ChatGPT has taken over as the topic du jour, reigniting the discussion on the future of creativity and knowledge work.

What does it mean to be original when creativity is reimagined as a problem of autocomplete, one that an algorithm with an exponentially improving corpus of knowledge gets better at solving each day?

vgr and AVC offer two good takes on crypto and AI being a yin and yang or two sides of the same coin.

It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other. The mild culture-warring between the two tribes is in fact a symptom of deeper kinships.

AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. I am convinced there is something deeper going on here. This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow.

— The Dawn of Mediocre Computing by @vgr

I think AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. As machines increasingly do the work that humans used to do, we will need tools to manage our identity and our humanity. Web3 is producing those tools and some of us are already using them to write, tweet/cast, make and collect art, and do a host of other things that machines can also do. Web3 will be the human place to do these things when machines start corrupting the traditional places we do/did these things.

— Sign Everything by @fredwilson

I am excited to participate in the evolution of this from the web3 side.

As I play with ChatGPT prompts and think about how NFTs will evolve as a medium, two observations come to mind:

Commoditization of creativity elevates creators. If producing creative work becomes democratized via LLMs, where the effort between idea and high quality final output is drastically reduced, who produces the work becomes a lot more important. The creator’s celebrity, influence, world-building, and interaction with the rest of the ecosystem becomes much more important. Appreciating art becomes more-so about who is making it and how they engage with their audience and the broader memeplex. This likely exacerbates the power laws of creator popularity and success.

Scarcity + cost makes consuming creative work more meaningful. As AI abundance commoditizes and devalues creative work, further straining the attention economy and overloading the feed—audiences having the ability to purchase or invest in work offers an antidote. Scarcity creates a “meaning filter”. The byproduct is both a significant new business model change for creators, and a more meaningful relationship with the works as we become more discerning collectors.

If you aren’t already, I recommend starting experimenting with both. It’s really fun. Try ChatGPT or publish your first on-chain essay (which is automatically an NFT) on Mirror today.