Let's talk AI.

But before that, let's go back to the year 2012. We're having a conversation over a cup of cold brew coffee at the newly launched Starbucks (the first ever in India) inside the heritage Elphinstone Building at Horniman Circle, Fort, Mumbai. You own a phone with a QWERTY keypad and a screen size of 2.8 inches.

Your primary device for consuming YouTube videos is your PC. Your iPad is slowly taking over, though.

Your primary source of media entertainment is cable TV or a movie theatre.

You don't believe me when I tell you that in just 8 years:

1. There will be a set of people who make a fortune by talking to a camera.
2. Your primary source of media entertainment will shift to OTT platforms.
3. First, your mobile device will become the primary source of media consumption and then your TV [YouTube Viewing on TV Now Surpasses Mobile, Desktop in U.S.] — that is, if India follows trends in the US. At the moment, mobile devices remain consumer favorites in India.
4. Thousands of content creators will sprout from all regions of the world to produce and express their stories with low production budgets and easy access to the viewer market, thanks to YouTube, Twitch, etc.
5. You might develop a parasocial relationship with one or several of these content creators.
6. You might spend more time consuming small creator content on YouTube than movies or series from large production houses.
7. The advertisement industry sees a massive shift in strategy, budgets, and spending.
8. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the world are able to market themselves with the capacity to reach buyers like never before. You hear about many good creative products from small businesses because of social media platforms; perhaps some of your favorite products are from these small creators.

I can go on all day about these shifts. The point is, all of this has happened because of smartphones, dropped internet prices, and social media platforms.

There are two sides to the story, as with any event. But I am going to focus on not being a doomer in this blog post.

Very few, if anyone, could predict this in 2012. From where I see it, the digital revolution empowered creators.

You could be a small shop creating custom handmade leather shoes, sweaters, a culinary delicacy not cooked in your city, jewelry, or healthy fruit-veggie smoothies... You can now access the market with ease, advertise your product with a fraction of the budget previously required, and choose from a multitude of logistics startups to deliver your products directly to customers.

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AI will not be very different in my opinion. GenAI will ultimately empower creators.

Note: Empower doesn't necessarily mean make better. There are many average/poor content creators, businesses, and products that spend on marketing across multiple platforms. You just avoid them by looking at ratings now.

This post is based purely on anecdotal experience, so there is bias here. YouTube gave so many small production companies a way to express their creativity and tell their stories—The Viral Fever (TVF) and All India Bakchod come to mind. While their dissolution is sad, the reasons behind it weren't creative. TVF especially told stories that were so profound, they could put large production houses in India to shame. Some of my favorite TV series are from these production companies simply because they were written, produced, and acted by everyday people. I could easily connect to their shows because they centered around people from the majority socio-economic class.

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What can AI bring?

• For learning, it's a revolution. Imagine having a tutor with you 24/7 that can answer your queries about a subject. Sure, LLMs aren't perfect—but neither is a professor, a school teacher, or online forums. Published textbooks aren't going anywhere. I cannot overstate how much it has helped me understand complex subject matter simply because I can throw questions at it and request tailored, example-based explanations. A prompt I used earlier this week: "Why is my Celery worker complaining of an unregistered task, and can I create two Celery apps in two containers with the same name with the same task and expect a worker from one container to consume the task from Redis?" No documentation was going to answer that directly—it had to be either Stack Overflow or Discord.


• For small-time content creators: If generative AI provides us with low-cost animated movie generation agents, creators can tell their stories and distribute them to millions who would likely connect with them more than big movie studios. Just like what happened with long-form content and OTT.


• For solo product builders: For people who want to build products but cannot afford specialized teams, you can roll out an MVP without hiring professionals during early stages. For example: I wanted to build ClosetX and FlexPlay (a sports app) for a long time. My bottleneck was time. I needed to carve out time to learn JavaScript and mobile app development to code the frontend. I had no issues with building the backend. I did the classic "I will handle business and backend if you build the frontend for equity" with lots of people. Developers liked the product idea, but none worked on it. As a creator, that's a common struggle without bootstrapping funds or pre-seed capital. Hundreds of prompts later, I built a functional frontend, learned JavaScript, and ended up liking it. Even without an LLM, I can now build decent frontends.

Still—it's too soon to say anything with absolute certainty, but I hope generative AI brings a similar revolution for creators across music, animation, and digital products.

What does it mean for thousands of jobs that might be or are at risk? I'd probably be as clueless about your concerns as someone in 2012 sitting under the beautifully handcrafted wooden ceiling supported by Malad stone walls at Fort Starbucks, pondering traditional marketing and cable TV.