Hey Hivers!
This morning I woke up to a realization. Last night I was having a rather intense conversation with some fellow artists about Web2 Social Media. AI generated content has inundated all of our feeds with videos, photos and posts. I had read a statistic that this year the expectation is that at least 90% of all social media posts in 2025 will have been generated by AI by the end of the year. If your entire “business” is geared around the production of music, video and storytelling – this has just diluted your ability to reach an audience significantly. Mechanically what is happening is that a small group of individuals own algorithms that determine what the majority of people see, they technically “own” the content that is posted on their platforms and then they are able to manipulate those algorithms to drive the narrative. As AI is fed the information from those algorithms – what is being watched and engaged with and drives conversation – you can start to ask yourself the question: Who is this being made for?
That has been one of my criticisms of Spotify for a very long time. As the Spotify algorithms developed, artists started studying them in order to best understand how to create music that would perform well under that particular set of variables. The Platform had sold itself as a way of “empowering artists” by removing the gatekeepers of the old industry and allowing the music to be brought directly to the listener, but the truth is that they have simply replaced them. I’ve watched as the entire music industry scrambles to alter the artform in order to gear better for streaming – quick engagement. Gone are the days of long introductions and extended solos. We need to be concise, to the point. Get the catchiest part of the song in the listeners’ ears within the first 15-30 seconds lest we risk getting skipped. Negative interactions will kill the reach of a song! This is happening across all digital web2 platforms.
That brings me back to my realization, that one of the things I love most about HIVE is that there is still a predominantly “human” narrative happening here. We are not dominated by algorithms (Private Keys maybe). I think it would be a great loss to the sanctity of this entire Blockchain if we suddenly were inundated with AI generated content. Am I against the USE of AI as a tool? Not at all! But I draw a clear distinction between content that someone has written and formulated and uses AI assistance to enhance or realize an Idea that they themselves have had, and an entirely automated AI Agent that analyses posts, generates new content and then posts it without any human input or intervention. Frankly – I don’t see the long-term benefit to that end. Without moving into the extremely relevant philosophical debate about the purpose of our entire civilization, I am hoping that Hive will remain an ecosystem that very much maintains the value of the Human at its core. It is called "SOCIAL" Media after all.
Thanks for reading Humans 😁
