This data is courtesy of Dan Shapiro.
As there are only so many people and hours in the day, the market for human attention is finite. Hollywood is spending more money to make TV and movies, but its market share is declining. People, especially younger people, are far more likely to watch videos on the internet made by small creators. Needless to say, the small content creators’ costs are vastly cheaper. AI is rapidly making them cheaper still.
And it’s not just that small creators using AI-generation will displace Hollywood’s existing efforts; they are likely to create new artforms that will displace the old screen/broadcast formats of TV shows & movies too. AI-gen artforms, as yet uninvented, may be real-time rendered, personalized for individuals, hyper-niche, etc, etc
This is all part of a surprising trend with AI, its tendency towards decentralization. Some dommerist nightmares see all powerful corporations in the future, but as with open-source AI & robotics equalling the Big Tech efforts, the trend seems more for AI’s power to be dispersed.
This tendency towards decentralization you’re seeing is an illusion. Open-source doesn’t change the fact that you need compute and the compute isn’t decentralized. It’s highly centralized in extremely expensive (both in terms of resources and energy) server farms. Even if content is decentralizing out of Hollywood it’s still physically centralized.
Also, this tendency towards content decentralization will not last. Right now the whole AI industry operates at a loss because they don’t expect profits, so small creators can use these tools because they’re artificially cheap. Every company wants to capture market share in the short term so they can profit at a later point. Eventually they’re going to want to profit and costs for content creators will skyrocket… and they’ll just stop using it. Then the whole thing will crash.
Open source tools can be, and often are, run on consumed hardware though.
Yeah, but a consumer can’t buy enough compute to run these LLMs. Let’s not pretend that’s the same as running Linux on your desktop.
A consumer can absolutely buy a RTX 3090 and run most of the biggest open weights models.
Run a pretrained model, which was trained on massive data sets. That’s still absolutely centralized.
You aren’t going to have enough data to train a model from scratch on your desktop.
By your definition, everything is centralized because no one is making the tools they use. You don’t have the skills to build a photo editing software or a chainsaw either.
The photo editing software and chainsaw aren’t made artificially cheap by companies operating at a loss by burning investor capital.
You’re grasping so hard. If you have a model that you can run locally and do what you want with it, then it’s not an issue that a single entity made it. What do you expect, a whole bunch of people huddled around a keyboard pushing all the keys together so that a single entity doesn’t make it? Ai is here, it’s improving rapidly, accept it and prepare, or be left far, far behind. There are enough people who are not blindly religiously anti-ai that they will be able to put their influence into the world while you scream your throat out at an empty wall.
The issue isn’t that a single entity made it, the issue is that the single entity that made it is operating at a loss. Training LLMs is a massive investment of energy, material, and finance capital. They can operate at a loss for now because they’re being pumped with liquidity from investors eager to get in on the next hype wave. That won’t last, investors will eventually expect profits and when these companies can’t produce those profits investors will pull out. AI isn’t here. These are chatbots.
You don’t think they’re actually intelligent, do you?
then the whole thing will crashthem only the super rich mega corps will be able to produce such content and we’ll have lost entire generation(s) of people learning how to make art, photograph, film, etc. as they “had AI to do it growing up.”A generation is 20 years. This bubble is not lasting that long.
Also by 2045 climate change will be actively destroying civilization so 🤷♀️
I know how long a generation is.
The hype train of AI will have passed to a degree, but photography, painting, cinema and many other visual and performing arts will be impacted for generations and permanently reduced by a degree not yet known.
That’s alarmist. Painting? Really?
Also, kind of ignoring the climate elephant in the room. People entertaining each other in the ruins of civilization won’t be using AI much.
