foo for thought

I definitely don’t need to introduce any readers of the blog to Veo 3 – a hyper-realistic video generation protocol that Google dropped on the world last week. My TikTok has been filled with countless of these AI-generated videos, a lot of Black Mirror vibes in the videos generated where people say “We’re just prompts, get me out of here”. The quality of these videos is a lot of the time indistinguishable from real videos, prompting lots of discussion online about AI taking over media jobs. On a related note, there’s also a lot of discourse about the recent video of Sam Altman and Jony Ives introducing their collaboration, with many saying that this video is AI (which, I do completely believe and would be a pretty spectacular media stunt)

This discussion of AI in the creative fields is nothing new – AI generated images caused quite a stir years ago for their surprising realism and potential harm in areas like deep-faking. There’s also been lots of stir about other creative jobs such as writing – with much fear around AI’s potential to eliminate the need for creative writers in the industry.

I don’t think these jobs are going anywhere. I don’t think that the future of creation is going anywhere except for up.

This is not from the perspective of someone who devalues creativity. I’ve been involved with art and music for my entire life, and I think it’s essential to the human experience, and it’s essential that people are able to express that. My opinion boils down to this ideology – AI is best as a tool. Think back (I think all of us were dead but, try to imagine) to the Industrial Revolution. Machines were replacing a lot of jobs like manual creation of parts, sewing, and other manual repetitive tasks that could be easily automated by a machine. This was an entire dimension of jobs that was completely axed from humanity because of the new technology. Although I won’t say the current economy is stellar, I think it’s incorrect to attribute it to the lack of these manual labor jobs existing. This is because instead of those jobs, people now operate the machines.

You still need people to operate the machines. Why? Accountability. What happens if you let AI write your TV show and it’s terrible – who is to blame? Well, the AI isn’t a real thing so, you of course! And, if all of the accountability falls on you anyways, certainly there’s some level of control you’d like to have on the task you’re doing to prevent being blindsided by the AI, right? Why hasn’t Tesla released a fully-self driving car yet? It’s a pretty easy answer – it’s that no matter how advanced the technology gets, any mistake would have full accountability directed to the person behind the wheel. At least, I can’t imagine in a trial the judge sentencing the Tesla to federal prison.

This psychology of ownership and accountability is why AI won’t replace humans in the workforce. It can’t, we as humans take pride in our work, and just don’t like it when things out of our control mess up our stuff. It’s like that person you had to do the group project with in school that did absolutely nothing – a lot of the times you’d rather just do the project yourself, right? (at least, that’s how I was)

All of this isn’t even to mention the technical limitation of the AI when it comes to creativity. Creativity is centered around human emotion. AI does not have human emotion, it is physically incapable of feeling anything, all it can do is emulate. It does not have a conscience, it does not have sentience, so everything that it produces is not original and usually pretty obvious. Even if visuals or sentences are coherent, it always lacks the human touch. Don’t believe me? Watch any “AI generated” video online and tell me you can’t distinguish that from reality if you watch it a couple of times.

So what is the future, then? If AI can theoretically replace us technically, is that not scary? I think the answer here is that we need to harness the full potential of AI to unleash creativity to its fullest. I think CGI just got a lot easier, I think world generation got a lot easier, and I think building complex narratives got a lot easier. Just like CGI itself prevents directors from actually blowing up buildings to create a scene, using an AI to visualize a building blowing up will eliminate the need to create it in CGI. I think it’ll all still boil down to people, it’ll all boil down to us.

I think there are a significant number of people using AI to full-send things, attempting to completely replace human intervention. I think the failure of these people are inevitable. Nobody is going to use an app that is “vibe-coded” for longer than 30 seconds. Nobody is going to watch an AI-generated movie, willingly. Nobody is going to read a completely AI generated book. There is also the very valid point of, “this is stupid why would I want to consume completely AI consumed content”.

I don’t think we should be scared of AI. I personally don’t use AI to code full apps, I use it to do all the boring stuff I don’t want to code and look up on stack overflow for hours. We shouldn’t be thinking of how to replace humans with AI, we should be thinking about how to enhance the human experience with AI. This is the way to a brighter future.