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The Harvard Business Review outlines
three scenarios that companies should prepare for in the brave new world of AI.
article here
The more cheerful one is
that AI will be your best creative assistant. AI tools will give us all a lift
away from less menial work to be able to concentrate on the more interesting
work of management and curation.
The authors, David De Cremer, Nicola Morini
Bianzino and Ben Falk, suggest that we learn “prompt engineering” — the skill
of asking the machine the right questions — to produce more relevant and
meaningful content that humans will only need to edit somewhat before they can
put it to use.
Overall, this scenario
paints a world of faster innovation where machine-augmented human creativity
will enable mainly rapid iteration.
A doomsday scenario is if
machines monopolize creativity. Here, human writers, producers and creators are
drowned out by a tsunami of algorithmically-generated content, with some
talented creators even opting out of the market. If that would happen, then an
important question that we need to address is: How will we generate new ideas?
“In this scenario, generative
AI significantly changes the incentive structure for creators, and raises risks
for businesses and society,” De Cremer, Bianzino and Falk caution. “If cheaply
made generative AI undercuts authentic human content, there’s a real risk that
innovation will slow down over time as humans make less and less new art and
content.”
This could also mean
fundamental changes to what content creation looks like. If production costs
fall close to nothing, that opens up the possibility of reaching specific — and
often more marginalized — audiences through extreme personalization and
versioning.
That sounds like a bonus — except that if enhanced
personalized experiences are applied broadly, “then we run the risk of losing
the shared experience of watching the same film, reading the same book, and
consuming the same news,” says HBR.
“In that case, it will be
easier to create politically divisive viral content, and significant volumes of
mis/disinformation, as the average quality of content declines alongside the share
of authentic human content.”
The third potential scenario that the HBR authors
consider as possible is one where the “techlash” resumes with a focus against
algorithmically-generated content. In this scenario, humans maintain a
competitive advantage against algorithmic competition.
“One plausible effect of
being inundated with synthetic creative outputs is that people will begin to
value authentic creativity more again and may be willing to pay a premium for
it.”
It follows that political
leadership taking action to strengthen governance of information spaces will be
needed to deal with the downside risks that could emerge. For instance, content
moderation needs are likely to explode as information platforms are overwhelmed
with false or misleading content, and therefore require human intervention and
carefully designed governance frameworks to counter.
Is computational creativity possible? A pair of
academics have come up with a reassuring answer. Chloe Preece and Hafize
Çelik write in The Conversation that the key characteristic of
AI’s creative processes today is that computational creativity is systematic,
not impulsive, unlike humans. Generative AI is programmed to process
information in a certain way to achieve particular results predictably, albeit
in often unexpected ways.
“In fact, this is perhaps the most significant difference between artists and AI: while artists are self- and product-driven, AI is very much consumer-centric and market-driven — we only get the art we ask for, which is not perhaps, what we need.”
Preece and Celik conclude that, so far, generative AI seems to work best with human partners — even acting as a catalyst for human creativity.
“Art history shows us that
technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do.
Think of the camera, for example, which was feared due to its power to put portrait
painters out of business. What are the business implications for the use of
synthetic creativity by AI, then?”
They note that AI has been known to “hallucinate” —
an industry term for spewing nonsense — and that human skill is required to
make sense of it — “that is expressing concepts, ideas and truths, rather than
just something that is pleasing to the senses. Curation is therefore needed to
select and frame, or reframe, a unified and compelling vision.”
A similarly optimistic view is held by Ahmed Elgammal, professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Writing at Science Focus, he says the current generation of AI is limited to copying the work of humans and that it must be controlled largely by people to create something useful.
“It’s a great tool but not
something that can be creative itself,” Elgammal says. “We must be conscious
about what’s happening in the world and have an opinion to create real art. The
AIs simply don’t have this.”
Artists are often the first to experiment with new technology. But the immediate future of generative video is being shaped by the advertising industry, which is leaning into the often disjointed, surreal and even horrific imagery that generative AI tends to produce.
For example, the 12-minute movie The Frost is
being held up as one of the most impressive — and bizarre — examples yet of
this strange new genre to date. Every shot is generated by AI (DALL-E 2 and
D-ID mainly) yet, it was also prompted, tweaked and guided by humans at
Detroit-based video creation company Waymark.
“[AI is] not a perfect medium yet by any means,”
Josh Rubin, an executive producer at Waymark and the director of The
Frost, tells Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Tech Review. “It
was a bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional
responses in faces.”
The Frost follows a fake beer ad, “Synthetic Summer,”
from British studio Private Island, which was designed to showcase the video
capabilities of generative AI.
According to Heaven, both examples play to the strengths of the tech that made them.
“The Frost is well suited to the creepy
aesthetic of DALL-E 2,” he writes. “Synthetic Summer has many quick
cuts, because video generation tools like Gen-2 produce only a few seconds of
video at a time that then need to be stitched together.”
This may mean that we will
start to see generative video used in martial arts videos, or music videos and
commercials, he speculates.
More complex narrative
video, however, still requires huge amounts of human creative input.
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