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.
I mean, you could theoretically use decentralised computers for training. Even that aside, though, they only have to train these things once and then it just works on anything; the bell will not be unrung like that.
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 mean, it already is causing some problems, looking at the dominant story right now, which for future people is LA burning.
Coincidentally, that’s also the year the agreement to not settle Antarctica expires.
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.
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.
I can’t imagine believing this. I can run llama3.3 on my laptop, it’s just as fast as chatgpt and while it’s not quite as good, it is good enough for many things. This is rapidly becoming easier too as models get more efficient.
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.
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?
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.
I’m not sure what that has to do with what I was saying; that it isn’t centralized as you said.
Artificially cheap seems like a buzzword. I’m not sure what you mean but I can guarantee that a lot of chainsaws are cheaply made and Adobe definitely showcases “cheap” behavior. It has nothing to do with centralisation in any case.
In the same vein, a lot of ground breaking technologies started at a loss. I don’t think all AI companies are running at a lost but some are doing it for our benefit, mainly the ones releasing free models with open minded licenses.
I reaaaaaaaaaaally want and hope you are right. We can’t get rid of all this AI crap soon enough.
You’re gunna have a very bad time until you quit hoping that ai goes away. Ai is a constantly developing field that is currently in a massive surge. It’s more likely that the internet goes away than it is that ai goes away.