Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass.

Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".

Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.

Why can't it be the actual tiktok? By simply winning competition with humans i.e. whereas vast majority of humans see their pay go too low to bother to continue?