Technology

as we saw with computer chess, novelty can only be interesting for so long once there are no humans involved.

I think this is underestimating or even misunderstanding how entertainment works in our brains. The same game/movie/book produced once by humans, and once by computers, will not be enjoyed differently by our brains. No one watches the credits of a movie for that sweet dopamine hit of knowing it was made by real people.

With chess, the enjoyment isn't watching the pieces move, it's the strategy involved and even the rooting for a player. It's a competitive activity. Movies/books/(most) games are not. It is just watching the pretty images on screen. The character running around the world, opening the loot box. The story in our head.

If the assertion is that computers will never be able to produce a video game or movie or book that a human would actually enjoy for any period, I think that is extremely naive; many thousands of people enjoyed Pong for years, and ChatGPT actually can write a working Pong clone right now. I would be surprised if it couldn't write the kind of infinite-runner games that people still spend hours a day playing on their phones, with only a little debugging needed.

And this is just in the last 4 years, really. 20 years from now? Hoo boy, AI is going to be being used for a LOT of stuff that people do as jobs now (to our collective detriment).

But even if they stay up and running, the public perception of these “services” will likely change once social media is deprived of the last pretense that anything “social” is going on.

They will never let it get there. They will restrict AI use by third parties and users, in favor of their own AI content creation (or curated third party content), so they can keep strict control over how authentic their content feels. TikTok and Twitter don't curate content themselves now (technically not true, they actually do curate the content quite heavily, via algorithms), because their whole model is letting others do it via "popularity" (via said algorithms). If the content that others produce is hurting their business, they'll ban that content in favor of content they control.

a majority of the posting class is coming around to the idea that maybe this stuff is not great for us:

Are they?

TikTok is just TV again

TikTok is basically just broadcast TV now

I must have missed the part of the headline where they say that TV sucks. Most people still watch TV, even young people (they just don't all do it on a TV).

My other hope is that when that time comes, real human-made art made for connecting with human audiences can be more readily recognized by society as the valuable thing it is on its own, not only when it is put to work in service to some marketer turning a profit for some CEO.

This is already recognized by society at large. The problem is that it's not translating into legislation, and legislation is the only way to control corporations. Just look at the state of book publishing; ebook platforms are absolutely destroying the industry, largely unbeknownst to buyers (and unbeknownst by design, because corporations know that buyers would be upset if they knew).

The real question is whether society will come to realize that unending, corporate profit-seeking (which enriches one at the expense of others), and healthy societies (which are based on mutual cooperation), are mutually exclusive goals.