Sparknotes For Everything

The year is 2009, and you have a report due tomorrow at 8:15am on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Bummer. You’re about to dive in when, suddenly, you hear the infamous AIM alert tone… your crush has signed on. Obviously you can’t sign off now, so you do what all good 2000s teens do. You fire up SparkNotes to save some time and return to laying the groundwork for the Spring Prom. Fast forward 15 years, and “sparknotes'' has become synonymous with “summary,” earning its place among other deonyms like Kleenex and Popsicle. But what happens if we have sparknotes for everything… even for the content that used to be our escape?

Last week, Google announced that Bard can now summarize or answer questions about YouTube videos. In its current state, the tool is most relevant for educational, tutorial, recipe, instructional, or how-to videos – basically, content with objective information to retrieve and synthesize. While the tool isn’t perfect, we are certainly not far from AI models that are capable of watching and interpreting all genres of videos on behalf of users. And such a development is sure to have profound implications for their creators and viewers.

Search and discovery: The ability to more comprehensively organize, tag, and index the contents of a video should vastly expand the surface area of opportunity for creators, connecting them with consumers and brands they may not have otherwise reached. With greater context and understanding, search and discovery becomes ever more powerful. Imagine searching for content by hyper-specific elements such as character types or aesthetic, or being able to recall exactly where you saw a particular scene or heard a distinct soundbite. Conversely, a robust and precise picture of a creator’s content library may work against them. For example, a brand using the tool for a creator search could flag a relatively subtle but unfavorable element that would have previously been missed.

Revenue: In a world where consumers can outsource their consumption to an AI agent, views and reach on a given video may decrease, negatively impacting platform or brand revenue. On the flip side, if search and discovery is supercharged (per the above), new audience pools or even new forms of attribution and monetization may emerge, unlocking new compensation streams for creators.

Storytelling: In this paradigm, expert storytelling becomes even more important. A storyteller’s magic is intangible – they evoke emotion through their unique perspective and presentation. Their audience tunes in not for the information/content itself, but for how they deliver it. Just like in other mediums, it is the powerful narrative that transcends summarization and remains relatively immune from obsolescence. Further, aware of the interpretation abilities of AI models, creators might more deeply consider how their content is developed or scripted – much like how copywriters and marketers consider search result ranking today.

Fandom: Powerful summarization tools will test the kind of fandom each creator has, and ultimately determine the level of audience attachment. This is likely to be more true for categories like education where, similar to how Google’s “answer box” negates the need to visit websites, the audience may not need to engage with the creator’s content to get the information they are looking for. In other categories, like maker categories where visuals are essential (e.g., beauty tutorials or home renovation), the impact on engagement and attachment may not be as dramatic.

Skimming the SparkNotes for A Tale of Two Cities is a far cry from actually reading the book; it’s the functional equivalent of reading a menu item instead of tasting it. While we ultimately expect the same to be true for certain creator content, the advancements in these models will force all creators to play by a new set of rules. As they consider foundational content, community building, maintenance, and future growth, they will have to understand and strategically navigate an AI-driven world.