Available evidence by late 2025 indicates that Friedberg’s prediction has largely played out as described.

• Prompt-based, “narrate what you want” interaction has become the standard for generative AI. Academic and industry work now explicitly defines AI-generated content as systems that automatically create text, images, etc. based on user prompts, and even proposes architectures and frameworks whose core optimization variable is the prompt/narration supplied by the user. (arxiv.org)
• Mass consumer and enterprise adoption shows this narrator-style usage has indeed “emerged and grown.” By 2024–25, ChatGPT alone had over 100 million weekly active users and was reportedly adopted in some form by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, while the broader AI boom is characterized specifically by generative models like large language models and image generators. (investopedia.com) This reflects exactly the behavior he described: ordinary users and workers typing natural-language instructions to generate content, code, designs, and more on demand.
• Business operations and product creation are being re-shaped around generative AI. Research on firms integrating GenAI into online retail workflows finds statistically significant sales and productivity gains when generative features are embedded into business processes, directly tying prompt-driven generation to measurable operational changes. Conceptual enterprise frameworks published in 2025 focus specifically on how organizations adopt and integrate GenAI – including prompt engineering and model orchestration – into strategy, workflows, and governance, indicating that this mode of working is now a serious management and IT concern rather than a fringe experiment. (arxiv.org)
• Cultural and creator behavior has shifted toward a “narrator / prompt economy.” Commentators now explicitly use terms like “narrator economy” and “prompt economy” to describe an environment where economic and creative leverage comes from the ability to prompt and frame ideas for AI systems, not from traditional technical production skills. These pieces highlight that with tools like ChatGPT and image generators, anyone can create apps, art, or content by narrating what they want, and that prompting has become a central creative and economic skill. (medium.com)

Taken together, these developments match the core of Friedberg’s prediction: a rapidly growing, prompt‑driven "narrator economy" that is changing how people entertain themselves, behave as users, and how businesses operate and create products. The trend is still evolving, but enough has already materialized to judge the prediction as essentially correct.