All this is to say that niche content and community are having a moment. And it’s no coincidence that this moment coincides with the rise of generative AI. The better machines become at producing human-sounding content, the more human creators will push into offerings that only humans can provide. Bringing together and “managing” a community of like-minded people is something that humans are still much better at.

The word “content” is sometimes interchangeable with “news” or “information.” But online, the information quotient of a piece of content is lower and probably diminishing over time. What I mean is that what determines a paid creator's success is not the information they deliver but how it is delivered and even who delivers it. The creator’s literal and figurative voice, their background and journey, their aspirations, and even their weaknesses and mistakes — are part of the value proposition; they are part of the reason people want to hear from them rather than anyone else. 

The point is that online, in a world of abundant content, the definition of quality is increasingly subjective and specific. This means there’s room for many more people to write (and teach) different topics. So even if AI becomes really good at writing objectively correct but pareve content about various topics, there will be room for more humans to take this content and deliver them in a manner that appeals to other humans. In fact, there will be more room because (1) more people will have access to correct information to build their own content around and (2) as the world gets flooded with free, machine-made, pareve content, more people will hunger for actual “meat and milk.” And some of this meat and milk will include offline interactions — yet another thing humans are better at than machines.