Human-written content could become premium

I initially thought blogs were a dying art. Whilst building Mokasearch, I felt a little like I was starting a library, just like you might feel like starting a library of books when the blogs took over. If fewer people are writing blogs, you might naturally ask what the point is of building something around them.

But when I thought about it more, I began to see the scarcity itself differently. The scarcity might actually become the selling point. When there was an abundance of blogs, you could simply say, “Oh my God, we can get the blogs from Google. Why are you showing them?” When something becomes scarce, however, it can start to become more valuable.

That is the part I find interesting. Human-written content could become more valuable precisely because there is less of it. What is scarce could eventually become the main product.

Take televisions as an example. Television technology changed enormously when we moved towards flat screens. But the content on the television remained the same. It is not as if television content changed into something else simply because the technology changed.

Technology can change the way something is delivered without necessarily changing the underlying content. I think AI can be looked at in exactly that way. AI can become the flat screen. The technology becomes much better, much faster and much more efficient, but that does not mean the human content itself has to disappear.

What I find interesting is using AI to improve the technology around the content rather than simply replacing the content. The point is not to turn everything into a tab with inserted content which you have to consume however it is. If everything has already been inserted and decided for you, there is no television for your choice. You get nothing else.

That is why I think this is a prime example of how AI could be used differently. The machine can change the screen. It does not necessarily need to replace what people originally created.

The question then becomes: where does the human-written perspective come from? What is the source? I think individual bloggers and writers are important here.

The strange thing is that at exactly the point when AI is producing more and more content, fewer people may feel the need to write blogs. That was why I originally thought building around blogs sounded silly. If the supply keeps falling, however, that same weakness can become the interesting part.

There may be less human-written material being produced, but you do not necessarily need an unlimited amount of it. You may only need a small number of genuinely useful perspectives for a question. The volume can be scarce without the result becoming completely empty. For the main questions, there may still be enough human writing to offer something useful.

The obvious problem is that some questions are dependent on time. “Why should I move to Canada?” is a good example. What the conditions were five years ago may not be what the conditions are now.

If a question is highly time-sensitive, old human writing can become a problem. There may simply not be enough people writing new material about every subject. That is a genuine weakness when the decision depends heavily on what is happening today.

But I do not think this necessarily kills the idea. Relevancy itself can improve. If today only three or four results are relevant, tomorrow six or seven out of seven may be relevant. You can also take the year into account and look at who has written something in 2026.

Newspapers and other writers may continue to produce current articles. Yes, the volume may become scarce. But you do not necessarily need a huge volume. It is not as if every major question is going to have absolutely nothing written about it.

I also think something from the past can remain an interesting perspective. Old does not automatically mean useless. Five years ago, people may have felt London was like this, and then you can look at London now. That comparison itself can make for interesting reading.

A perspective does not always have to be the latest perspective to have value. Sometimes it is interesting precisely because somebody thought that way at a particular point in time. You can read what people thought before and compare it with what people think today.

So I do not think the older material necessarily needs to be thrown away. It can sit alongside the current material. The current perspective tells you what somebody thinks now. The older perspective tells you what somebody thought then. Both can still be useful for different reasons.

That brings me back to the thing I find most interesting. What was once abundant may become scarce. And what becomes scarce may begin to feel more valuable.

AI can produce enormous amounts of material very quickly. But the fact that technology can produce more material does not mean that what people previously wrote has suddenly become worthless. The television changed into a flat screen, but the content did not disappear.

I think human-written content may go through something similar. The technology around it will completely change. How we find it may change. How it is organised may change. How quickly we can search through it may change.

But underneath all of that, there is still something somebody actually chose to write. And if fewer people are doing that, human-written content could eventually become the premium part.