Trust Beats the Slop
Courtney W. Holt@mootron
+3.0%
since Sep 30
The idea
I believe AI has made content infinitely cheap, which means the scarce thing now is trust: who curated it, verified it, or vouches for it. So this basket owns the trust layer across four angles, community curation platforms, brands whose name is the verification, identity and authenticity infrastructure, and licensed content libraries that gain value as unlicensed slop multiplies. It skips pure content-volume plays since those sit on the wrong side of the divide, and it keeps a small cash buffer while staying spread across many names rather than betting big on one.
What it owns
- News and media companies whose reputation and editorial standards are the product, worth more as unverified sources lose credibility. · New York Times Co.Its brand is the verification layer; people subscribe because the byline proves the reporting was fact-checked and edited, more valuable as AI-written articles erode trust elsewhere., News CorpIt owns mastheads where the brand name guarantees credibility, and increasingly licenses that trusted reporting to AI companies training on verified text., RELX PLCIt sells vetted, authoritative information to professionals who cannot afford to be wrong, a pure trust layer that holds value against generated answers.35%
- Platforms where human judgment and community trust sort through infinite content, becoming more valuable as generative slop multiplies. · Spotify TechnologyIt curates infinite audio through playlists and recommendations, making that filtering more essential as AI-generated tracks become indistinguishable from the catalog., Netflix Inc.It operates a gated library where editorial teams decide what gets made and surfaced, the opposite of free feeds drowning in cheap generated video.27%
- This bucket holds positions that don't fit neatly into other categories but remain part of the take's broader strategy. · It owns YouTube, a platform with billions of hours of human-created content curated by viewer preferences and recommendation algorithms., NET, FIG, SKYD26%
- Infrastructure that proves identity and authenticates content, essential as AI-generated fakes become cheaper and more convincing. · Okta Inc.It provides the identity and access infrastructure that proves who is real underneath platforms and services, more critical as AI impersonation becomes cheaper., Adobe Inc.It develops Content Credentials, the standard that labels where media came from and whether AI touched it, owning the authentication layer if adoption spreads.17%
- Rights-cleared catalogs of creative content that gain value as unlicensed AI output floods the market. · Shutterstock Inc.It licenses and clears rights for images at scale, exactly what platforms and publishers need as scraping unlicensed content becomes riskier.6%