New Delhi: The public square of the digital age has rarely been so crowded. The mighty arbiters of the written word—publishers, broadcasters, tenured professors—were once the sole custodians of cultural discourse. Then came the democratizing jolt of social media: billions of people suddenly gained the means to publish instantly to the world. That upheaval now seems almost modest beside the next leap—artificial intelligence capable of producing polished, seemingly expert work at the press of a few prompts.
When social media arrived on the scene, it immediately lowered the barriers to micro-publishing and sharing. In this new phase, AI lowers the barriers to sounding like an expert. A student, a freelancer, or a techie from a small town can summon, in moments, an opinion piece that could pass for the work of a specialist—or a speech fit for an academic conference. (True story: film director Shekhar Kapur told News9 at one of its summits that his cook of many years actually wrote a script for a Mr. India sequel using AI. The director’s verdict: it wasn’t bad at all!)
Back to my point. The arrival of this synthetic eloquence raises an awkward question: when brilliance is ubiquitous, what is it worth?
The Economics of Plenty
Be it words or wares, when abundance arrives, exclusivity departs. The printing press devalued the painstaking craft of manuscript transcription; the keyboard killed calligraphy; blogs, tweets and LinkedIn posts made op-ed punditry a commodity.
AI now threatens to make expert-level content as common as spam emails. Already, reports, market analyses, essays, and even legal drafts pour out of algorithmic engines at an industrial scale. Distinctions between original insight and well-dressed recycling have never been hazier.
In this environment, sheer expertise—at least as it appears on the page—loses its rarity. New dimensions of value emerge, ones that scarcity still protects: authenticity, traceability, and a carefully curated sense of limitation.
Do They Care, Though?
When any computer can conjure literary elegance or analytical nuance, the question shifts from ‘how good is it?’ to ‘is it real?’. Did the author live the event they describe, or is it stitched from patterns in a training set? In other words, is the writing authentic? But the million-dollar question is, will the reader really care? I think they should.
Live panels, intimate podcasts, unedited conversations, and in-person performances have their own unique value, which a soulless LLM spitting out words doesn’t have. Therefore, expect proof of origin—whether via blockchain metadata, community trust, or the old-fashioned credibility of a byline—to become the mark of high-value content.
But verification will be a moving target. AI, after all, will grow adept at forging everything. There’s no saying that digital avatars won’t end up jamming and creating human-like experiences (Sigh.). This will place greater weight on communities and relationships: people will trust what comes from within their networks, what is vouched for by curators they already follow and respect.
Democratisation Redux
What AI adds to the democratisation once ushered in by Twitter and Facebook is the levelling of capability. Social media allowed anyone to ‘publish’; AI allows anyone to mimic mastery. The likely stratification of content may look like this:
- Autoproduced mass output: machine-written text, imagery, and commentary, generated at scale and, literally, no cost.
- Hybrid human work: personal experience and individual perspective amplified by AI tools, blending efficiency with authenticity.
- Proven human origin: content tied to identifiable, lived sources, and valued precisely because it resists automation. Mimicry does not equal authenticity. Without its copious training, no LLM will be able to produce any work of Shakespearean quality or Vedantic depth.
The crucial shift in the age of AI will be from access to authority: from who can publish to whose words carry weight.
The Paradox Ahead
In tomorrow’s content economy, creating something that reads as expert will be ridiculously easy; but creating something that matters—amidst the tidal wave of words–will be harder than ever. Paradoxically, as AI raises the average quality of expression, the rough edges of genuine humanity—flaws, tangents, idiosyncrasies—may grow more valuable, not less. (In my writing, for instance, I tend to use quite a lot of long dashes and brackets for asides.)
What will remain in short supply is not eloquence or knowledge, but trust, context, and the patient attention of audiences. The AI revolution will not abolish these scarcities; it will intensify them. And for all its capacity to flood the world with words, AI may end up making genuine voices worth more than ever. Or so I hope—for my own sake.