LLMs enable a new kind of perfectly adaptable liquid media.
Traditional media (e.g. essays, movies) are fixed in place, static.
Traditional media contains content that is dead.
Fossilized content has to be created with a particular audience in mind.
If it turns out to not resonate with that audience, it slips out of society's awareness.
If there are other people who might resonate, but not with how it is fixed in place, it fails to have as much impact as it could.
Adapting to your media's audience used to be extremely expensive and required human effort, so you had to pool whole audiences together to something that was good enough for all of them but perfect for no one.
Oral communication is alive, it can adapt and morph to the context, to how it is being received in real time.
But it can only do this perfectly in a one-to-one conversation where the speaker has infinite patience.
It can be approximated in some contexts, e.g. a live lecture responding to an auditorium of people, reading the room and playing off of it.
But in all of them, it requires the author to be engaged, live–a huge opportunity cost and fundamental ceiling to scale.
LLMs make it so media can be perfectly adapted to a given audience.
A new kind of living, liquid media.
More like talking than like writing.