NAB
In 2022 AI was most
certainly a gimmick and a headline grabber. In 2023 the answer will be
different.
article here
“People will start
using AI in their workflow because it makes sense,” award-winning
director Karen X Cheng says in an interview.
In an a16z podcast,
host Steph Smith talks with Cheng about her use of generative AI tools like
DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Cheng has more than a million
followers and almost everything she creates goes viral — including a video of
her becoming a lawnmower (yes, that’s right), an AI-generated magazine cover
for Cosmo, and a DALL-E fashion show.
“It is so much
harder to make a video go viral than it was 10 years ago,” she says. “The way
to do it now is you have to have a following. It’s not so much about trying to
make something viral but about building an established follower base so that
the number of people who see your work steadily gets higher.”
For Cheng, the
secret ingredient that unlocked viral videos in the age of the algorithm was to
produce a behind-the-scenes look at how she made a piece of content, posting it
alongside a new release.
Recently she has
successfully created content for sponsored partners using generative AI.
“I had to find new
toys to play with,” she says. “I noticed the insane stuff in AI white papers
and what researchers were doing but it’s not their job to explore AI
storytelling or cinematic potential.
“So, I started
experimenting by taking the research from white papers and making them into
social media-friendly videos.”
Aside from the
leading text-to-image tools, Cheng also uses AIs that require more technical
knowledge but enable niche techniques. Dain, for example, applies artificial
slow motion to your video. She used it on a stop-motion video of her lying on
the lawn to smooth the action to appear “as if she were a lawnmower.”
It went viral.
NeRF technology
uses any camera to scan a scene to create a 3D scan constructing a particle
lightfield so that the light changes realistically during the scene. “That’s
why it can handle mirrors,” she explains, “Whereas traditional photogrammetry
cannot.”
Each AI tool has a
specific purpose: “Where it becomes more interesting is when you combine them.
For example, you can generate an image in DALL-E and then use the CapCut app to
turn it into a 3D image. Since image synthesizers don’t do human faces very
well, you can run them through Facetune — an app that will fix it.”
Cheng feels that AI
art will significantly lower the barrier to entry to becoming an artist. “To be
an artist you [historically] have to have a lot of time, a lot training and
sometimes the money to do that. Now, everyone can do it. Image synthesizers
takes the artistic skill of artists and gives it to everyone. There will still
be standouts — they will be the ones finding different or creative innovations
with the ability to combine things in different ways.”
As it’s popularly
conceived, AI is all-powerful and will replace humans. Cheng says she feels a
responsibility to portray the tools in an optimistic light.
“I’ve had to
unlearn a lot of my bad habits. As a trained viral video creator, I am rewarded
for making clickbait headlines. My first instinct was to make a bunch of human
versus machine videos. Then I realized that will just freak people out,” she
comments.
“There are
legitimate reasons to be worried about AI and it will negatively impact some
people more than others but AI can be used for good or bad. The media will push
toward the bad because that gets clicks and views.”
Having amassed a
sizeable following, Cheng says she felt less pressure to make clickbait and
decided to make videos depicting AI in a positive manner.
“It does feel like
a collaboration. You often get results back that you didn’t expect and which
prompt you to go down that rabbit hole.”
However, she
doesn’t deny that AI will negatively impact many people. The introduction of AI
into the creative industries for example will put “incredible downward
pressure” on prices where the vast majority of people will lose out.
“I do worry about
that for creators and I don’t know how it will play out. If you hire a human to
use AI as a tool then you pay the human.”
Cheng advises, “I
would say best thing to do is not to learn a specific skill, because technology
is changing so quickly, but to adopt a specific mindset. You have to accept
that the model humans had which is to choose a career and have it for life, is
gone. The sooner you can accept that the world is always changing the better
off you will be.
AI-powered video
tools for creators are on the way — but aren’t here yet. “That’s why I’ve been
doing so much hacking of AI tools because it’s not quite there yet. Once it
does though, be careful what you wish for. My wish is for humans to take the
ethics of AI very seriously. By which I mean that everyone working on AI be
held to a standard to use AI for positive force rather than negative. I hope
society finds a way to seriously penalize those who use AI negatively.
“For example,
deception is bad. If you alter things you need to disclose what and how.”
Do we need to label
things as AI or human-generated?
“It will be
necessary and will be similar to nutrition facts on food packaging,” Cheng
suggests. “There will need to be a universal standard that shows this is a
video produced in such and such a way especially if the message in the video is
very important (like a political video, rather than a social influencer’s
vlog).
“I would love to
see a culture develop where, as part of being human, we use technology
responsibly and ethically.”
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