Creating, Copying, and Remixing in the Age of AI
The effect of AI on human invention
I recently launched two sites with lights-out codebases where I’ve never seen any of the code, from conception all the way through production:
ReachVIP (https://reach.vip). You should be able to reach anyone in the world, no matter how famous, if they name their price. ReachVIP lets any expert create a profile and set prices for what they’d charge in order to answer your question.
Luminaries wouldn’t do this, you say? A friend of mine received a birthday video from Kirsten Bell via Cameo. Kenny G sent a birthday video to my wife. Most people are happy to do a little something helpful in their day if they’re compensated for something straightforward.
You can already book 1:1 videos with people like the founder of Reddit with services like https://intro.co. Video coordination is hard, though, for both the expert and the client. ReachVIP instead offers text-based inquiries that don’t need schedule coordination. It’s like being able to email any expert in the world by paying for a thoughtful response.
Thankverse (https://thankverse.org). Thank anyone in the world with a thoughtful note online which they get to keep forever. In high school, I went to a camp where, on the last night, everyone wrote everyone else a note of appreciation. Those notes were treasured by me for decades. I wanted to create the same experience for people, but in a digital world. There’ll never be ads on Thankverse; it’s meant to be something positive for humanity.
Each of these went from ideation to launch within one weekend, which opens the door to several observations.
The Consequences of Easy
The ways in which AI supercharges creation are obvious:
Non-coders can now make their ideas a reality. It’s going to be a PM and Designer heyday.
Individuals and small companies can accomplish heretofore unimaginable amounts of work.
Deep expertise in all areas is no longer a prerequisite to prototyping. I built ReachVIP’s Stripe integration without ever having looked at the APIs.
But the consequences may not be as obvious at first blush.
Cheap Things Are Wasted
Book publishing used to exert a strong selection bias toward quality writing because printing physical books was both expensive and time consuming. Nowadays anyone can put something on Amazon via CreateSpace, uploading a PDF for free and collecting royalties only if the book sells. You can bet the average quality of books has gone way down.
Similarly, just because you can build AcmeSite.ai doesn’t mean you should. Back when developers were expensive and prototypes took weeks, you’d think long and hard before commissioning the work. These days, the whole Lean Startup mindset has gone to extremes as more and more vaporware / abandonware is released online.
Discovery Becomes Impossible
Some time in the late ‘90’s, there was a comedic trope about having “200 channels of cable but nothing to watch.” There was CourtTV with nonstop gavel banging. The Box, where you paid by telephone to queue music videos. Prevue Channel, where the only thing happening was a scrolling schedule of other channels’ content.
You might suppose moving from three national TV stations to 200 cable channels would be an unequivocal boon to viewers worldwide, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the relative ease with which you could create new channels led to a morass of slop.
If you think the App Store’s 2 million apps are already a problem, brace yourself for the world of 160 million apps.
The crappy cable problem was solved over 20 years through a combination of:
Quality aggregators. When you tuned in to HBO, you were paying for discernment and taste.
Personalization at scale. The promise of personalization was hyped even in the year 2000 by Pandora, though its algorithms were bad enough nobody subscribed. Nowadays, however, YouTube and TikTok recommendations have gotten so good that global tastemakers are no longer necessary. You can now have a channel which you always love.
We’ll no doubt also experience this transition in the apps/sites domain over the next few years, but in the meantime, buckle your seatbelts for a barrage of bad apps.
Copying Goes Thermonuclear
Copying an app has always been far easier than building it in the first place because the initial inventor threw away 90% of various experimental features until the core value prop was discovered. Copying requires that you only do the 10% which survived, with much less market risk at that.
AI takes this to a different plane altogether. If you’ve never pointed AI at a web app and asked it to simply replicate its entire functionality, you ought to experience such magic at least once. There’s little doubt we’ll soon be able to replicate mobile apps just as easily.
Many traditional software businesses were built on the premise that software is hard, and that the code itself forms a strong barrier against competition. With AI, you’ll need to rely on other moat-building principles, like branding, network effects, or scale efficiencies.
Calendly is a great example. Anyone can replicate its functionality in a weekend. In fact, Google Calendar now offers the same functionality for free. Calendly’s business is 100% based on the brand it established via rapid adoption shortly before the AI revolution.
The Timeliness of Now
If all of this didn’t discourage you from building, I’ll add another major problem: the breakneck speed of improvements in AI exerts deflationary pressure on the value of your time.
Is an hour of your time building with AI more valuable now, or six months from now? If you wait six months, you’ll likely be able to build whatever you wanted to build today in 25% the time.
Most of us have only ever experienced inflation so we tend not to have strong intuitions about human behavior under deflation (as there was in Japan between the ‘90’s and ~2012). If you knew a dollar would buy more next month than this month, you’re going to put off most purchases until you absolutely need them.
This is the sense in which improvements in AI cause deflation in the value of your time. You would understandably be tempted, with that logic, to defer building things.
I’ll here make the argument you probably should build now anyway:
First movers often still have the advantage. See Calendly above. You could invent and define a new category of app. Your app’s name could become a verb.
There’s joy in the building. Overcoming difficulties is part of the fun of it all. Games are, in a way, putting up deliberate obstacles for ourselves in order to feel the sense of accomplishment once overcome.
And of course, life isn’t forever. During deflation, a dollar might buy more for you tomorrow than today, but it certainly buys you nothing 90 years hence.
I built ReachVIP with a talented Nigerian designer, Daniel Afolabi. The interpersonal experience of collaborating with Daniel was truly enjoyable. But if I’m honest, it may be the last time I work with a designer to prototype ideas. AI is getting to the point where the price differential (several orders of magnitude) and speed differential (waiting several days for a design vs. getting an updated design within minutes) no longer justify the cost of human design labor for small firms or solopreneurs. The import of hiring human coworkers is fast becoming a luxury belief which only the wealthy, or those who don’t sign the fronts of paychecks, can afford.
With that said, I’d especially encourage you to build now, not later, if you have one or two coworkers to brainstorm alongside. Such opportunities will likely become rarer in the near future.