I’m not in the utopian or the apocalyptic camp on AI. Artificial intelligence, like the internet, smartphones and other transformative technologies before it, will bring both beauty and horror into our world. We’ll just have to do our best to tip the balance.

But we’re already seeing a predictable (and widely predicted) low-grade horror: greedy publishers and malicious propagandists are flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated “content.” As many have noted, the 2024 elections will only make things worse.

Pity the spam filters.

But there will be silver linings to The Great Robot Spam Flood of 2024. It will drive us into healthier online communities. It will spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity. And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media.

Robots will make the internet more human.

First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We’re already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise.

When we’ve left those sites for good, we’ll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren’t, and quality is valued over quantity, we’ll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection.

Second, this flood of authorless “content” will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast. It’s plausible that generative AI tools will soon allow us to create gobs of adequate utility content: Guides and how-tos that could make it easier for millions of Americans to navigate their everyday lives. But I haven’t seen anything that persuades me they’ll be able to tell stories that make us cry, or investigate and explain injustices that make us howl. And until we truly arrive in “Westworld,” they won’t be able to share the life experiences and mistakes that inform their arguments and point of view.

“Could a robot have done this?” will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge.

Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media. The continued decline of VC-funded and Trump-bumped national media and continued growth of community-funding platforms like Substack and Patreon — and subscription/membership features that mimic them embedded in platforms — will continue to tilt the risk / reward math for audience-facing talent.

We’ve seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists for a few years now. Some have failed, many have burned out. But the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer.

And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I’ve seen in more than 15 years in journalism. And whereas speculative investments (for better and worse) in social, video, and audio over the past ten years have created new jobs for this kind of talent, the next wave of speculative investment in AI almost certainly won’t.

Some of these talented storytellers and reporters will see the recent community-funded success stories, notice the AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence, assess their prospects in established media, and decide to go it alone.

It won’t be for everyone. Some will try and fail. But if we’re lucky, we’ll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care.

Thank the robots.