It’s painfully obvious that in 1 year the job might be exceedingly more difficult than it is now.
#1: Master these new tools #2: Build a workflow that incorporates these tools #3: Master storytelling #4: Master ad tracing and analytics #5: Get better at marketing yourself so that you stand out
The market for your skillset may shrink, but I doubt it will disappear...
Think about it this way...
Humans in cheaper countries are already much more capable than any AI we've built.
Yet, even now, There are practical limits on outsourcing.
It's hard for me to see how this will be much different for creative work.
It's one thing to casually look at images or videos, when there is no specific money-making ad in mind.
But as soon as someone is spending thousands to run an ad campaign, just taking whatever the AI spits out is unlikely to be the real workflow.
I guess I'm suggesting a more optimistic take...
View it as a tool to learn and incorporate in your workflow
I don't know if you gain much by stressing too much about being replaced.
And I'm not even sure that's reality.
I'm almost certain, most of the humans to lose their jobs will be people who either because of fear or stubbornness refuse to get better, refuse to incorporate these tools, and are thus unable to move up the value chain.
Get better [...] so that you stand out
I realise this comment is a bit vain. And I like the human touch of you helping a stranger.
I [...] don't [...] like [...] helping a stranger.
It's more likely that you're still going to be filming/editing/animating but will have an AI layer on top that produces extra effects or generates pieces of a scene. Think "green screen plus", vs fully AI entertainment.
People will over-hype this tech like they did with voice and driverless cars but don't let it scare you. Everything is possible, but it's like a person from the 1920's telling everyone the internet will be a thing. Yes it's correct, but also irrelevant at the same time. You already have AI assisted software being used in your industry. Just expect more of that and learn how to use the tools.
Also I think "a good algorithm" is more than just repetitive content. The plots are reused and generic, but there's real skill involved into figuring out the next series to reuse with a generic plot which is still guaranteed not to flop because nobody actually wants to see reruns of that series or they accidentally screwed up a major plot point.
Kidding aside, these technologies are amazing, but for a while still they will need a human in the loop selecting, tweaking and editing the output and feeding it back to the contraption for the next iteration.
The question is, for how long?
If you mean the former, then I frankly think you’re an outlier and lots of people would have no problem with that. If you mean the latter, then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. We’re certainly not there yet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. I’ve definitely read stories that were produced by an AI and preferred it to a lot of fiction that was written by humans!
As to whether I am an outlier: Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide watch Magnus Carlsen. How many have watched AlphaZero play chess when it came about and how many watch it when it ceased to be a novelty?
Speak for yourself. Actors do have fans, and a lot of them. Their personal lives are subjects of interest for a reason.
So, no, not totally different at all.
It reminds me of part of the book trilogy Three Body Problem, where these aliens create human culture better than humans (in the humans' own perspective, in the book) by decoding and analyzing our radio waves to then make content. It feels to me much the same here where an unknown entity creates media, and we might like it regardless of who actually made it.
I am also extremely skeptical of the ability/need so serve at individual level instead of niches (as today).
If you're on the creative, storyboard, come up with ideas and marketing side, you will be fine.
If you're in actual production, booking sets, unfolding stairs to tape infinite background, picking up the best looking fruits in the grocery store... yeah, not looking good.
Go up in the value chain and learn marketing, how to tell stories, etc... you don't want to be approached by clients telling you what you should be doing, you want to be approached and being asked what the clients should be doing.
They’ll just throw it away off hand. But I’ve run my own business and I know what the pressures are. A lot of people working today will not be working in 10 years in my industry, period.
The optimistic view of all of this is that these tools will give people with skill and experience a massive productivity boost, allowing them to do the best work of their careers.
There are plenty of pessimistic views too. In a few years time we'll be able to look back on this and see which viewpoints won.
I think Cleo Abrams on YT recently tackled this exact question. She tried to generate art using DALL-E along with a professional artist, and after letting the public vote blindly, the pro artist clearly 'made' better content, even though they were both just typing into a text prompt.
Here's the link if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiJeB2NJy1A
I could see a lot of digital artists actually getting better at their job because of this, not getting totally displaced.
