Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murati failed to satisfactorily answer. When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI's app for generating video with AI,
Are you fucking kidding?
We’re just seeing photoreal video, barely two years after blurry images with too many fingers. At a bare minimum we’re going to get an explosion of effortless CGI. At the extremes we might watch the entire film industry collapse.
Being able to coax a finished shot out of your computer, just by describing it into existence, will not coexist with streaming services that deny writers a third season. People will tell stories. It will look like they have actors and sets and cinematographers. They will not. (Though they’ll probably still need editors, because you can’t save bad writing, and a bad edit can ruin anything.)
And that’s the boring use of these tools. Feeding them art halfway through the process will let any one person crank out a whole-ass cartoon by drawing a couple frames. You can still have actors and sets and cinematographers, and then let the computer fill in a magical city outside the window, and make that alien costume’s third arm believable. Text descriptions are the least you can put in - not the most.
The applications in things that matter are similarly wild. We’ve basically invented computers that do what they’re told. More Douglas Adams than Isaac Asimov at this point, and not embodied enough to solve or cause real-world problems on their own, but systems where people can forget they’re not dealing with a human. Calling this brief early period of weird shit starting a “peak” is completely ridiculous, even if all you’re going by is the Rich People Feelings Graph.