by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I was listening to The New York Times’ podcast “Hard Fork” and I was startled when they came up with a scenario for AI generated music that I have already gamed out for video entertainment — the idea that AI could, on the fly, generate entertainment out of whole cloth relative to what mood you might have at any particular moment.
It was spooky who hear people that others actually listen to come up with an idea I have already mulled. I felt their vision was way, way too limited. They were talking about music and so they said, “Hey, what are we going to do when AI can generate music on the fly that sounds like our favorite artists based on biometric sources?”
Think bigger, folks.
It won’t be music, but TV and movies that will be the most consumed by generative AI. Rather than listening to hours of AI generated Radiohead songs, what happens when you sit down in front of your smart TV and it does a quick face scan of you to determine your mood — then shoots out a TV show or movie that perfectly fits your mood at that specific moment.
What’s more, it would use a licensed database of full body scans of your favor actors to do this. So, it could be 30 years from now and we could all be watching very, very personalized Indiana Jones movies or TV shows to the point that mass media as we currently conceive it no longer exists.
But that’s really the end game of all of this — if everyone is watching AI generated TV shows and movies and listening to AI generated music….the idea of any sort of shared reality grows exceedingly quaint.
We already have problems talking to strangers at a bar because of the frayed nature of our shared reality. When everyone is watching very specific AI generated entertainment…oh boy. I suppose there might be a mass market for the entertainment generated by someone who is….really interesting?
But given how fucking lazy everyone and self-absorbed everyone is, it makes a lot more sense that one day in the not-too-distant future we’ll all entertain ourselves with such specific AI generated art that….lulz…everything will change overnight and we won’t even bat an eye.