WILL A.I. RESULT IN TOO MUCH CHOICE? THE COMING CONTENT TSUNAMI

As I was drinking my first coffee this morning, I watched as my girlfriend take over half an hour to choose what to wear for work. This process was, I strongly suspect, so tricky in large part due to the overwhelming choice of outfits hanging in her two full-size wardrobes. It got me thinking about the world today - specifically, how AI is going to increase choice massively, and how that will affect the iGaming and wider digital entertainment industries.

At first, the prospect of more choice seems great, right? I mean, who doesn’t want more? More is what consumer society is about. And, that is true. Everyone wants choice because choice is freedom - and choosing a game, movie, song, website, book, or other types of entertainment is one of the most frequent and tangible ways we experience freedom daily.

Our ability to meaningfully curate was already at breaking point

But, maybe infinite choice isn’t such a useful thing. Already, years ago, our society hit a point where the sheer choice available in everything from movies to toilet paper brands became overwhelming - but with the aid of personalized filters, clever search algorithms, and highly organized superstores, we somehow managed a semblance of effective curation. That being said, this necessary effort to curate, especially in the digital sphere, has caused massive problems in the form of online echo chambers - something that is steadily fueling divisions. But, it isn’t the unintended (usually) divisive nature of digital curation that I want to focus on here, but rather the problem presented by sheer volume.

Already, most people are only aware of a tiny fraction of the information or options actually available to them for any specific choice. This is, of course, something that affiliate marketing companies in sectors like iGaming appreciate only too well, and why up until now SEO (search engine optimization) is so crucial. The simple truth is that we, as a global societal whole, already produce far, far, far more content than can be processed by humans - so most of it goes almost unnoticed, while increasingly complicated curation processes funnel users to a tiny percentage.

AI will result in an ever-growing tsunami of all digital content

So, what happens when content output explodes by orders of magnitude because of AI? And, believe me, from my own experience over the last five months, it is exploding. The number of AI tools available is already in the thousands - covering just about everything that has anything to do with writing, images, video, accounting, analytics, coding, and everything in between. Moreover, the rate at which capabilities are advancing is exponential - a quick look at the capabilities of the latest version of Midjourney compared to the version from just a couple of months ago illustrates this perfectly.

Inevitably, as capabilities increase, so does productivity, which means the sheer volume of content being created isn’t just going through the roof, it's going through the stratosphere. This brings us back to the problem of choice. It’s simple logic - more content isn’t necessarily needed or useful. Yes, you could argue that better content is always useful, but as I addressed in a previous blog post, deciding which constitutes ‘better’ in an AI world presents its own insane challenges. The unavoidable truth is we’re about to be swamped with content.

Take social media, for example. Whether it’s YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram, as AI adoption rates skyrocket, social media platforms will be subject to a tsunami of content. Sure, much of it will be crap, but an overwhelming amount will be good too. The same goes for online casinos - when AI tools start massively speeding up the production of online slots, there will be a landslide of new titles. Yes, many game studios will argue they focus on ‘quality over quantity’, but it seems unavoidable that they will all get caught up in a race as AI tools expedite the development and production of games. In fact, this same logic applies to pretty much everything - from movies and TV shows to art, literature, and music.

But, because consumers will still only have the same amount of time available, and presumably similar amounts of disposable income (unless they’ve all lost their jobs due to AI), they will still only be able to consume the same. So, what happens to all the excess content? Does it all just become a kind of digital sediment, sinking and settling as layer upon layer at the bottom of the digital ocean?

Is there an answer, or will content of all types just become even more disposable? I won’t even pretend to know the answer, but I do think that everyone involved with any form of digital entertainment or marketing needs to strap themselves in and hold on because the sluice gates are about to be fully opened.