Last Thursday was a drizzly night in Oxfordshire, England as I sat having a pint with my brother, Joe, and one of our best friends, Sam. We’d been working all day on giving this very website a shiny new look. Before long, the conversation turned to the topic of AI-generated content – one of the most fiercely debated facets of the contemporary online publishing landscape.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with online content creation and search engine optimisation (SEO) will know that the rise of AI, thanks to the likes of OpenAI’s powerful and incredibly useful ChatGPT, threatens the entire industry. With sweeping changes already underway, online journalism is quickly becoming awash with rapidly-generated AI content that is indistinguishable from the real thing.
It doesn’t stop there, either. Tools like ChatGPT are so accessible that they can be used by even the most ingrained technophobes with fantastic results. That means every industry that requires even the most basic level of human creativity and thought is under threat.
ChatGPT and other similar tools have their uses, of course. But without proper regulation, it stands to reason that thousands of human jobs could be replaced by large language models that are much more efficient and cost-effective for business owners. And things get even scarier with the introduction of Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool.
As we sat sipping our pints of Guinness, Sam – a developer and academic – offered his own perspective on the future of content creation. “The only thing that AI can’t touch is video,” he said. It seemed logical. Up until that point, the only thing we’d seen were malformed clips of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
The night went on and we thought no more about it – this stuff is a ways off, we presumed. We had a couple of packs of Scampi Fries and a few more pints of Guinness before staggering home in the pouring rain.
The next morning, however, brought perhaps one of the most surprising coincidences I’ve ever experienced. We awoke to the announcement of Sora, a brand-new AI video creation tool that can generate ultra-realistic video clips. And when I say ultra-realistic, I mean virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
I’ll be the first to admit, it is truly astounding how far the field of artificial intelligence has come on in recent years. But warnings from experts that the field carries with it the “risk of extinction” are hard to ignore (we’ve all seen iRobot and The Matrix), especially when they’re coupled with the short-lived sacking of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman amid safety concerns related to the hush-hush Q* project.
While the idea that AI could bring about the end of the human race is a particularly scary one, what’s more likely is the destruction of human creativity. Without regulation, Sora (and other similar tools) pose a very real threat to the worlds of film and television – that almost goes without saying – but, crucially, it signals what could be on the horizon for the video game industry.
ChatGPT is already capable of producing code for software and it’s incredibly useful for novice and advanced developers alike. However, with the revelation that Q* could soon be solving problems on the level of grade-school math students and the announcement of Sora, it’s not too much of a leap to see how these tools aren’t all that far from being able to construct a high-quality, functional video game at a fraction of current development costs. For context, the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI could end up costing $2 billion.
While that might seem like a good thing on the surface, the issue here is that most video games (like movies) are built by large teams of people with different specialities. Soon, an AI could be able to do all of those jobs – and all it will need is a few prompts.
Sure, it could make the field more accessible to inexperienced individuals. But what does that really mean for a medium that has only recently been considered an art form? Video games have allowed me to experience some of the most awe-inspiring human stories in the world – and it’s the passion, hard-work and creativity of real people that brings them to life. Just like film and other artistic mediums, many of us live vicariously through the games that we consume, and the loss of an entire creative industry to robots is a depressing and dystopian idea.
Of course, we’re not there just yet. And there’s a lot to be said for the well-regulated use of AI technologies – OpenAI’s head honchos have even called for the regulation of the burgeoning industry themselves. But it’s a very real concern of mine, and it should be for you, too. If we humans lose the ability to create films, novels, art – and yes, even video games – there will be nothing left for us as an intelligent species. We will have given away they very thing that makes us who we are: our creativity.
How do you feel about Sora and the future of AI generated content? Let us know in the comment section below and don’t forget to check out our other tech articles.
