It's difficult to think in exponentials.
But this demonstrates we're a couple orders of magnitude away from generating 1:1 hyper-personalized entertainment and media for individuals, rather than the masses.
It's difficult to think in exponentials.
But this demonstrates we're a couple orders of magnitude away from generating 1:1 hyper-personalized entertainment and media for individuals, rather than the masses.
I don't really get the desire for hyper-personalized entertainment. People are very good at pointing out things they dislike, but not very good at coming up with how to fix them (common wisdom in game design).
On top of that, a decent chunk of the joy of entertainment is the social aspect.
I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression. I don't see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a negative signal, rather than "ooh, AI image, I'm in for a treat". Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images?
Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want, and they don't want to be in charge of content production (even if you have an LLM do most of the work). I don't doubt that there are niches for it, especially stuff like porn, and I'm sure that pros (game studios, film studios) will leverage AI more and more, but I suspect that most of us will just want to sit on the couch, watch Spiderman XVIII, and then be able to talk about that shared Spiderman XVIII experience with all our friends.
All small business marketing material now looks exactly the same.
LLMs produce an extremely small range of artistic expression, and its kind of ironic, that while it certainly looks functionally good. It immediately becomes noise because everything looks identical.
So companies are going to have to hire creatives again, in order to stand out, and be "creative"
I'm mostly seeing the impact of GenAI images in everydays life for example in the small posters small associations or individuals usually attach on streets to promote some small local event. We went from just text created with PowerPoint and maybe some stock image just a Google search away to now images depicting the topic closely. But yeah, it's not like a revolution.
And this personal media thing, yeah maybe for terminally online persons that are REALLY into a sub-genre but otherwise, it's too much effort, I agree. Until we get machines that can read our (subconscious) mind, that will not exist.
I yearn for the old days of bad photoshop/wordart/powerpoint flyers.
They were visually bad but honest and sometimes soulful or playful.
The AI slop that's everywhere now looks superficially more professional but it's very busy, samey, unnatural and it really turns me off.
I don't want to say this is indicative, but my local library used AI-generated event poster/images for the past year. But recently they switched back to word/clipart event posters. When I was checking out, I query the librarian about it, and apparently they saw a 40-60% drop in attendance. On one hand, I found that hard to believe, but on the other hand, simple word/clipart event posters do have a certain inviting charm about them.
> We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation
Not even close. Current AIs have very poor spatial awareness, they can generate some kind of scene but they can't tell you where objects are in the scene, nor can they move objects into different places. They're very useful but it's difficult to be very creative with them because they can't update an image to make it more aligned with your vision for what should be in the image.
Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want
1:1 AI entertainment probably won't be a cold start experience.
Much like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the 80's, consumers choose a baseline template, customize the characters, and interact at various points within the plot.
> We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation
No, we don't. It's quite good, but it's nowhere near perfect. For example, you can see: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ or others that highlight how far from perfection we still are.
> and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression.
It sure has changed our discourse. Look at hackernews, where people just can't help themselves to engage in ragebait and flamewar comment threads about llm generated accusations. We've got half the people convinced that looking at ai content is like consuming food.
I'd venture a guess that it's too early to determine how this technology will change expression. A good analog would be photography, which caused a similar meltdown in the arts at the time.
> I don't see my friends getting wildly creative.
Maybe you don't have creative (enough) friends.
If that becomes a thing, that will be fun 2 weeks, then become a gimmick only a small niche will be using. What’s the point in having a hyper personalized entertainment? People want to experience the games, movies, tv shows, books others created and are also experiencing
Judging by the Seedance 2.5 demos today, I’d say it’s not that many orders of magnitude away now.
I kind of like a sense of community even if it means losing out on personalisation.
Amazon recently kiboshed a new Stargate television series. The fan community was quite heartbroken because the Amazon had involved some of the writers from the original television series and apparently one of the reasons that they cancelled the show before it made it to production was that the felt that the proposed story would appeal too much to the fans and not new people.
The fans were real heart broken about this but I think you're right on where this is going. We're not going to be seeing the dominance of centrally produced content like this for much longer, like sure, I think there will be big blockbusters will stick around, but I think the day is coming where media becomes a choose your own adventure sort of scenario.
It'll be interesting to see where this scales to. there will definitely be some amazing solo projects but we'll also see the like 4 player co-op version of productions and then the larger mine-craft server 'Minas Tirith' scale ambitious projects that involve a few dozen people. And of course passive consumers will remain a thing, or people who just provide some suggestions or nudges for what they'd like to see others make.
But I don't think it'll be dominated by big companies like Disney, Netflix, Amazon or Paramount.
I'm sure a lot of them will suck but it'll be neat to see the inevitable Seinfield - Star Trek Voyager cross over episodes.
Elaine and B'Elanna Torres feud after a transporter accident leaves the crew stranded the delta quadrant. Jerry attempts to date 7of9 but is rebuffed as she finds Kramer's quirky bluntness more relatable. George panics after someone compares him to Neelix.