The Sixth Era of Content Creation

As everyone from students to politicians wonder about the impact of A.I. on our day to day lives, and we all wonder how it will impact our jobs in the next few years, I've been trying to figure out how what this means for content creation, marketing and publishing.

One of the main reasons I love working in marketing is exploring creativity – more specifically, creating interesting, engaging content for others to benefit from, share and discuss, or to bring a subject to life. As the topic of AI has grown in importance and interest in the last decade, there have been a lot of commentary suggesting that creativity is the 'secret sauce' humans have that the machines will never replicate. Unfortunately that's probably not true, at least for marketing – not because we can't create things the machines can't, but because of how people value the content they receive. It's time for us to approach content differently, in fact, it's critical.

The Six Eras of Content Creation

I believe we are entering the sixth era of content creation (I did think about using the term 'publishing' but that just doesn't seem appropriate any more). With the advent of publicly accessible AI tools, we will have to think differently about content, who does it and how we do it. I'm optimistic about people still being at the centre of the process, but perhaps not the same people as before.

Content creation has evolved as new technology has come along to change our relationship with it. It seems to me there is a logical interconnection between technology and content, which could lead us to a better understanding of what the future holds with AI in the mix.

Firstly, what are these six 'eras'?

1. Recording – the advent of writing enabled consistent, repeatable knowledge sharing, even if it had to be produced manually for the most part
2. Publishing – the printing press unleashed an enormous wave of ideas across the world, codifying of information and enabled huge scientific progress
3. Broadcasting – where print was physically transported, broadcast radio and TV could deliver the same information to millions of people at the same time
4. Connecting – the web took this concept to the next level, democratised the access to both the information and the ability to create and distribute it
5. Sharing – social media took our natural tendency to look for value from our personal and professional networks and attached it to the technological reach of the web, creating an explosion of new networks and communities
6. Generating – we have arrived at the next level of content creation, where the ability to produce content to not restricted to specialists, but only to those who can instruct AI tools to interrogate the data of the web in the right way

In the recording era, the 2000 or so years until the sixteenth century, there were approximately 50 to 100 million 'books' (or equivalent) of content produced. During the next 300 years after the printing press, we matched that total, a six-fold increase. As we know, that acceleration has continued relentlessly as different technologies improved our ability to create and distribute content. Today there are approximately 2 billion web sites and 1.7 billion blogs (plus quite a lot of books still being published), not to mention social media content, videos and podcasts.

From central control to individual control

The three aspects of the control of content which have changed over this period which shows these massive shifts in production, which impacts who produces it and how it's consumed. These are:

• Creation – who determines what gets made, who creates it, and what does it say
• Production – who controls the means to make this come to life, in a form others can consume it
• Distribution – how content reaches its audience

Each era has had a significant shift in how production and distribution have been controlled, driven by technological advancement – and the era of AI is likely to see a similar shift.

The key decision makers in each era were different, and their influence the strongest because of it. When writing was centrally controlled in the hands of the privileged few, the controller, whether king, Pope or pharoah, had the most sway; during the Publishing era, the producer – publisher, newspaper proprietor, or leading authors of authority – directed and steered the public discourse and reaped the rewards; as broadcasters reached millions at once and mass publishing became possible, the tv and radio networks, advertising industry and respected spokespeople who commanded those stages (politicians, celebrities etc) impacted the discourse the most; the web ushered in a digital boom of new services and publishers where conveners or curators of new global communities had the most power, like Yahoo, Google or even MySpace; and social media spawned influencers whose networks became their own individual fiefdoms (see Prime). For the AI era, who will hold this power?

Democratising creation

What is unique about the Generating era we are entering, is that it will be first time the effort and resources to create content will become an order of magnitude smaller – much like the web did for distribution, and the printing press for production. It will likely have an equally profound impact, and change our relationship with content we experience forever. The value shifts from the information contained in the content to the quality of the narrative, it's "originality", and – most important of all – the credibility and trustworthiness of any new ideas that it contains.

In this new era, the Editor will come to be the most valuable player. They have a trusted ability to navigate and shape the infinite amount of content available, and add value at the same time. It will be interesting to see what form this takes, but with the amount of disinformation, fake news and debate over what really is 'true' we will have to establish some common understanding of what we value – or more accurately, what we can all trust. Clearly, a blue tick is not going to do it.

If the best content will be based on trust rather than quantity or quality (as both will be freely available), we will have to find new ways to agree what will deliver that. Legislation, technology and our existing trusted media outlets will all have a role to play in deciding this, but there is no definite direction of travel - yet.

I will examine the more specific implications of this for my industry - marketing and communications - in my next article "The Race to the Middle". Please let me know what you think so far!