We’re in a weird time.

On the one hand, generative AI has turned what has traditionally been a craft service into a commodity and replaced human labor with a simple product. This has obviously freaked a lot of people out and threatened their livelihoods.

On the other hand, human-made data has never been more valuable. As our computational capability increases, we will become starved for ground truth human-made data, and after this brief window of time it is probable that most of the internet will be AI generated, so scraping anything new from the internet will have little value. Anything from 2025 onward is almost certainly AI slop.

Human artists and content creators are in a strange position of being both the most valuable part of our technological civilization and the least valuable in terms of providing direct economic value in a competitive free market economy. This is obviously an important challenge to face, but the fervor that people feel about their position is causing many people to entirely miss the golden opportunity in front of them.

What really matters is whether we want to be remembered and how we want to be remembered.

We can choose to wipe ourselves from the internet, send out takedown requests and have our work removed from the models. We can cloister our most beloved works in licensing and copyright. And those who do will be forgotten not just to ten generations, but to all generations in all time.

We could also choose to see it quite differently. Share everything. Open source all of our code, release the project files for all of our inventions, make videos on our process, and share or ideas.

The more open we are, the more of our essence will be pulled into the public and private datasets and mixed and shared and passed down as part of the corpus from the last golden age, when all works were human made.

The deal is this: very few humans will ever see your work or care. But the things you make will be part of everything every human ever sees or reads or hears or experiences for the next hundred million years.

I’d rather be remembered.