2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.
I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.
I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.
Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released?
20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
>* NYT is now 10x as thick?*
One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now.
> Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not.
> I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future.
Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction.
In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that.
> Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?
> 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
Tangentially, assuming a median length of 4:03 [0], and a bitrate of 8192 Kbps (8 Mbps for video, 192 Kbps for audio), that’s almost 5 PB per day. That is insane.
I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.
The thing is, though, people are still choosing to spend time on crap.
So as a producer of quality content, your audience has shrunk because a minute spend consuming crap is a minute not available for your thing. And as a consumer, the average total quality being consumed has likely gone down.
Doesn’t the claim in the first paragraph only make sense if you assume that content becomes irrelevant as it ages? That holds for news but not for most other media.
I have a huge Steam backlog and a Plex server stocked with (ymmv) many of the finest movies available in the form. There’s so much media there that there’s no realistic path to experiencing it all in my lifetime. That certainly has an impact on my inclination to purchase new games or movies.
I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggering.
Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated. It's not just the graphics that ages, but also the game mechanics, UI and UX, and the general presentation of the game. I would rather play Path of Exile than Diablo 2.
>I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggerin.
I think even these written works go through "improvements". It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects). Picking up an old book is harder than a new one if you're very familiar with a genre.
>Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated.
I don't agree with what you wrote literally (I almost exclusively play old and old-ish games, and I have fun), but:
>Path of Exile is a 2013 free-to-play action role-playing video game developed and published by Grinding Gear Games
I'm confused. Why is your example of a modern game is a game from 2013? Most people's backlog is probably shorter than 13 years, so if 13 year old games are fine then I'm not sure that contradicts OPs point.
PoE2 is still in early access, I feel it would be wrong to say that it is out until the makers claim that the product is ready to stand on its own two feet in the market
I mean, first, Diablo 2 did come out in 2000, 13 years before Path of Exile.
But also Path of Exile is maybe the game that has received the most updates and content of any game in existence (No Man's Sky looks stingy compared to Path of Exile, imo). It receives a small expansion's worth of content every ~4 months. Path of Exile in 2026 is an entirely different experience from Path of Exile in 2013.
I absolutely would not play the 2013 version today (and also am unable to because it's a live service game).
The better comparison would be Path of Exile 2, which came out last year or comes out later this year depending on your perspective on Early Access games, but it's less a 1:1 evolution of Diablo 2 and more its own thing.
I also like old games, but I grew up in the D2 era, so they hold nostalgia factor for me. There will always be games that stand out as classics, like Diablo 2 and Super Mario 64, but not many people play them who didn't already play them during their era, and even fewer people are going out of their way to play Titan Quest or Gex 64 for the first time in 2026.
Games do age, more so than books and movies, imo, because it's a younger medium and the technology keeps evolving.
As an aside, I also think entertainment industries are not saturated. I'm always hunting for recommendations that hit just the right spot, and so much is a miss for me. I'd love if there were 10 Path of Exiles to choose from, I'd play them all. (Hell, I'd be happy with just one quality Pokémon game...)
> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects)
For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.
The purpose of reading is to challenge your mind, literally the cognitive load. If slang from 20 years ago is preventing you from reading a book, that’s a sign of mental laziness.
I wouldn't say irrelevant but certainly less popular over time compared to when it was newer. Even with all this supply on your fingertips I bet you watch a lot more movies from the 2020s than the 1920s.
EDIT: Since people are getting specific about that last line and missing the point, how about instead it's "I bet you watch a lot more movies from the $yourFavoriteDecade than the timemachine(start = $yourFavoriteDecade, direction = "reverse", years = 40)"
Watching a movie from the 1920s requires paying some attention to follow characters and plot. Watching a movie from the 2020s is just 90-120 minutes of nonstop CGI visual stimulation.
I believe you're spot on. We now have exceptionally capable local image generation models for example. Are the masses rushing to produce a thousand fold increase in the output of any sort of generative images?
Not even in the slightest is that happening. Why not? Nobody gives a shit. Their attention time is finite. And the masses don't want to produce anything when they're not at work. Production is work. High-quality production is hard work. The latest human TikTok continues to be at least 10x more interesting to the masses than most any form of AI media. Why? It's about pleasurable passive consumption. AI video isn't there yet (3-5 years before it really matters in the realm of big media).
There's no risk on the horizon of a supply issue. The 99% do not care to spend their home time manufacturing.
I'm trying to put a wedge between quality content and slop fodder. I admit slop fodder is increasing exponentially. But quality content e.g. movies that see theatrical runs, it isn't like there is some huge increase of supply of that relatively speaking, or some huge scale up in theater capacity to show more supply.
