[adventured]

The opposite will occur. Very little will change from how people consume content today. There won't be endless amounts of quality content, there will still be very little high quality content. There will be brief bursts of large amounts of garbage that nobody pays attention to (as a small percentage of people flirt with generative media and quickly lose interest; and the vast majority never bother at all).

The extreme majority will all watch the same things just as they do today. High quality AI content will be difficult to produce and will be nearly as limited in the future as any type of high quality content is today. The masses will stick to the limited, high quality media and disregard that piles of garbage. Celebrity will also remain a pull for content, nothing about that will ever change (and celebrity will remain scarce, which will assist in limiting what the masses are interested in).

By and large people only want to go where other people are at. Nothing about AI will change that, it's a trait that is core to humanity. The way that applies to content is just the same as it does a restaurant: content is a mental (and sometimes physical) destination experience just as a restaurant or vacation trip is.

[imiric]

I think both things will be true. We will enjoy common media that everyone else enjoys, not because of its high quality, but because it's shared shared within our social circles. And we will also generate highly personalized media for our own enjoyment, because we will have full control over it. The quality of this media won't necessarily be "garbage", and will likely be on par with professional productions. It will just be much more personal than anything a professional team could create for us.

Though a reason we would gravitate towards common media more is if what someone brought up in the comments here comes to pass, and celebrities/actors license their likeness to studios only, and amateur tools are not licensed to use them. Though I think there will always be crafty/illegal ways around this. Also, likeness probably won't be worth much, if we can generate any type of character we like anyway. I, for one, couldn't be happier for celebrities and the cultural obsession around them to disappear.

[intended]

Rich people will afford the subscription costs for curated and verifiable content.

Plebs will get the mass produced stuff, just like it has been for junk food.

In the information case, even if you wanted to sell good quality, verifiable content, how are you going to keep up with the verification costs, or pay people when someone can just dupe your content and automate its variations?

People who are poor dont have the luxury of time, and verifications cannot be automated.

Most people dont work in infosec or Trust and safety, so this discussion wont go anywhere, but please just know - we dont have the human bandwidth to handle these outcomes.

Bad actors are more prolific and effective than good, because they dont have to give a shit about your rules or assumptions.