>>41952709Generative AI does indeed mean the death of content, but content is a historical artifact that arose from a combination of capitalism, distributional scarcity and cognitive surplus. So content’s value is headed to zero.
Alternatively, art, and other forms of communication where a person is trying to convey something to other people, and other people are invested in interpreting it — obviously this is not threatened even a little by generative AI. So content will die, but communication will live on.
The fact that “parasocial” is a real adjective that means something like, “I actually have a relationship/connection with and investment in this creator” is such a bizarre thing that can only happen in a world where “content” is the norm. What we see as “parasocial” was the normal way to relate to cultural objects in the pre-content era. If a work, like the Odyssey, didn’t have a clear provenance, you had to invent an author-as-culture-hero (Homer) for it so hearers would care about it and know how to relate to it.
In other words, free-floating “content” had to attract an author (real or imagined) so that people could enter into what we’d call a “parasocial relationship” with that figure that would make the “content” worth investing one’s attention in. And so vtubing will inherit the internet in the coming decades when we return to this dynamic.
