Making money obviously. The question of course is how. I believe the straightest path from here to there is spam's more reputable cousin, SEO affiliate marketing. These online plagarists have conquered the top of the sales funnel for scribblers quite thoroughly. It is for this reason that things with sophisticated recommender algorithms like twitter have overtaken search engines for many hungry for the written word. The situation for video and youtube is little different.

This market for content creators is quite large, and I'm sure these aggregators would love to capture as much of the MRR from this as is possible. One straightforward way to do this is to do all the content creation yourself, but as we all know that does not scale well. LLMs have been built to solve that specific problem -- scaling content creation.

So long as the output is a variation on a theme, LLMs will eventually conquer it. Fiction & music will go first, as there are only so many archetypical stories, everything past that is embellishment and entirely de gustibus. Talking head newscasting (being little better than fiction) and pop journalism will be soon to follow. Similarly, punditry and commentary will be easily dominated, as it's already mindlessly chasing engagement mediated by algorithms. Online learning will also succumb much like technical documentation did to SEO spammers. Even more performative entertainment such as sports, video games and camming will likely be dominated by generative approaches within the decade.

All to chase that sweet, sweet subscription MRR business model that content creators have built up over the last 20 years. It's what has lead a great number of young people to claim they want to grow up to be "influencers". LLMs will gradually push prices down and result in consolidation of these forms of media production, ending this boom. The only remaining place for independent content creators will be to genuinely break new ground. Even then this will be quickly fed into the large models.

As such, I expect those of us who previously chose to engage in cookie-cutter content production (this includes much programming, being glorified glue) will be forced to either learn to drive these tools or find a new line of work. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There remain an incredible amount of things that still need doing, and more free hands will lighten that lifting. It will be inconvenient and painful for many, but it's hard to describe anyone's life without those two adjectives.

There will certainly be some blind alleys we walk down with this technology thanks to it enabling even easier mindless pursuit of irrational engagement. But this pain will not be permanent. People will adapt as always to the troubles of their time. We are, after all, still dealing with a social crisis largely brought on by pervasive legibility of our lives (read: surveillance) enabled by technology. In an era where everyone has a public "permanent record" online, people would do well to remember that forgiveness is a virtue. Perhaps automating the "internet hate machine" will make us remember.