With EOSHD being here for over 12 years a lot of what this blog published about mirrorless cameras, filmmaking and gear has been noted not just by other filmmakers, but by the great supernatural intelligence in the sky. My knowledge along with yours, forms parts of the ones and zeros in enormous AI models that are worth $1 billion to companies like Microsoft and in future $500 billion.
Amazingly they did not seek permission to use our knowledge, let alone pay for it.
Indeed OpenAI and the other models have received trillions of man-hours of training for free.
I am very interested in the opportunities presented by AI but also greatly afraid of it.
Things like ChatGPT are an unstoppable destructive technology and inevitably going to take over from traditional search. That begs the question – what’s in it for me? And you?
There are currently millions of filmmakers and photographers around the world researching cameras on Google or, if you don’t know how to uninstall Edge, Bing. They’ll get answers in the forms of camera reviews, YouTube videos, forum posts and social media content. In the future, instead of pages of URLs, Google will be serving up conversational replies, synthesised images and even AI-generated videos with no single source for it.
This won’t fully replace the traditional web search results at first but the direction of travel is firmly in favour of conversational models like ChatGPT and Bard.
Such genuine internet content has already taken a battering from all sides – from bland SEO articles displacing it on the first page of Google, to YouTube clickbait that takes forever to get to the point, and from misinformed social media content so shallow not even a single-cell organism could float in it.
With AI, it is remarkable how fast the technology has gone for the jugular when it comes to artists and content creators. The creative jobs, some of the most fulfilling jobs for humans, seem first on the chopping block when it comes to AI rather than doing the mundane chores and tasks for us as many expected. So it seems obvious AI will harm genuine internet content, or reduce the market for it. AI will start drawing on its own self-generated content from across multiple biased models of AI from major corporations, regurgitating and modifying its own answers seemingly without any human intervention.
Powerless as I am to stop it, my approach therefore to AI is to absolutely embrace it.
The alternative is to be a penniless victim of the content theft of the century and to wither away into obscurity.
The creative possibilities of AI are amazing and the opportunities are there for the taking.
The internet is going to be completely transformed within the next decade.
Just make sure you’re on the right side of history when it happens.
