I'd would say that text is capable of being extremely useful even when no human reads it, because of source code, maths proofs, etc.

But I'm curious: 238 wpm * 0.75 words per token * 16 (waking) hours per day * 83 years * $10.00 / 1M output tokens (current API cost for 4o without batching) means the current cost of making as many tokens as a human can read in a lifetime is $92,300: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=238+words+per+minute+%2...

With these numbers, a well-written project with even a billion lines of code would be a rounding error even if only a thousand people used any specific such software and none of that was ever shared with what other people wanted to get done.

Market dynamics should push people to stop generating that content if they don't enough value to justify the cost. In practice, though, it hasn't seemed to happen yet and we must be pass a threshold where there's more content created online than we could ever value.

It'd make for an interesting study, but short of having verifiable data I have to assume we'll continue increasing the rate at which content is created whether the value is there or not.

You'd most likely categorize all of the unseen textures or higher-than-needed resolution in your "waste" bucket, and I can't argue with that. But VR still clearly means that there is at least theoretical room for "realtime video generated custom for every viewer, which in turn is composed of even more content sources".