Here is the thing about a world collapsing towards average: it makes the extremes valuable.
If everything regresses to the mean — if every piece of writing starts to sound the same, every image starts to look the same, every idea starts to rhyme with the last one — then the people at the edges become the only ones worth paying attention to. Not just the excellent ones. Both tails.
The left tail gets appreciated as much as the right.
What AI does to this
High quality, in the old sense, is something AI can't do. The thing that took a decade to master, the sensibility that came from a thousand hours of looking and failing and looking again — that's not something you prompt your way into.
Low quality, in the most interesting sense, is something AI won't do. Not because it's technically incapable, but because it isn't wired to produce something genuinely strange, uncomfortable, or unfinished on purpose. The deliberately rough edge. The idea that shouldn't work but does.
Skills for truly high quality will be as scarce as the courage it takes to put out your genuinely low quality work — low quality as perceived by masses. In other words: the thing that makes no sense to most people but feels absolutely necessary to you.
The thing about opposites
Opposite of good is not bad.
Opposite of good is anti-good — which might be bad, or might be entirely new. That's the interesting space. Not the mediocre middle where everything is technically fine and nobody cares.
The people who will matter are the ones who can do something extraordinary — or the ones brave enough to make something the algorithm would never surface, because it's too odd, too personal, too committed to its own strange logic.
Mediocre is the only losing position. It is too good to be interesting and not good enough to be undeniable.
As perceived by masses.