Programmable content is eating software

As we transition from recording to generating videos, the next exceptional entrepreneurs may program content rather than apps.

Abstract — TL;DR

- We are witnessing a paradigm shift where most content will soon be AI-generated, not captured from the real world.

- The economics of production are inverting; generating a cinematic explosion is getting cheaper than filming a person in a room.

- While social media democratized distribution, AI is democratizing production, removing physical and budgetary barriers.

- As AI makes visual perfection abundant, creative value will shift from polished aesthetics to unique characters and truly novel ideas.

- The creator archetype is evolving from favoring performers and social skills to enabling thinkers and builders.

- The functional distinction between an "app" and "content" is dissolving. E.g., local event recommendation in an app or in a TikTok feed solves the same problem.

- The most viable path for tech entrepreneurs may shift from building applications to building content that leverages native distribution.

1. Introduction: Generating reality instead of recording it will be a shift as massive as the one from paint to cameras

Content is the vessel that transmits our ideas, stories, and culture. Human history is a history of increased communication, the sharing of content. Cave paintings captured a single moment for a few. Writing scaled knowledge distribution. Radio and television brought audiovisual media to the masses, but distribution remained centralized. Finally, smartphones, the internet, and social media democratized the distribution of audiovisual content.

Today, we live in a world dominated by video content, and this video-centric world is going to change fundamentally. Until now, most video has been created by recording reality with cameras, but in the future, most video will be generated by AI.

When we shifted from painting and drawing reality to using cameras to capture it, this had a profound impact on how we collectively saw reality, but also on our culture and businesses. Similarly, AI-generated content will be a massive shift that will disrupt our culture and businesses, creating many new opportunities but also many new challenges.

When, instead of capturing audiovisual content with a camera, we can generate it on computers, content is becoming programmable, like software. This means content production can become automated and scalable, which enables a whole new type of business opportunities and a new type of creator.

The product of the next billion-dollar startup might not be interactive content in software distributed via apps in the App Store, but AI-generated audiovisual content distributed via media networks.

2. The New Economics of Content and the Democratization of Production

Generating content with AI will fundamentally change the economics of content production.

The Inversion of Production Economics

Historically, realistic content production is bound by the physical world. To film a story, you have to physically construct a new reality—a process involving casting actors, scouting locations, building sets, and coordinating crews. The more a creative vision departs from reality, the more expensive it becomes.

With AI generation, these economics are inverted. For an AI, the content of a scene doesn't matter—each pixel it generates costs the same. An "explosion" may prove cheaper than generating a mundane scene with nuanced human interaction. This inversion makes content previously exclusive to Hollywood-level budgets accessible to anyone.

The Democratization of Production

This marks the final stage in the democratization of creation. Social media democratized distribution, but success was often still tied to an individual's real-world attributes—their appearance, charisma, or access to resources. AI democratizes production by removing these final barriers. You no longer need a budget for a car crash scene or conventional good looks for a viral video. High production value is becoming a commodity.

While high-quality AI video generation is still expensive and not perfect (AI slop might be similar to the jerky movements of early cinema), its cost is already a fraction of traditional production, and that price is falling fast while quality is improving.

From Commoditized Perfection to a New Frontier

In the short term, we will probably see an inflationary flood of what was scarce before. Social media will get saturated with AI-generated "beautiful people," luxury lifestyles, and exotic locations—status symbols that are hard to obtain in the real world. But this might soon become a boring commodity.

As audiences grow numb to sterile, hyper-polished visuals, creative value will focus on what remains scarce: compelling characters, original stories, and unique aesthetics. Taste and vision will become the ultimate differentiators. As is usually the case when introducing new technologies, the true frontier isn't mimicking the old, but creating something entirely new, previously impossible.

3. The New Creator: Renaissance of the Renaissance Man

This shift is creating a new type of creator. The traditional archetype of a creator, the film director, was a hybrid of artist, manager, and fundraiser, balancing creative vision with the logistics of managing people and physical assets. The modern social media creator is primarily a performer, where on-camera personality, charisma, and appearance are key drivers of success.

This new paradigm empowers the "ideas person" working behind the scenes, where success is not predicated on social skills or on-camera appearance.

This creator is a modern polymath, requiring strong logic to design content systems, a refined aesthetic sense for visuals, deep creativity for original ideas, a mastery of storytelling for narratives, and high emotional intelligence to build resonant characters.

