[danpalmer]

This is a fair point, a different way of looking at things.

The way I was thinking about it was, for example, newspapers going online behind paywalls, YouTubers/Podcasters creating paid content on Patreon in order to fund their activities.

On the other side you get Buzzfeed creating AI generated quizzes (rather than news), and YouTube/TikTok content farms with AI generated scripts. Both of these are ad supported, so free to the end consumer, and therefore more accessible than a Patreon/NYT/etc subscription.

[nopinsight]

Articles from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are better and also more expensive to produce than those from Buzzfeed, which justify their subscription fees. What if editors of such caliber could leverage AI-assisted tools to scale their efforts and create high-quality content at a lower cost?

While it's true that, even with advancements in AI, top-tier content uniquely shaped by the individuals or teams behind it will still be more costly to produce, these are likely to get cheaper over time as AI improves. As a result, high-quality content will probably become more accessible.