How AI Changes the Media Business

Let’s play a game of two extremes.

On one side sprawls a pantless man, alone, in the dark of his mother’s basement, a half-melted tub of ice cream dripping onto his raggy T-shirt, while chatting in his favorite Discord as he watches the anime the server is devoted to.

On the other side, a shirtless man—inebriated, high, and just all around wasted—is crammed into a living room with a dozen other similarly smashed individuals, each squinting their eyes to watch the NBA playoffs over a haze of cigar smoke wafting through the room.

The game is this: Which of these is the better media product?

From the moment we boot up a device, every single app and piece of content contained therein is in a death match for your eyeballs. If you removed the cigars and Rocky Road, the better media product is determined by individual preferences. Whether you prefer Naruto or the Brooklyn Nets is dependent on personal taste. You can’t watch both simultaneously—every time you watch anime versus the NBA you make a trade-off.

This leaves media companies to compete, not solely on the basis of the quality of the content, but on all the extra stuff surrounding content. The ability to build fandom, to have some sort of monopoly, even just to be really good at marketing, all these things are how companies stand out.

AI may 10x this dynamic—let me explain: