Sometimes I’ll be watching a twitch streamer and they’ll make a comment about “content.” Maybe something goes wrong in their game and they say “That was on purpose, just doing it for the content, you know?”

Anytime that happens I get this immediate guilty stab into my heart because it’s a reminder that what I’m watching doesn’t really have any value — it’s “content.” OK, no value isn’t exactly right. I’ll say it doesn’t have any value, beyond engaging me for the brief moments I am actively paying attention to it, and then leaving nothing at all in my long-term memory.

Remember a while back I started a book review with this exceedingly well researched and scientific four box model?

In this model, content lives right around here, in this reddish shaded area:

That’s not to say content is terrible! Content is the fast food of our media consumption — it is briefly tasty, but ultimately has no nutrition. It’s mostly harmless, unless you replace all your meals with it. Content is fine if you’re still consuming other nutritious media.

Lots of people make content, whether they are twitch streamers, bloggers, ghost writers, authors … you get the picture. One of my favorite blogs of all time was Basketbawful which is certainly content, but it made for an enjoyable five minutes almost every morning during the NBA season.

Content isn’t insightful. It doesn’t add anything new — it’s just slight rearrangements of words or images that have already been said, often many times.

That, quite literally, is a description of exactly what ChatGPT (and other generative “AIs”) does. It’s a statistical language model — it slightly rearranges words that have already been said, often many times.

So the most obvious impact of ChatGPT is to those who create content in the written word space (this has actually already begun). It could extend to other forms of content as well. Unfortunately it will probably also reveal just how much of what all of us do actually is “content.” Doubtless more than we’re comfortable with.