Lightspeed Ventures partner says Sora will make social media creators 'far, far, far less valuable'

"OpenAI's launch of Sora 2 sent shockwaves through the social media economy. AI slop was already rampant, and now there was a more realistic form of video with even narrower tailoring. Then came the lifelike images of Google's Nano Banana. How will creators fare in the age of AI? Lightspeed Ventures partner Michael Mignano takes a more extreme view: that it signals the "end of the creator." On "Sourcery," Mignano described a future of social media where content is generated instantaneously."

"It comes down to keeping the user's attention, he said. "That's why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful," Mignano said. "But it still requires human beings to make the content, and there's a cost to that." That "cost" is the human labor and payments that go into creating your feed. AI could mean costs go down, but that spells bad news for the influencer."

""The individual creator becomes far, far, far less valuable in that dynamic," he said. Mignano is well-versed in the online media space. He cofounded Aviary, a photo editing tool that was acquired by Adobe. He then cofounded and ran the podcasting platform Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify. At Lightspeed Ventures, Mignano also invested in Elon Musk's xAI. The investment was made in 2024, before xAI acquired X, formerly Twitter."

OpenAI's Sora 2 and lifelike outputs like Google's Nano Banana enable highly realistic, narrowly tailored AI-generated video that can be produced instantaneously. Tailored automatic content reduces the human labor and payment costs that currently sustain influencer-driven feeds. Lower production costs threaten creator economics by making individual creators far less valuable in platform optimization focused solely on attention. Some creators may retain value through demonstrable uniqueness and original creativity, but many face diminished opportunities and revenue. Acquisitions of creator tools and investments into AI firms show deepening links between platform capability and the shifting creator economy.

Read at Business Insider