> The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words.

Here's one attempt; it's art versus content. Tiktok is content; it's people recording a video, sometimes in one take and publishing, sometimes in multiple takes with some editing etc, sometimes fully professional ones. But overall, it's cheap, rapidly produced content for cheap, rapid consumption. ASoIaF was a labor of years to produce not just a series of books, but a world, a rich history, and later on a multi-media enterprise that involved and employed millions of people, then entertained and excited hundreds of millions of people over the years.

AI is lowering the barrier to entry even more, with anyone able to just punch in some words - less even than this comment - and produce something. For someone to consume. Maybe one in a billion will be remembered or still popular in a decade (like how some of these cheap videos are still popular / remembered / quoted, think vines / memes). But the ratio just keeps getting worse.

ASoIaF to a TikTok video is like... ASoIaF to a tweet.