This month, as OpenAI released the latest iteration of its AI video creation software, Sora, I realised something. We are sleepwalking directly into our next obesity epidemic. One designed directly to appeal to our consumerist tendencies, to appease our need for dopamine, and offers light reprieve from our daily dystopian depression. But, rather than a diet of greasy takeaway fries and sugar-stuffed chocolate priced low at the checkout to drive impulse purchases, this next threat is to our creative minds.
Tech billionaires grow even wealthier
Since 2021, our lives have been dominated by the latest tech craze. The richest men in the world are falling over themselves to create the latest marginal gain in artificial intelligence. In turn, this is sending valuations of already billion-dollar corporations into heights never before seen, in the largest (and currently unchallenged) intellectual property theft in human history.
While some of these breakthroughs have no doubt been impressive – some Large Language Models (LLMs) are very adept at writing code, for example – others have left me puzzled at their purpose and worried about the future of the creative space that tech billionaires are colonising.
Rapidly growing companies that have achieved product market-fit, are usually defined by several criteria. But the two primary boxes to tick are that they solve a particular problem for their target customer and that they can make enough money by selling the solution to those customers. This is exemplified by East Anglia’s very own annual hackathon, Sync The City, which has brought hundreds of people together to build startups in Norwich – we know the space well in this county.
The unwanted invasion of our space
Sora, and other video and image-generation models, don’t appear to have done this for the wider population of consumers. We’re told to play with them, to ‘be creative’, to experiment. They’re already integrated into our smartphones, our chat apps and our word processors. We have movie trailers made with AI, synthetic actors, computer-generated fashion models and even artificial musical artists.
But the problems with these apps are as impressive as some of their outputs. They’re making us lazy, reducing our cognitive ability, and are wrong far more often than not. And now a growing majority of the population are worried about it, and want to see it regulated.
Governments are so keen to keep ahead of the international competition that they’re reluctant to tie AI companies up in regulations that would stifle innovation.This leaves AI apps currently free to suck up as much Intellectual Property (IP) as they can, from every source on the internet. Books, art, movies, music and TV – nothing is safe, everything is replicable.
Fooling the public
It’s now evident from the latest iterations of video generating models that they’re capable of imitating real life so closely that the public are very often fooled by social videos, created in minutes, that could be used to show fabricated evidence of a political opponent in a racist rant, or a celebrity assaulting a reporter, that might be incredibly difficult to disprove, and certainly not before it circumnavigates the mobiles of the globe. After all, “a lie is already halfway around the world before the truth has its trousers on”.
So why is it everywhere? Why, if it’s terrible for us, mostly incorrect and unsafe, is it being forced down our throats?
Art is the toil of creation, experimentation and emotion. It’s a very human endeavour, the output of which isn’t just a painting or a sonnet. It’s a story, woven from the mind, poured into a vessel that you consume and feel. But content isn’t art. New media isn’t made to make you feel any emotion, other than surface-level needs and desires. The John Lewis annual christmas sob-a-thon demonstrates this – works of art they are not. Cynical mechanisms for pulling you to the nearest department store to buy your loved ones the next kitchen gadget, they most certainly are.
Social media platforms and new media owners aren’t here to make us feel – other than anger, of course, the most visceral emotion of engagement – but they do need more and more content, made as cheap and personalised as possible, to sell more. As always, we have to follow the money.
AI is akin to junk food
Much like the junk food that has become cheap, easy and ubiquitous through industrialisation and globalisation, AI is the way our billionaire curators expect us to consume our art in the future.
AI art is cheaper and easier than paying human artists. AI won’t complain about working conditions, and you don’t have to sexually harass an artificial actor in exchange for the leading role in your next movie. It’s infinitely scalable, personalised to individuals and groups, and can be tailored to provide messages exactly how you want them. Even in the worst scenarios, to manipulate and exploit.
After all, to tech billionaires, the commodity they trade is our eyeballs, and our brains. Our attention is the most valuable stock in the world, sold to global advertisers and governments. And as the world becomes more dangerous and uncertain, we seem to be doomscrolling at a more frantic rate. Gratefully consuming, getting angrier and more exercised, sharing and commenting our days away.
Tech colonisation
So while the last few decades of our diet have been dominated by the rise and subsequent regulation of junk food, our next two decades will be those of junk art. Easy consumption of cheap, ultra-processed TikToks, sugar-coated palm-oil-fried meme images, while our human-made, organic home-grown art becomes even more expensive to produce, our independent artists priced out by international conglomerates as they colonise our digital social spaces with factory-made consumables.
East Anglia has been on the map for a while as an up-and-coming tech hub, but has never reached the national acclaim (and subsequent funding and support that tends to follow) of larger innovators like Manchester or Bristol. To compete and thrive over the next few years – or even simply keep our heads above the flood waters – we’ll have no choice but to embrace this technology as much as we can, build on it, and feed our people with it.
But looking at the lay of the land, the winners here are going to be the AI conglomerates, the colonisers from the West, as they seize the landscape and the final means of creation from under our feet – leaving us with little left to call our own.
If we want to stop the next epidemic, we have to be brave enough to see it coming and legislate now – before it’s too late.
More from East Anglia Bylines
