AI is Coming To Media World — and it’s bad news.
Academy Award winner and movie producer Tyler Perry has announced that he is halting construction on his $800m expansion of his Atlanta studios.
He did this after seeing a demonstration of the new Open AI SORA software. It is able to generate video images with text inputs. Ask if for a desert scene and it will put you in the middle of the Sahara instantly, for no cost.
“Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing,” he told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday of Sora, which debuted on Feb. 15.
Perry had been intending to build a dozen new sets, but having seen SORA at work, he feels he no longer needs them.
“I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text,” he continued. “If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing.”
Perry called Sora a “major game-changer” that could potentially let filmmakers produce movies and pilots at a fraction of the cost, but added, “I am very, very concerned that in the near future, a lot of jobs are going to be lost.”
It is certainly a game-changer, but a lot more than jobs are going to be lost. Rather, I would say, if you expand on the power of the software, our contact, all of our contacts with reality are going to be lost.
If movie directors can create a realistic artificial world at no cost, at the input of a few lines of text, well then so can the rest of us. And of course, we are only at the very beginning of this. Soon, we will all be able to conjure up entirely artificial worlds, environments, adventure and stories that we can inhabit for hours, days or more likely, most of our lives.
Of course, as we continue to degrade the real world and the environment, maybe this is where humanity is ultimately going to end up living — if you can call it living.
In 2023, more than 28,000 scientists, technologists and engineers signed an open letter warning of the dangers of AI and asking for a six month moratorium on development. The signers included Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk. But the profits from AI are too enticing. (Note both Microsoft and Nvidia stock prices). No one can hold back technology,
The danger of AI is not robot overlords — though that may come, but rather that AI simply makes us stupid and passive — content to live out our lives in entirely artificial and mediated worlds, conjured up in an instant from our own imaginations.
Could it happen? The pieces are all there. And, if Moore’s Law continues to function, processing speeds will just get faster and cheaper. With no more than an iPhone and a headset or maybe a neural link chip implanted in your brain — you’ll be able to disappear to a much better world — albeit one of illusions.
In 1960, Enrico Fermi looked at the millions of planets (today trillions of galaxies) and asked poignantly, “where is everybody?”
Maybe every civilization reaches this point — a point of self-extinction.
Some time ago, naturalist and scientist Stephen Jay Gould remarked “In the long run, it may prove that intelligence might not be the best trait for the survival of a species.”
