What Do You Do, When Quality Becomes Infinite?

Programmatic made real the delusion of infinity. Infinite reach. Infinite inventory. Infinite data.

What wasn't infinite was quality. It remained the differentiator for premium media owners, even as everything else became commoditised.

With generative AI, even quality could become abundant.

When quality becomes abundant, it becomes cheap and replaceable, and it stops being a differentiator.

Then what?

The threat isn't mediocrity

There are many question marks ahead, but one stands above the rest. It's not “will AI create more low-quality content?” That's already happening, and we've been swimming in it for years.

The real threat is more uncomfortable.

The enemy is not mediocrity. The enemy is increasingly good-enough content that costs almost nothing to produce, content that looks and feels like quality.

I'll admit my thinking has shifted. I used to believe authentic human content would remain distinguishable, that AI could mimic the surface but not the substance. I still believe AI cannot replicate voice, accountability, or genuine human perspective. But I've come to accept that audiences, scanning a page, won't reliably tell the difference. The content itself won't reveal its origins.

Trust now comes before content. If audiences can't judge quality by looking at it, they'll judge it by who made it.

This is the asymmetry that should keep media executives awake at night. Creating good-enough content used to require investment, journalists, editors, fact-checkers, time. That investment was a barrier to entry. Now the barrier has collapsed. Anyone can produce what looks like quality. The economics of content have inverted.

The narrative is that agentic AI can fix this. That algorithms will sift through the swamp and surface quality at scale. Perhaps. I remain open-minded.

But even if the open marketplace becomes marginally better, it still isn't what premium advertisers and premium media brands need.

Solving a problem technically doesn’t mean it fits everyone’s business model. The deeper problem is that the open marketplace makes everything look the same. It dilutes the value of premium media while legitimising rubbish, and soon “quality rubbish”, through adjacency.

The open marketplace isn't a tech problem. It's structural. Agentic AI can filter better. It can't fix the architecture.