I’m a good writer because I’ve been working on it for 50 years. Now, with no training, a person who has never studied writing can be a competent writer instantly through ChatGPT. She has unearned status.
I’m not whining. It’s great AI can provide a creative voice to anybody. This is a plus for the world, not a minus. But let’s think this through. What will happen when everybody isn’t just good … they can be great? Even spectacular?
Within a year, we’ll be able to create written, scored, acted, and edited full-length movies on our laptop. That seems a far cry from the lovely short videos coming out of Sora at the moment, but step-by-step, it’s coming. I recently played around with an app that will lip-synch virtual actors to your script. Sora is now guaranteeing character consistency across your videos.
And of course the ability of AI to write a script and narrate it is already well-established. I used AI to narrate my latest book, Social Media Explained 3.0 … in my voice … and it’s really great.
What’s next?
We’ve already witnessed AI winning art shows and photography contests.
A science fiction novel written by AI has won a national literary award in China. Land of Memories author Shen Yang created it from a 43,000-character draft generated within three hours using 66 prompts.
We’re already seeing contests for AI films and video shorts.
I love spectacular films like Avengers End Game and television epics like Game of Thrones. Most of these properties are already computer-generated, including some of the stars of the shows.
As we think through our near future, it does not require a leap of logic to know that these spectacles will become commonplace. It’s already happening.
The rock band Pink Floyd (LOVE!) recently ran an animation contest to mark the 50th anniversary of their classic album Dark Side of the Moon. Creatives were invited to submit music videos for songs on the 1973 album. The band drew outrage when Damián Gaume won the cash prize after revealing he used an AI video generator to make the film. You can watch it here:
A certain “awe” comes from observing true art and innovation. What happens when the spectacular becomes commonplace? Whoever creates the first AI feature film has about one year to do it, because after that, it will become ho-hum. We’ll be flooded with AI movies.
What will life be like when the spectacular is commonplace? Will we still appreciate the human spark and initiative? I can’t think of another historical precedent for comparison.
A lesson from Jimmy
Perhaps one clue to our creative future comes from the mild-mannered young man named Jimmy Donaldson, better known by his nom de Tube, MrBeast.
Jimmy discovered as a teen that the only way to rise above the noise was to be a little crazy. In his first viral video, he counted to 100,000 in one sitting. Yes … that’s pretty dull, but hey, it’s also something you’ve never seen before.
Senor Beast has perfected his disruptive formula and earns more than 2 billion video views every month. This unassuming young man from Greenville, North Carolina, is the largest media franchise on earth (by far), with more worldwide subscribers than Netflix or Disney. Here are some of his more popular stunts:
- A real-life Squid Game (450 million views)
- Burying himself alive (300 million views)
- $1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel Room! (250 million views)
- I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory (210 million views)
- I Ate a $70,000 Golden Pizza (102 million views)
I cannot imagine a universe where an AI bot earns 102 million views by eating pizza.
I take comfort in this. No matter how good the AI overlords may get, humans still own crazy.
This is the future of creativity. You’ll have to be a little nuts, or you’ll be a commodity, chewed up by AI and spit out as a gooey bot paste. I’m not kidding.
Marketing too dull to survive
Here’s my concern. Marketers have cornered the market on dull.
Research firm System1 evaluated 57,000 television ads and found that 48% of B2C advertisements were dull — consumers registered no emotional response by the end of the ad. For B2B, it was much worse – 78% of the ads were “dull.”
There are many reasons for this, and at the top of the list is that it’s easy to get dull ads approved by the legal department. But every person behind this pandemic of dull could lose their jobs because the bots are coming, and they are spectacular.
Nearly all marketing is dull, especially social media marketing. I recently tuned into a panel called The Future of Creativity in Social Media Marketing, and here were the recommendations: short-form videos, infographics, and (drum roll, please) using hashtags. Is that the best we’ve got folks?
Don’t answer that. I will just get more depressed.
My advice: The marketing world is about to become universally spectacular. To be relevant, you need to go a little crazy. Build an unhinged fortress. The bots are coming. The bots are coming now.
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Illustration courtesy MidJourney
