AI's ability to reduce the cost of intelligence nearly to zero might be thought to fundamentally challenge zero-sum economic principles (what one entity gains another loses) in many domains, including content.
But it will probably be a complex matter, as has been the case for the way internet-fueled abundance affected the economics of content markets where scarcity has been the rule.
Consider the impact on content. The internet fundamentally transformed content economics by collapsing the barriers that once made content creation and distribution expensive and exclusive.
Traditional media businesses built their models around scarcity: limited time, space and distribution real estate. The internet changed all that, enabling much lower cost content creation and distribution.
The key point is that scarcity-based content business models became vulnerable when the internet removed the underlying scarcity.
But new forms of value creation emerged around curation, community, convenience, and trust. So sources of value shifted, in many cases. But abundance has not actually eroded zero-sum economics, just reshaped it.
Consider attention, which is genuinely finite and zero-sum. Each minute spent watching YouTube is a minute not spent reading newspapers or watching television. Traditional media's loss of audience attention directly translates to digital platforms' gain.
This explains why established media companies have struggled so intensely with the digital transition. They're fighting for shares of a fixed attention economy.
However, other aspects of digital markets can be positive-sum. The internet enabled entirely new forms of value creation that didn't exist before. Wikipedia didn't just redistribute encyclopedia sales to volunteers - it created an entirely new model of collaborative knowledge.
It isn’t yet clear where AI might actually break the zero-sum model, as AI doesn't fully escape fixed-resource constraints.
Zero-sum games will persist in many areas, since not all resources become abundant, and might well persist for other reasons, such as a shift in scarcity value to attention.
In many cases, physical limits will remain, for example. There are only going to be so many National Football League regular-season games. There will only be one SuperBowl.
So paradoxically, perhaps, the era of content abundance might not eliminate zero-sum economics as much as one would think.
Where all major contestants in an industry (think law, marketing, manufacturing, transportation or finance, for example) adopt AI, there is no net economic advantage. Rivalry continues, and no firm gains a sustainable competitive advantage.
Content abundance does not mean an end to strong zero-sum pressures in television, radio, movies or music. Popularity still will be quite unevenly distributed.
In the professional content businesses (music, film, video, books, magazines, newspapers, radio) the issue is “what is scarce?” Traditionally, we might argue that content creation is expensive, and therefore scarce.
In the era of digital content, it is human or audience attention that is finite, and therefore scarce, whereas the supply of content approaches infinity. That might continue to be true even if AI enables new content formats that gain favor with consumers. They will simply consume less content in other formats.
Traditionally, content markets have had zero-sum elements because producing high-quality content required scarce resources like time, skill, and capital.
AI, as did digital media and the internet before it, disrupts scarcity value by making content generation cheap, fast, and scalable.
The “oversupply” of content effectively collapses the scarcity that once gave content its intrinsic value. As the marginal cost of creating content approaches zero, the content itself becomes a commodity.
So a creator's success is no longer determined by their ability to create, but by their ability to get noticed i
The value proposition shifts from "what can I create?" to "what can I get people to pay attention to?"
That is the attraction of live sports content, for example.
The point is that AI support for abundant content creation does not necessarily mean an end to zero-sum economic effects in media industries. Consumers have only so much time available to consume content.
