[wongarsu]

If we assume that text and images are made for human consumption then there is a limit in how much we can consume. In fact I doubt there is much room for our society's per-person media consumption to increase. There is obviously room for growth in fewer people seeing the same content, and room for some "waste" (i.e. content nobody ever sees). The upper bound (ignoring waste) would be if everybody only saw and read content that nobody else has ever seen and will ever see. But if we assume society continues to function as it does the real limit will be a lot lower.

Now maybe waste is a bigger issue with content than with food. I'm not sure. Both have some nonzero cost to waste. It might depend on how content is distributed

[ben_w]

Mm.

I'd would say that text is capable of being extremely useful even when no human reads it, because of source code, maths proofs, etc.

But I'm curious: 238 wpm * 0.75 words per token * 16 (waking) hours per day * 83 years * $10.00 / 1M output tokens (current API cost for 4o without batching) means the current cost of making as many tokens as a human can read in a lifetime is $92,300: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=238+words+per+minute+%2...

With these numbers, a well-written project with even a billion lines of code would be a rounding error even if only a thousand people used any specific such software and none of that was ever shared with what other people wanted to get done.

[_heimdall]

Its an interesting question for sure. Anecdotally it seems to me like there's a ton of content thrown online that is rarely, if ever, consumed. From bot-generated blog posts to social media posts, surely some of it is never seen or viewed only a few times before it gets buried and never seen again.

Market dynamics should push people to stop generating that content if they don't enough value to justify the cost. In practice, though, it hasn't seemed to happen yet and we must be pass a threshold where there's more content created online than we could ever value.

It'd make for an interesting study, but short of having verifiable data I have to assume we'll continue increasing the rate at which content is created whether the value is there or not.

[UltraSane]

Yandex image search works really well at finding similar images but it also leads you to some very strange parts of the internet that are exactly what you are describing: bot generated pages that almost no one reads.

[HappMacDonald]

The simplest example of what you describe regarding fully bespoke content would be realtime generation of VR feeds. Of course even in VR people would be consuming still more 2D content: the environments are built out of 3d models textured by 2d content at higher resolutions than most viewers will ever closely inspect.

You'd most likely categorize all of the unseen textures or higher-than-needed resolution in your "waste" bucket, and I can't argue with that. But VR still clearly means that there is at least theoretical room for "realtime video generated custom for every viewer, which in turn is composed of even more content sources".