AI is taking control over so much of the content we consume, and could spell the end of most human made content we consume.
At first, AI just seemed like some silly new fad to mess around with, which I did. However, the more information that began to come out, the worse it got. Did you know that AI is being powered by the work of thousands, if not millions of artists and writers all across the internet, without them even knowing? According to an article from the New York Times, “Apps like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are built by scraping millions of images from the open web, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style. That means that artists who upload their works to the internet may be unwillingly helping to train their algorithmic competitors.”
Ever since ChatGPT’s release on November 30, 2022, everyone’s eyes have been on AI, especially when it started making ‘art.’ It got better and better, making many higher ups realize that AI is cheaper and quicker than any real artist. This is a huge problem not just for those artists, but us, the people who consume content, whether on the internet or on streaming platforms.
Animation is already an insanely hard career to get into. It takes thousands of hours to master your craft, yet at any big animation company, there’s constant reports of artists being overworked and underpaid. And there is always the risk that what you’re working on could be cancelled, no matter how far along it is. In 2022, there were multiple completed films that were fully cancelled. As said in an article by City Weekly, “It is hard enough to earn your way by making art. Our society has devalued it to the point in which it’s a struggle, where you’re expected to sacrifice your life and well-being in order to have a chance to ply your trade.” And now, with AI coming into the picture, there is a good chance that in the coming years, many artists will be replaced by AI, and lose their source of income, all while the same AI that’s taking their jobs is being trained off those artists’ own work.
And for the audience, all of the shows and movies we watch would be mostly made by AI, and there would be no substance, because AI isn’t human. AI doesn’t have the personality, and life experiences that makes any show or movie what it is. All the AI has are the words that came from thousands of experiences. It’s a mess of ideas and experiences that AI is just trying to imitate.
The changes that AI may make in the coming years are worrying, and if AI evolves at its current rate, many people will be out of jobs, and we, the consumers, will be left with soulless, formulaic movies and shows that will eventually be training off themselves. Hopefully, though, this issue will be something of the past, something we’ll laugh about because we really thought it would be much more consequential than it actually was. Only time will tell, though right now, it’s not telling us much good.
