The AI Sessions: 1/Visual arts, artists and content creators — should you be worried?
This is the first of a handful of posts on the dramatic rise of AI, and the effects it’s having on our world. In particular, I’m going to look at what it means for our visual world — from Oscar winning movie performances to Twitch streamers. If you trade on your image, or wish to share or perform online, AI is already changing everything. Should you be worried? Should you be doing something? Let’s see…
Rather than drown in technical details (that’ll be out of date in weeks anyway), or rehash the questionable ethics of ‘deep fakes’, let’s look at some of the bigger themes of visual AI:
AI Will Steal My Image!
In short, yes it will. It’s far from perfect, and in some situations downright wrong, but the immense amount of research and experimentation going into creating convincing images with AI mean that:
Within a relatively short period of time it will be possible to seamlessly insert your likeness into any photo (already possible) or video (not quite yet..).
There have been endless essays on the threat of faked images and videos, covering moral and legal arguments and controls. Most of them make a big deal of the risks we face when misinformation can be created at the touch of a button. Few of them admit that this is hardly new. Almost from the day of the very first grainy photograph, we were using whatever tools were at hand to edit, adjust or transform what we saw. The camera has always lied — it’s just getting better and better at it.
If the camera has always lied, here’s the big deal: we live with it. In fact, as most movie actors will gladly attest, we take full advantage of it. From lighting and lens effects, through to Photoshop and full CGI, we are surrounded by images that are subtly (or sometimes dramatically) different from the reality they claim to capture.
So where does that leave us?
We have a new set of visual tools. There will certainly be those who abuse them, and no doubt new laws and richer lawyers dealing with that abuse. However, for the most part, the question should actually be — how will we use those tools for ourselves, and how will those tools change the jobs of people working with performance or content creation?
Not Just a pretty face?
Whilst tools like Midjourney have democratised the ability to create preternaturally beautiful pictures of elvish women, they are behind the curve in an important way.
These days, video is king. Your mum might look through the adverts in her magazines, but everyone else is watching Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, or (inevitably) the adult content equivalents.
And it turns out that this is the Achilles heel of AI content. Not that it can’t create video — though it’s patchy, there are huge strides being made for video generation. The problem is that it remains (and probably will remain for some time) extremely difficult to create a performance. And increasingly what we want to watch is a performance, whether it’s a Shakespearean monologue, or a cosy conversation with a gamer on Twitch.
This is the key point to understand. Of course these new tools will dramatically change how we can create and manipulate images. Some jobs will go (I wouldn’t want to be a stock image model right now), but in their place we are already looking for new types of content and new content creators.
Actors and musicians will be able to take their performances and play with them as never before. Content creators will be able to change identities at will. But this is no different from the technological changes of the last couple of decades that saw CGI characters appear in mainstream films, or YouTubers go from grainy hand shots to professional multi-camera productions.
And just as it has been for the last couple of decades, it will be those who learn to use and work with these new tools who will benefit the most. Whether it’s taking control of your visual identity or learning to completely transform it, the most important answer to AI right now is to figure out how it might work for you.
In the next AI Session, I’ll talk a little about what we can do right now to own our visual identity, transform ourselves, and capture performances…
About the author: Claudia works with technology, plays with makeup and doesn’t do politics. All of which indicate she’s an eternal optimist.