The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance
TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself.
If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume?
The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators.
The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out.
It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm.
There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.