The rise of AI causing worries in creator-land
And what that means for the TV and film production sector.
I ran a poll last week asking which of all the various issues bubbling around I should cover next. Thanks to all who voted, the answer was this one, which is about generative AI and the worries being shared by creators.
In this post I’ve gone into their concerns, and pondered what might come next: or at least, how to frame your thinking about the future, considering futurology can be a bit of a mug’s game.
The concerns from creators are coming at the same time as the questions around ‘is AI a bubble or not’ have broken through. At a high level, this worry can be summarised that the level of investment in the building out of the necessary data centres as well as AI R&D may not generate the level of profits predicted and expected.
The related question whether the current versions of AI (LLMs) are a step on the path to some form of super intelligence, or if they are a technical cul-de-sac continues to rage between technologists and investors, who have wildly different opinions on this critical question. To attempt to summarise their different views: On one hand, the issues with accuracy and reliability with the LLMs are just part of a developing and emerging technology, which will only get better and better. On the other hand, these issues with accuracy and reliability are a feature not a bug of the fundamentals of LLMs, and they will never be rectified. Therefore the promise of automation and intelligence using this as a foundational technology can’t be realised especially for critical activities like finance, health, security and so on.
Meanwhile, graphs like this Axios one below are appearing, where we can see that human origination is being devoured by the general public’s use of LLMs.
Like most technical revolutions, the low-hanging fruit is grabbed first. So going back to the early days of the internet, it was text and then music that was upended in the first phase, and TV/video came later, thanks the slow speeds of internet connections combined with the large file sizes of video assets. In a similar progression, we are seeing text in the form of websites being swallowed first into LLMs.
However, with the launch of Sora 2 and the Sora app in north America in the last two weeks, there is a sense that AI is coming for video. This has caused a whole lot of concern for those that are most vulnerable in that category, which are creators with YouTube and video centric businesses. Although obviously, it has caused a whole lot of soul-searching amongst established media too.
The biggest creator of them all, Jimmy Donaldson/Mr Beast clearly expressed his worries about gen AI and what it will do to creators:
