Art, culture and creativity at zero marginal cost
We're moving to a world where machines not only recommend human-created creative work, but one where machines actually do the creative work
In the winter, from the USV office on the 19th floor in Flatiron, we see beautiful, pink and purple skies during sunsets draping Manhattan. One of us in the office will walk to the southwest side of the office to take a picture, and others will follow. I've done this myself many times, which feels natural in the moment but always strange in hindsight; it would be easier for me to ask for someone else to send me their photo, or to search Google Images for beautiful sunsets over Manhattan and then save that photo, or to just remain satisfied with the photo of the purple and pink sky I took the day, week or year before. And yet I can't help it: I re-take the photo every time. Human like me remain transfixed, and sometimes even paralyzed, by the process of authentic creation.
One could say that we live in a time — powered by the networked, high-end camera and computer we carry in our pockets — when authentic creation has never been greater in one sense, and never lesser in another. This has been driven by the ever-falling costs of creativity.

We are beginning to perform many more creative endeavors at zero marginal cost. Manual, tedious edits in Photoshop can now be performed with content-aware fill. There are very few scenarios in which people would have been willing and able to do to this photo what Photoshop can do in a snap:
On relatively little capital, Instagram got to 100m users. Then, Whatsapp got to 500m. Eventually, a solo entrepreneur will get to 1B users.
— Chris Dixon (@cdixon) June 1, 2014

You may have noticed that the auto-Friends-screenplay-generator is not really a great writer now (I’m sparing myself from taking a shot at the actual writers of Friends). Writing entire scenes is a fairly significant task, and autonomously entertaining viewers is a high bar to clear. Moreover, writing complete narrative arcs for theater, television or cinema is a task so large we may not be able to accomplish it any time soon. However, recall the content-aware fill example in Photoshop: You can generate tremendous productivity gains not by creating a photo of a kid on a beach from scratch, but rather filling in the bits that would make it a better picture. In the same vein, a writer could build a narrative arc and rely on a machine to make suggestions for dialogue, to “fill in” the screenplay as it were.

Computer-generated creativity also raises interesting questions regarding the value of originality. Every cover Richard Dawkins’ next book will feature a unique, original computer-generated image:
We did it! Unique covers for Richard Dawkins’ books on evolution. No two copies are the same https://t.co/FiDLC3g2KL pic.twitter.com/o5MZqzW8lD— Matthew Young (@matthewoyoung) May 27, 2016
It’s unclear if or how infinitely original design work adds much value beyond novelty (more precisely, the novelty of novelty). One could imagine an application, call it “AutoHallmark”, in which one uploads an affectionate photo of him or her with his partner and generates a romantic poem that you could print for your anniversary. Would it matter if that poem is completely unique? Who would know, or even care, if a one out of every thousand poems generated were re-used?
Likewise, creativity at zero marginal cost means that any creator could choose to build the world's largest library of photos, music, or art. Whereas having a large library was once very valuable because rights to creative work are scarce, work that was created at zero marginal cost and is naturally royalty-free must abide by a very different economic model.
In fact economic models around creativity have largely been governed by technology. Over the last 150 years we’ve undergone three technological phases in the consumption of art, culture, entertainment and creativity. Prior to the invention of the phonograph or the film projector, it was impossible to consume music or film on one’s own, hence we paid for scarce live access to musicians or theatrical performers. The second phase, between the time of those inventions to the invention of ubiquitous internet, generated another layer: Physical media, which greatly popularized and democratized art and culture while also giving rise to organizations like the music labels and film studios, who monetized production and distribution of those goods. The last phase is marked by a brief period in which the download obviated the friction of buying physical media, hence unbundling the album or the TV series, and now a period when ubiquitous streaming eliminated the friction of the download, which made purchasing a single song or show archaic. Value still accrues to those music labels and film studios, but now also the operators of the delivery mechanisms: the likes of Spotify, Apple, Netflix. And live, “authentic” events like live concerts increasingly become the way to monetize off those platforms.
As we move to a world where not only the consumption but the creation is driven by technology, value will almost surely accrue to a new layer: Organizations which can capture people’s attention with work that costs only as much to create as it does to keep the servers running.
The biggest question is how much we continue to value pure authenticity. For example, will a song that was written only by a human be perceived as more valuable than one written at least in part by a machine?
Perhaps this is really just a false alternative. After all, that redundant photograph of the pink and purple evening sky I take from my iPhone five times per winter, because the actual taking of the photo feels authentic? I might tag it #nofilter, but God knows I've got the HDR on.
This blog post was written, in part, after a conversation with Ross Goodwin, who pointed out that the digital camera spawned creativity at zero marginal cost. Thanks to Samim Winiger for reviewing a draft of this post. Alex Danco's examples from his series on Emergent Layers was also helpful in organizing some of these thoughts.
And if you’ll be at the Nuclai conference for “Artificial Intelligence for Creative Applications” with me in July, let's meet.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