What Does It Mean When Most of the Web's Content Is Mass Produced?

The other day I was listening to my friend Jed’s excellent “Techs on Texts” podcast (subscribe!) and Jed’s guest Alex Merose got into a nice discussion about how Duchamp’s art was a reaction to the rise of industrial mass production in the early 20th Century.

What does any tangible hand-made good mean when it can be cheaply replicated by machines? Duchamp’s response was in part to say that an object’s value comes from the human connection between giver and receiver. Sure, Duchamp says, there are 100 pencils that are exactly the same, but this one is special, because I picked this one for you.

We’re entering a similar age now. The rise of generative AI means that, like it or not, the majority of content we see on the Internet is going to be a manufactured object mass-produced by an LLM. People are still going to write stories, and make movies and songs, but a lot of what anyone consumes will be machine generated. So what does that mean for content?

At Rover, we think content will take a cue from Duchamp. The meaning of a thing will come from the sharer of the thing, and the receiver. As one user we interviewed put it, “I don’t care about the news. I care what other people think about the news.” For us, this means reinventing social audio, using LLMs to facilitate and spark conversation, but not be the point of the conversation.

The goal is for Rover to help you find things you love so that you can talk them over with others; to learn what they think, to find meaning in shared understanding. We can’t wait to share with you all. If you. Join our beta here!