That being said, it’s possible that it won’t pay anywhere near what you’re used to. Either way, it will probably be a solid decade before you’ve really felt the pain for disruption. MP3s, which were a far more straightforward path to disruption took at least that long from conception.
Also won't nearly require the amount of work it used to.
Instead of feeling threatened by the new tools, think about how you can use them to enable your work.
One of the ironies* of these tools is that they only work because there is so much existing material they can be trained on. Absent that they wouldn't exist. That makes me think: why not think about how to train your own models than entail your own style? Is that practical, how can you make it work and how might you deploy that in your own work?
Something that everyone is sticking their heads in their sand about is the real possibility that training models on copyrighted work is a copyright violation. I can't see how such a mechanical transformation of others' work is anything but. People accept violating one person's copyright is a thing but if you do it at scale it somehow isn't.
* ironic because they seem creative but they create nothing by themselves, they merely "repackage" other people's creativity.
But here is the catch, there is the same last mile problem for those AI models. Currently it feels like the model can achieve like 80%-90% what a trained human expert can do, but the last 10-20% would extra extra hard to reach human fidelity. It might take years, or it might never happen.
That being said, I think anyone who doubts AI-assisted creative workflow is a fuzz is deadly wrong, anyone who refuses those shiny new tools, is likely to be eliminated by sheer market dynamics. They can't compete on the efficiency of it.
Small creators will win under this new regime of tools. It's a democratizing force.
I'm wondering why the open source community doesn't get this. So many voices were raised against Codex. Now artists against Diffusion models. But the model itself is a distillation of everything we created, it can compactly encode it and recreate it in any shape and form we desire. That means everyone gets to benefit, all skills are available for everyone, all tailored to our needs.
Exactly this!
We no longer have to pay the 10,000 hours to specialize.
The opportunity cost to choose our skill sets is huge. In the future, we won't have to contend with that horrible choice anymore. Anyone will be able to paint, play the piano, act, code, and more.
Eventually the data model will be abstracted into deterministic code using a seed value; think implications of E=mc^2 being unpacked. The only “data” to download will be the source.
And the real world politics have not gone anywhere; none of us own the machines that produce the machines to run this. They could just sell locked down devices that will only iterate on their data structures.
There is no certainty “this time” we’ll pop “the grand illusion.”
From what I see, these technologies have just lowered the bar for everyone to create someone, but creating something good still takes thought, time, effort and experience, especially in the advertising space.
AI in the near term is never going to be able to translate client requirements either. The feedback cycle, iterations, managing client expectations, etc.
It certainly could play out similarly but, at some point, if all the work in a field from now on only requires 1/100 of manual labor, people will probably go out of work.
But yeah I’ll figure something out.
Bit of an apples/oranges comparison to tech that will (eventually) generate endless supply of content with less effort than writing a Tweet.
The era of inventing layers of abstraction and indirection that simplify computer use down to structured data entry is coming to an end. A whole lot of IT jobs are not safe either. Ops is a lot of sending parameters over the wire to APIs for others to compute. Why hire them when “production EKS cluster” can output a TF template?
Yes, it will be possible for one person to do the work of many, but that just means each person becomes more valuable.
It’s also a law in economics that supply often drives demand, and that’s definitely the case in your field. Companies and individuals will want even more of what you want. It’s not like laundry detergent (one can only consume so much of that). There’s almost no limit to how much of what you supply that people could consume.
The way I see it, your output could multiply 100 fold. You could build out large, complex projects that used to take massive teams all by yourself, and in a fraction of the time. Companies can than monetize that for consumers.
AI is just a tool. Software engineers got rich when their tools got better. More engineers entered the field, and they just kept getting richer. That’s because the value of each engineer increased as they became more productive, and that value helped drive demand.
And that’s my optimistic projection. It could be we have amazing output in 24 months.
A bunch of fields would be simultaneously impacted. From computational physics to 3D animation (if you have a 3D renderer and video generator, you can compose both). While it's not completely unfounded to extrapolate that progress will be as fast as with everything prior, consequences would be a lot more profound while complexities are much compounded. I down weight accordingly even though I'd actually prefer to be wrong.
10 years ago: https://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visi...
Now: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.13807
Given that this is what makes photos and videos interesting I think it's still a while before artists are automated.