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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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You discuss school and jobs, but I don't think any of that applies to entertainment media. Yes, it's usually good that we force children to go to school. It might even be good if we were to force adults to go to work, even ones that are independently wealthy or happy enough to subsist on welfare. But entertainment media? We currently have no way of forcing adults to watch certain pieces of media that we think would be good for them. Adults have pretty free choice - today more than ever - to seek out entertainment media as they wish, and though "high art" stuff are very very niche, they're still a significant niche.

This indicates that people actually seek this stuff out voluntarily. Where I see gen-AI being a boon for this is that we can have far higher throughput of art that is considered "good" by whatever "high art" standards are held by people with taste and discernment and [whatever characteristic that true connoisseurs have], and also for far more custom artworks that provide exactly the right amount of challenge to enrich someone's life without being so challenging as to make them shut down and reject it.

And building on that, there's also the fact that it's quite possible to train AI on media that makes people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I'm glad I did," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, and there was nothing about it that piqued my interest, so I decided not to check it out," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I regret doing so," as well as many other combinations of similar concepts. And I don't see why some near-future gen-AI couldn't generate media that creates reactions similar to the first one while avoiding the latter ones fairly consistently.