[The Editors' Verdict] The Age of Content Inflation

It is not only currency that loses value when it is produced indiscriminately. The same phenomenon is occurring in the digital content market. All types of content-writing, images, video, and music-are experiencing an explosive surge. This is due to artificial intelligence (AI). AI has dramatically reduced the cost of content production. With just a few prompts, convincing articles, images, music, and videos can be generated.

Suno is an AI music generation platform. Even without any basic knowledge of music theory or the ability to read a single note, anyone can compose music. All you need to do is provide the desired mood and feeling in the form of a text prompt. The amount of music files created by Suno users every two weeks is said to rival the entire catalog currently held by Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service.

The academic world is also facing challenges. It has long been the case that academic papers seemingly written by AI are flooding in. Now, even the reviews evaluating those papers are being written by AI. This year, 21% of the peer review reports for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) were generated by AI. Less than half of the reviews were “AI-free,” meaning not influenced by AI.

AI is drastically reducing the cost of producing digital content. The creation of fake and false content has become easier than ever. Pixabay

Content inflation caused by AI is an issue of both quantity and quality. On December 3 (local time) in the United Kingdom, train operations were halted because of a single photograph. An image claiming that a railway bridge in the northeast had collapsed due to an earthquake spread rapidly online. Railway authorities stopped operations and conducted emergency inspections. However, when they checked the site, there was no problem. It turned out that the image was a fake, generated by AI. A trivial prank by someone ended up paralyzing a society’s transportation infrastructure.

While there are high expectations that AI will bring about a “productivity revolution,” it is clear that it is also causing a surge in the production of fraud and falsehoods. When production costs decrease, supply increases-this is a basic principle of economics. If the cost of producing fraud and falsehoods approaches zero, the internet will be flooded with fakes. On the other hand, the cost of verifying whether something is real or fake remains high. Someone must visit the site in person, or an expert must spend time analyzing and verifying the information.

Some people have begun to distrust and even avoid AI-generated content altogether. Recently, a paradoxical service has emerged: a tool called Slop Evader that only searches for content created before November 30, 2022, the release date of ChatGPT. This indicates a clear demand for genuine information that has not been “contaminated” by AI-content that is 100% handmade by humans. As the flood of AI-generated content continues, it is likely that more people will experience “AI fatigue.”

During periods of currency inflation, cash holders lose out while those with scarce assets benefit. The same logic applies during content inflation. The value of content that can be easily replicated by AI declines, while the value of irreplaceable content rises. The more fakes there are, the more valuable the truth becomes. The ability to distinguish valuable signals from meaningless noise will become increasingly important. And this is one of the things that journalism does best (or so I would like to believe). I hope that “journalism” will have a place in the “content inflation defense” asset portfolio.