• If left unchecked the rise of AI cannot only have detrimental effects for creators, but threatens to fundamentally alter our very perception of reality as we know it.
OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft, is one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research organizations paving the way for AI advancement across multiple technology sectors.
Best known for the creation of ChatGPT, on February 15th the company debuted previews of its new prompt-based AI video generation software, Sora. A text-to-video tool which allows users to input a text prompt into the software which then uses generative AI to create a video based on the input.
While Sora isn’t the first of its kind as far as generative AI video tools are concerned, industry insiders have noted the crispness and detail as well as the ability to generate complex scenes and longer length videos than previous models, at present totaling up to sixty seconds in length, as a “significant leap” for the development of the technology.
On its website, OpenAI has stated “We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.” While providing several brief examples of videos generated with the software and without any further modification.
The videos span a variety of scenes, including photorealistic clips of puppies playing in the snow, historic footage of California during the gold rush, a robot living in a cyberpunk world, woolly mammoths in the snow, an animation of a cute fluffy creature playing with fairies in an enchanted forest, and various cityscapes along with other animations.
While tech enthusiasts are enamored with the latest development however, many are also voicing concerns about the ethical and societal implications that this technology may bring, despite assurances from the company that it is taking steps to address safety and risk assessment.
Experts speaking with CBS News voiced their concerns, calling it “terrifying”. Oren Etzioni, founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit organization which fights AI based politically targeted disinformation, manipulated media, and deep fakes was quoted as saying —
“Generative AI tools are evolving so rapidly, and we have social network — which leads to an Achilles heel in our democracy and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” he said in reference to the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Reece Hayden, senior analyst at the tech intelligence firm ABI Research, spoke of the risks posed to content creators and other professionals in the digital space, saying “Voice actors or people who make short videos for video games, education purposes or ads will be the most immediately affected,”… “For professions like marketing or creative, multimodal models could be a game changer and could create significant cost savings for film and television makers, and may contribute to the proliferation of AI-generated content rather than using actors,”
Content creators themselves have recently taken to their platforms to address concerns about the developing technology.
In a recent video posted to his YouTube channel popular content creator Moist Critical, aka Penguin Zero, whose real name is Charlie, took to his platform with 14.5 million subscribers to voice concerns about the advancements of videos generated by artificial intelligence.
“It’s shocking and downright scary. For the longest time “proof”, like irrefutable proof would always be like a video of something. Like if you need to confirm that something actually happened you would ask for the video evidence of the event. But now with AI tools developing as quickly as they have we’ve reached a point where AI is able to generate realistic videos that are so convincing that you have to question anything that comes out. The only things you’ll know for sure are real are things that you yourself see in person.”
The YouTuber goes on to list several other ways which the technology could be abused, citing propaganda, deep fake pornography, misinformation and what he describes as “a complete era of synthetic fake garbage that will go a head and expand across the entire internet to the point where it’s going to drown out real human creations”. As well as the replacement of creators such as artists and voice actors.
Other creators have pointed out the similarities between results of the same prompt entered into two different generators owned by separate companies, OpenAI and Midjourney. Despite this they often bear striking similarities, leading some to question whether or not they’re all sharing the same database.
In a recent article from Psychology Today titled The Precarious Dawn of Synthetic Video Realities the author notes;
Marshall McLuhan’s adage, “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values,” resonates profoundly in the context of Sora. As we venture deeper into the realms of synthetic hyperrealities, we must grapple with the notion that our media, now capable of generating lifelike videos from mere text, are not just tools of communication but architects of our reality. The synthetic vistas and narratives crafted by Sora are not mere illusions; they are the new frontier of our mediated existence, layering our perception with a veneer of artificiality that becomes indistinguishable from the “real.”
With that in mind, as this technology is ever rapidly advancing despite still being in its infancy humanity must come to terms with grappling a new horizon of illusory perceptions. Seeing is no longer believing. In a world where so much of reality already does not operate the way the vast majority of the public believes that it does; i.e. mainstream news media does not exist to tell us the truth, government does not exist to represent the people, big corporations do not work for the benefit of the people, and a hidden hand operates to manifest the machinations of a small ruling elite predator class, perceptions of reality are already skewed creating something of a “matrix” whereby most people live in an illusion.
The development of AI alongside other technologies such as brain computer interfaces which seek to digitize humanity threaten to plunge us ever deeper into a digital matrix where nothing is true.