If movie-quality content is easy to generate, then what is left to separate the good from the bad?
Probably story, characters, originality, etc.
Generative models could, across the board, commoditize the aesthetic leaving only substance as a discernible trait.
This could be positive for the world in both encouraging people to create things of substance and consume things of substance.
When instagram pictures are so easily made perfect, why bother posting? Or watching? What credit do you get for looking the way you do?
When shallow political arguments are made in a comment, why not just assume they are computer generated?
We could become blind to vapid content like we are blind to billboard ads.
What happened to the quality of video games once game frameworks became easily available? The market got flooded with low-effort garbage.
Youtube and Tiktok and other social media platforms make global video distribution easy, but most of it is uninteresting and uninspired, when not low-effort clickbait or ragebait. Making things easy doesn't lead to more substance, only exponentially more of what sells, which is shallow, low effort aesthetic.
What point is there in encouraging people to create things of substance when that substance will only be consumed, commoditized and shat out by AI? Every time you see authentic, human generated art online now, it just gets assimilated. It's a sign of something forever tainted and blighted from the collective human soul.
We can't be blind to vapid content when the systems and algorithms that generate our culture optimize only for it. The only hope is that somehow AI fails to follow through on its promise. Maybe it will never be able to create content of high enough quality, quickly enough or at a low enough cost. Given the evolution of technology, and the capability of LLMs in particular, that seems unlikely. Only another AI winter can save us. As long as AI remains deeply integrated into all possible electronic and online means of communication, creativity and expression (as it seems destined to be) then human expression just feeds the machine, and becomes as impossible to find in the ocean of machine-generated slime as non-commercial content on Google.
So we go from 98% not worth looking at to 99.9% not worth looking at, or whatever the figure is.
I read a blog today and it was high-quality long form tech journalism - something I haven't seen for a long time, tucked away on a no-mark site in a far corner of the Internet.
I didn't agree with all of the content, but it was so good to see something written at that level. 50 years ago it would have been normal for tech publishing. Today most tech journalism is gossip and clickbait. It's not thoughtful and referenced long form analysis of where the industry may be heading, written with original critical insights.
So, yes, there are a lot of new video games because it's easy. It's also true that the most aggressively marketed and therefore quite popular games are bad. Mobile games now make up over half of the gaming revenue. This is a problem not of volume but of incentive. These popular games have created a cycle of [heavy monetization > more ads > more popularity]. They exploit people. This is a problem but a different kind of problem.
On the other hand, the indie games on steam have never been better. They're extremely creative, and fun, and they invent. They riff off each other. And most new things in gaming come first from here. The only thing not healthy about it is the lack of money they make. These games are so cheap that they have a hard time paying the developer's rent.
Platforms and cynical games with better marketing and monetization have stolen their lunch and poisoned their audiences.
The point is that bringing down the barrier of creation did allow much better creations. However, marketing and exploitation ruined a lot.
I won't go into it as deeply, but you can imagine the same pattern played out everywhere else.
YouTube has great content and would have more if it was more discoverable. It's hard to find because the algorithm made for maximizing marketing dollars suggests things that we don't tell the algorithm we want but what the algorithm thinks will keep us watching. It resists helping us. Because marketing money.
With these new generative models, we can imagine decreasing money needed to create but we will all compete for the same finite source of attention. Like with games, the good stuff will still be there, but it might be hard to find.
A positive sum game (creation) turns into a zero-sum game (attention auctions) with negative externalities (ragebait, mobile game addiction).
Those that control who gets attention will be able to soak up all the gains from the positive sum game. It's already been happening with app stores and google ads. And there's no reason it shouldn't soak up all the margin gains.
The enemy is not bringing down barriers - that's the good stuff. It's reining in marketing and attention platforms so that we can all benefit from these creations instead the benefits being greatly attenuated and, in some cases, made negative but the attention gatekeepers.
When I was young, they were not many, but most of them were amazing. And there was a real story. Now, on Netflix there are thousands. But most feel like completely empty and stupid. Recently after watching one with my kids, I'm much more careful in the selection.
Sadly, it looks like it's the case with everything that will be available on the internet soon.
There are some very nice animated movies coming out of smaller countries - but finding them amongst the drek is the hard part.
Already happening without AI, see superhero movies.
What we are actually going to get is millions of stories, the vast majority of which will be terrible but a small percent that will be revolutionary.
We're not going to get better movies and shows by unleashing the TikTok generation on movies and shows. We'll get more, but not better because they are simply not capable of better. They don't have the training and the practice and it doesn't matter how cheap the tools if you don't have the ability, the skills that come with an education and a lot of trial and error. These skills are absent in all but the rarest of untrained persons so your friend's tv series is going to be shit, along with any tv series or movie created by people without the skills of a trained tv or movie maker. We don't need more shit. We have enough with the Disney, Apple, and Netflix and I should also include YouTube and TikTok.
Wider is not better in art because art is a developed skill not a party trick. As someone who went to art and architecture schools, I promise you that the camcorder did not bring a grand new wave of democratized citizen cinema. It just didn't and neither will so-called A.I. because, once again, art is a skill, not trick. There are no shortcuts and no secrets to bypass learning and practice.
I assume you've never seen a Tyler Perry 'Madea' movie before
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchise/fr4115107589/
I think I can see where the meat is.
We’re unlikely going to be watching movies like we have been in the next 10 years.