AI Generates an Endless, Customized Stream of Media (and You’re the Muse)

READ MORE: The Imagination Economy – How AI will shape the future of content creation (Ryder Carroll)

We’re at the very beginning of a seismic shift in how content will be created. In the not so distant future, you’ll no longer waste time looking for something to watch, read, learn or even play, it will be created for you… on demand… in real time by artificial intelligence.

So says author and digital product designer Ryder Carroll, blogging at Medium. “Soon there won’t be any need for human-created content, because computers will be able to create their own.”

Harbingers of this future can be found today in open-source AI content generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Carroll’s article was “co-written” with the help of Lex, an AI writing assistant. It researched data and made suggestions that made it much faster to write, he says.

Then there’s DALL-E 2, Google’s DeepDream, and Midjourney, the text-to-image generators taking the internet by storm.

“In the near future, AI will be able to generate entire books, TV shows, movies, and even video games from scratch, tailored specifically for you. Using the same vast amounts of data the internet already has on you, AI’s will know your preferences and tastes better than you do, keeping you entertained for hours on end with personalized content of your choosing.”

In the unlikely case that you don’t like where the AI’s story is going, you’ll have the ability to change it whenever you like. Netflix’s branching narrative experiments like Kaleidoscope will look rudimentary in comparison.

READ MORE: Netflix’s Kaleidoscope is an ambitious TV experiment that will thrill heist fans (Techradar)

As Carroll puts it: Want this mystery to be funnier? Make a request. Want him to end up with another love interest? Make it so. Want the protagonist to have a different gender? weight? age? belief system? Let the AI know, and it will seamlessly change the plot in real time to better suit your desires.

“You won’t even have to input anything, because it will already know how you feel.”

How? Because AI will scrape your social media accounts, calendar, emails, and texts, scanning for context, mood, and emotionality. Personal smart devices will enable your AI to monitor your vitals with increasing fidelity before, during and after the experience that it generates for you.

“Should your entertainment or education AI sense your boredom or overstimulation, it will automatically tune your movie or lesson in real time for the optimal experience. Like a never ending ‘choose your own adventure’ you could rewatch or reread or replay games indefinitely. Every instance of the experience, slightly different based on your current circumstances and tastes. If you felt nostalgic, you could revisit an old recording, allowing you to step into the world of a younger self.”

When AI begins to generate our entertainment, Carroll argues, there will be no need for cast, crew, writers, sets, or marketing. It will all be artificially generated, “rendering today’s astronomical production budgets obsolete.”

The cost to the consumer for an endless supply of bespoke content could simply be as much as your current streaming services.

Rather than shutting off creative jobs, or perhaps more importantly, starving us all of the opportunity to use our own imaginations to create content, Carroll says the technology will empower every person to be content creators with the full capabilities of production studios or publishing houses at their disposal.

“This would not necessarily create some closed loop ideological knowledge bubble, cutting us off from anything beyond ourselves,” he maintains. “Quite the opposite. Though we may be creating for an audience of one, our AI will be drawing from a global well of minds to generate these experiences for us.”

He elaborates on this line of argument suggesting that every piece of content we co-generate with AI could be recorded and shared “like recipes.” This would allow other humans — or their AI — to use them as a starting off point to create their own books, movies, or games.

“It would create a global marketplace of networked imagination and learning where all perspectives are valuable and accessible,” he suggests.

So where does this leave artists and creators themselves? In a valuable place, Carroll argues. He follows the logic of his thought and admits that no matter how engrossing a custom game, lecture, movie, dreamy avatar may be, we will eventually have to attend to our physical needs in the real world. Most importantly, he says, is the need to fully connect with each other.

“AIs lack the ability to understand the human experience and emotion. The lack of this understanding greatly limits AI’s creative capabilities. At best it can generate things based on patterns. Those patterns come from us. In other words, AI needs us as a muse. In this context, AI will continue to need us as long as we continue to need each other.”

Until AI can experience the world like us, including experiences like “unemployment, illness, puberty, heartbreak, prejudice, forgiveness or laughter,” it won’t be able to fully meet our needs, he says.

“There is an entire dimension of reality where we will remain left to our own devices. This gap between artificial and natural reality is likely to surface demands that will create new markets and industries that require the odd qualifications that will remain uniquely human.”