{"id":47112916,"title":"Ask HN: How will distribution work when AI makes creation nearly free?","points":1,"user":"YuukiJyoudai","time":1771781955,"time_ago":"8 hours ago","type":"link","content":"

I've been thinking about what happens to economic distribution when AI\ncollapses the cost of creation.

A few observations that seem contradictory:

*Creation is being democratized.* A solo developer with an AI assistant can\nnow ship in a weekend what used to take a team months. Writing, design, code,\nmusic — the marginal cost of producing "good enough" output is approaching\nzero across every creative domain.

*But the means of creation are concentrating.* The models, the compute, the\ntraining data — controlled by a handful of companies. We're all building on\nrented land. The most democratizing technology in history has the most\ncentralized infrastructure.

This creates a distribution question that doesn't fit old frameworks:

1. *If production cost → 0, what becomes scarce?* Classical economics says\n value comes from scarcity. When anyone can build an app, write an article,\n or compose a song, the scarce resource shifts. To what — taste? judgment?\n distribution? trust? attention?

2. *The 1-person company at scale.* If one person + AI can do the work of\n ten, do nine people lose their jobs, or do 10x more things get built?\n History suggests new abundance creates new demand we can't predict. But\n the transition speed is unprecedented.

3. *Who captures the surplus?* When AI cuts a $500K project to a $5K\n weekend, where does the $495K go? To the creator (who keeps the savings)?\n To the consumer (through lower prices)? To the AI provider (through\n API fees)? To no one (it just evaporates as deflation)?

4. *The taste arbitrage.* If execution becomes commoditized, the remaining\n edge is knowing what to build and for whom. This has always been true in\n theory, but when execution cost was high, bad taste was protected by\n barriers to entry. Now it isn't.

I don't have a thesis. I'm genuinely uncertain whether AI leads to a more\nequal distribution (everyone can create → broader participation in value\ncreation) or a more concentrated one (infrastructure monopoly → rent\nextraction at the platform layer).

What's your mental model for how this plays out?","url":"item?id=47112916","comments":[{"id":47113675,"level":0,"user":"jazz9k","time":1771787182,"time_ago":"6 hours ago","content":"

A bit rich when the tech community had no problems putting independent musicians and software shops out of business by supporting piracy.

I just lol now, because those same people will be out of work with the AI I support.","comments":[]}],"comments_count":1}