tool to be used by people. We are probably going to be in this phase for a while. If you want to dig a hole are you going to demand it be dug by 100 day laborers or a single hydraulic backhoe? Right tool for the right job. It's as simple as that.