This shift favors the thinker and the builder over the performer. While this skill set is broad, it is also more attainable than innate charisma or conventional good looks, opening the door for a more diverse range of voices to produce truly interesting content. This marks the renaissance of the "Renaissance Man"—a creator who is part artist, part engineer, capable of mastering a wide spectrum of creative and logical domains.

All these skills don't have to be in a single person. We will probably see many small, startup-like teams combining complementary skills. It will be easier for teams than the current solo-creator model led by the performing personality.

4. Why Content Is Eating Software

The functional distinction between an 'app' and 'content' is dissolving. For example, an app that recommends local events and a TikTok feed that shows you videos of those same events are functionally converging on the same service. Nearly 40% of Gen Z already turn to TikTok or Instagram for search queries instead of Google; they are learning a new language through short videos rather than a dedicated app.

This trend reveals a powerful distribution arbitrage. Building an app is expensive and faces a "cold start" problem, requiring a difficult marketing process in an ever-more-crowded app market to get noticed. Content, however, leverages the powerful, free distribution engines of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and maybe soon AI-based networks.

For the technically-inclined entrepreneur, the most rewarding path may no longer be to "build an app," but to "build content." This can involve designing complex, AI-automated systems—workflows that can generate content, test variations, and adapt based on performance data. It creates a continuous feedback loop, fueled by immediate and massive data from distribution networks that can be scaled with advertising, enabling improvement cycles that are much faster and cheaper than for the average new application.

While the business models for content can seem less straightforward than for apps, they offer a wide array of options native to the creator economy and totally new ones. Virtual influencers like Lil Miquela earn millions annually from brand deals, while Caryn Marjorie created an AI-powered chatbot clone of herself that fans could talk to for $1 per minute, reportedly earning over $70,000 in its first week.

Until now, the type of video content that is most consumed on media networks was hard to automate, but continuously improving AI video models are ushering in a new era where content could become a more profitable tech product than software.

5. Conclusion

The future of AI-generated content will create many risks and opportunities.

Fully Automated Future - Visual Crack?

The natural climax for programmable content would be full automation: platforms that automatically generate media that is hyper-personalized for each individual. Instead of being static, a lot of content might also become interactive, with worlds and characters (you talk to) that adapt in real-time to the user. Early examples of this are Google's Genie, which generates playable environments from prompts, and Farcaster's in-feed mini-applications.

AI will become exceptionally good at creating content optimized for engagement. Meta's FAIR research team, for example, developed TRIBE, an AI model that accurately predicts how the human brain will respond to watching movies. This is reminiscent of the dystopian vision of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," where media is so perfectly and lethally entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire for anything else.

Risks

The future of AI-generated content is accompanied by many profound risks.

• Job Displacement: The creative industries will face massive disruption and job loss. This disruption is already being felt, as evidenced by the 2023 Hollywood strikes, where AI's role in creative work was a central point of conflict.

• The Info-Apocalypse: For news and factual content, the incentive to create polarizing, convincing, and entirely false content could poison our information ecosystem even further.

• Concentration of Power: While AI democratizes creation for individuals, those with massive capital can scale content production to unprecedented levels, drowning out smaller voices and advancing their agenda.

• Decoupling from Reality: As most of our information diet becomes generated rather than captured, our collective sense of reality may shift and weaken.

• Loss of Meaning: Human meaning is often found in genuine connection, purpose, and a shared reality. We are moving from today's para-social relationships, where we at least watch real humans, to para-human relationships with synthetic beings.

The spread of AI-generated content will likely fuel counter-movements focusing on the authentic human experience. This trend is already visible in the rise of raw formats like IRL streaming and could, for example, lead to platforms dedicated exclusively to human-created content. The above-mentioned challenges are also opportunities for entrepreneurs.

A Feast for the Content Programmer

Fundamentally, new technologies always change culture and business, and this one might be especially impactful. As Google's CEO noted, AI may be "more profound than electricity or fire," and such changes reward entrepreneurs and produce generational companies as we have seen with Nvidia, Google, and Apple.

Paradigm shifts like AI always redefine where value is created. The established playbook will likely yield diminishing returns as the most profound opportunities emerge from entirely new categories. This text sketches out one such frontier: the rise of programmable content.

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