For games, forget steam as a whole but consider maybe a single studio. It isn't like EA is moving to monthly vs yearly releases of their regular titles even though output is 10-12ish-x more in theory. It isn't like they are covering 10x as many sports in terms of games as they did previously now that they can do 10x more output with this new tooling, in theory of course. Output in terms of actual deliverables seems to be the same as it ever was.
>Fair enough, but the increase does make it a lot harder to separate signal from noise
This is true but depends where you get your information. Social media like Reddit, yeah, it's becoming just bots and bot comments and many of the humans don't even trust themselves to write longer than six words without prompting an llm. Real news sources where people put their government name to the article, less so, especially the more credible the source is.
>I suspect that what we're seeing instead of "more deliverables" we're seeing "same deliverables with less effort"
Even this I wonder to be true. What is less effort? I agree that ultimately the slow point is not the code generation. It is the bureacracy, interactions with stakeholders and collaborators, everything else that isn't getting faster of course.
Now how about the engineer. Is anyone actually working less? Like having less to do and just not working for 9/10ths the day? I don't think that is the case. The nature of software is actually that its productivity is a bit removed from business. You could be in charge of some product and there is literally endless work to be done either in features to potentially add and bugs that appear. Some more or less critical but that is the job really: infinite work. You can literally tinker forever. If anything this enables more tinkering and doing and getting caught up mucking around in the endless work slog. And of course none of this increased effort is going to move the needle on ultimately the sales job that pays the real bills of the software org, not engineering. The product can be junk if it can be spun to sell to enough people and make a very successful company, and plenty of excellent products do not sell and wither on the vine. And there is only so much market out there, only so many fish able to bite so many lines even if there is some product market fit.
True, but these aren't becoming best sellers. It's a bigger problem for Amazon than for readers in a sense, as they need to implement a good way for people to filter out these offerings so customers don't simply walk away and go back to physical bookstores (perhaps a blessing in disguise).
I'm referring to high quality content not low effort spam such as AI books flooding amazon, which was already flooded with low effort spam books and other junk product before AI.
Engineers are not the CEOs. The CEOs are gaslighting to justify another self enriching layoff. AI decisions and control sits with a handful of grifting CEOs. Engineers get no say.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.
With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.
In his memoir Stephen King says not to write your ideas down since the good ones stick around anyway, and that a notebook is a way to immortalize bad ideas.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.
People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can.
The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc.
You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
> For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available.
The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
So your argument is what worked back when most people were illiterate and books were a luxury and audio and video recordings were non existent will also work today?
It's how all hyperscalers and kickstarter work so small and big companies. You raise based on an idea and a sample. Who invests? Those who want to see the product made i.e. instead of buying an album. You invest in a band who promises to make an album if they raise a certain amount otherwise refunds. Then you don't have to care about distribution as that's a solved problem. The band can still make more money doing festivals etc.
The issue is as others have pointed out the vested interests in the status quo.
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.
Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.
Why would anyone want that model of consumption? It seems terrible. I don't want to invest in a director to make a movie I may or may not be interested in
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.
This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.
If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.
> If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance.
Oh wait. I’ve heard this one before. Just send in the national guard. A couple of well placed free speech donations with some winks and nods should be able to break that sort of terrorist organization.
Don't assume people are trolling. That's how we got where we are. The response to "No one could possibly be that daft..." Is "Of course they can, and they aren't going to disappear if you ignore them."
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?
What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics.
It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example.
Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages.
I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.
I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them.
There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.
"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Herbert A. Simon
Simon is a fantastic author that everyone alive today would to well to read. He gets misrepresented by Karp in his manifesto:
"He envisioned that by the 1980s humans would be essentially relegated to kinetic tasks, confined for the most part to labor that required movement in the physical world."
Hm, doesn't sound like Simon. Let's see Karp's notes on that source:
"He envisioned that: See Simon, New Science of Management Decision, 38 (arguing that “men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery”)."
Ok. Seems to support Karp's interpretation. But let's follow Karp's recommendation than and see the source:
"I have done some armchair analysis of what this proposition means for predictions of the occupational profile twenty years hence. I do not have time to report this analysis in detail here, but I can summarize my conclusions briefly. Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating earth-moving equipment), some kinds of non programmed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhat more involved in maintaining the system that performs the work."
A much more nuanced and qualified take. Published in 1977, I would say that in may ways work and organizations in developed economies largely evolved like he foresaw given how the service sector came to dominate the economy and so much human effort now goes into software development, configuration and supervision instead of pushing paper with their hands into and from drawers as it was done in the 1970s.
> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.
Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user.
The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all.
The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on.
The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false.
It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.
2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.