AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Cant, and How to Tell the Difference

Generative AI Capabilities

• 💡 Stable Diffusion is a widely used, openly available image generator that has been downloaded over 200 million times, likely generating billions of images.
• 🎨 These image generators enable a deluge of entertainment that is endlessly customizable, from fantastic landscapes to humorous depictions like the "Balenciaga Pope" or Wes Anderson-style trailers.
• 🎮 Generative AI is also integrated into entertainment apps, with video game companies creating natural conversation for in-game characters and photo editing apps offering AI functionality like adding elements to pictures.

Impact on Entertainment Industry

• 🎬 The 2023 Hollywood strikes saw actors express significant concern that studios would use existing footage to train AI tools, generating new videos that exploit their likenesses without compensation.
• 💰 This raised fears that studios could capitalize on actors' likenesses and past labor in perpetuity without fair payment, leading to ongoing tensions between labor and capital.

Future of Content Creation

• 🚀 Many companies are actively developing text-to-video generators and tools for automating script writing, pushing the boundaries of AI in content creation.
• 📈 While the end result might not always be as artistically complex or valuable, these advancements could enable studios to efficiently produce commercially viable content, such as summer blockbusters.

Challenges and Solutions

• ⚠️ Adjusting to a world with generative AI is proving painful because these tools are highly capable but also unreliable, likened to everyone having a "free buzzsaw."
• 🛠️ In the long run, a combination of technology and law is expected to alleviate problems, such as making chatbots less likely to fabricate information and curbing intentional misuses.
• ⚖️ Regulation is crucial to address the intentional misuses of AI, while technological advancements can improve the reliability of AI tools.