The current friction between people who create content and those who create content factories evokes the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Why do the intelligent designers of content feel under siege as content factories create ever more gluttonous methods for manufacturing it? What does each side have to teach the other? Here are the arguments.

The intelligent design hypothesis

Professional content creators are adopting the posture of intelligent designers. They’re unquestionably intelligent; no one knows more about high quality content and how to create it. Here’s their perspective:

The skills involved in creating artful prose or insightful journalism has an irreducible complexity. Machines simply cannot create quality content. Content that is manufactured by machines is, at best, an unintelligently cobbled together hodgepodge of regurgitated information.

The reason content factories are so economically successful is mass production. They compete not on quality, but on quantity. Search engines and aggregators are complicit in this abuse of the Web, force feeding a glut of low quality content to unsuspecting consumers.

Professional content creators are under siege because content factories are stealing our jobs and glutting the market with low quality content. The market for hand crafted content is eroding as the value of content depreciates, making it economically impossible for professionals to practice our trade.

Inevitably, our hand crafted content could be wiped out of existence, and all of us will suffer for it. Everyone should be concerned.

The evolution hypothesis

Content factories are adopting the posture of evolutionists: provide for the basic elements of an evolutionary process—reproduction, mutation, and selection—and allow the content to evolve and adapt to meet the needs of consumers. Here’s their perspective:

Quality is subjective; good enough is good enough. Consumers care mostly about the time and effort needed to complete their tasks. They have an unapologetically demand-side bias. Consumers would rather have low-quality content that is more specific to their immediate tasks than high-quality content directed to a more general audience.

Content factories are successful due to our adaptive approach. We encode memes in content. Tiny mutations in these memes may seem grotesque on the surface, but in the aggregate they provide consumers with many variations on a theme. From this diversity, search engines allow consumers to make their own selections, which are fed back to the content factories to inform the next iteration.

Professional content creators are under siege only because they are slow to adapt. Their value assessments of the content are self-serving, out of step with their markets.

But it’s not the end of the world for content creators. While formulaic content will continue to move from human creators to machines, markets for high quality content will survive this industrial revolution, just as hand crafted goods survived mass production. Those that adapt will thrive, those that don’t will be marginalized.

Evolution or intelligent design?

Content professionals need to face the realities of Web 3.0 industrialization, just as they had to confront the social revolution of Web 2.0. While technological change is disruptive, it also brings new opportunities.

For their part, the content factories face the same competitive pressures as any other industry. No amount of productivity will protect those that fail to find markets that value their content. And these competitive pressures will also force factories to continue to ascend the quality ladder, often by incorporating the knowledge and best practices of content professionals.

Unlike the biological world, on the Web, evolution and intelligent design are reconcilable.