overheard from friends talking about AI in China, and it’s very alarming
- AI short films went massive in China market because of how good the video models are now
- the first wave of people who mastered using AI to generate short films and comics made quite some money because they could produce a lot more content than traditional workflows
- but within just a few months, everybody and their mom could make equally good short films because all the expertise could be written in a markdown file
- when everyone’s more productive, no one actually has an advantage and it’s a race to the bottom. very quickly it became impossible to make money, and everyone’s busier than they were without AI
- the only one making money now is companies like bytedance who owns user demand and distribution. they sell ads to creators who pay to get traffic, and eventually ad spend became 80% of those creators’ operating expense, while AI tokens is less than 5%
so what are the problems here?
1. there’s no moat if you are creating anything with AI
if a human is really good at something, and it’s hard to find more humans who can do the same, they can leverage the scarcity of their skill to get paid very well
but if AI is good at something, it will be infinitely replicated, so there’s no scarcity hence you can’t really expect a sustainable business by creating anything with AI
2. more creators created more content people actually liked. that’s a good thing
but the economical benefit of that all got absorbed by the distribution platforms
there’s a famous chinese poem 遍身罗绮者,不是养蚕人 - it basically says people who dress well aren’t the people making dresses. that’s exactly what’s happening here
if our society doesn’t figure out a better way to distribute wealth, AI will help billionaires become trillionaires while average people become more exhausted than ever
🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons, roughly 100,000 volumes, shipped to the US since last year. No buyer has been identified.
Separately, court documents confirmed Anthropic's "Project Panama" bought millions of books in the US, cut the spines off, scanned them, and shredded the originals. An internal memo said the goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Similar operations have been reported across Europe.
My Take
Anthropic's US book operation came out in court filings earlier this year. Project Panama. Millions of books, cut the spines off, scanned, shredded. Their VP chose the codename so nobody outside the company would find out. That story broke and apparently the same operation just moved to Japan. Anonymous buyer accounts, a warehouse in Okayama that won't take questions, and 100,000 volumes of specialized academic texts that nobody buys to resell.
I don't know how you build a trillion-dollar industry on material you had to acquire in secret through middlemen because you knew the public would object. Authors spent years on those books and now they're fed through a scanner and thrown away so a chatbot can sound smarter. If the data was free to use, they wouldn't need codenames and anonymous warehouses. The lawsuits over who owns this material have barely begun and I think the copyright exposure across the whole AI industry is enormous. Anthropic's internal memo said the goal was every book in the world, which describes the foundation of the product.
Hedgie🤗
Celebrating 65 years of Spider-Man at #D23#!
See how the iconic hero is web-slinging his way through Marvel Comics, Marvel Animation, Disney Parks and more.
Dave doesn't have the best record with Superlatives...and Nic is trying to run him out of town....But here's to hoping this round goes a bit better for him! 😅
#Superlatives# drops tomorrow, get ready to lock in.
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We've got something special for the 300th comic of IDW's TMNT!
The cover is by the man, the myth, the LEGEND: Billy Martin.
You can grab the #TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles# #20#: 300th Issue Special DTC on our website.
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Android characters, friend or foe?
Where do we draw the line with robots everywhere? Will AI lead us to a #Robocop# x #Terminator# future?
Watch the episode of #Superlatives# on youtube!
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