How OpenAI fits into the growing need for scarcity in digital entertainment
Digital entertainment has seen a boom in content production, with more songs, TV shows, and games released at a faster rate than ever to compete for audience’s attention. However, audiences have no available time left over to spend on entertainment, and the cost-of-living crisis is affecting their available spend as well.
Into this oversaturated entertainment environment, OpenAI has released the first of what will likely be many artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, DALL-E and ChatGPT, which can generate hyper-tailored images and text respectively in mere moments based on a users’ prompt.
The implications will be manifold, as this new technology empowers companies, creators, and consumers alike to create exactly what content they want or need with no additional tools, skills, or time necessary to do so. Independent creators can free up some of their time, companies can reduce team sizes, and consumers can cut down their spending and indulge their creativity by simply using the bots.
There are to be inevitable caveats: proper rights attributions for the datasets that the bots draw from are not yet in play, which is already spurring lawsuits; artists have already lodged cases against Stability AI, Midjourney, and Deviantart, which have all released AI-powered image generators of their own, for using their work without attribution or remuneration. More of this will come as the bots grapple with their immediate commercial viability yet total lack of back-end attributional capability.
While the bots are still not perfect, often creating bizarre images or text that still needs tweaking, their early-stage form is not likely to be a good indicator of their potential. Nor are text and images to be the end of the line: expect automatic music generators, lyric generators, video generators, and, one day, maybe even games generators to follow suit.
Yet this potential could take a long time to be realised, and in that interim, the risk of over-investment in the space could result in a boom-and-bust that over-inflates the amount of content available and then drops suddenly when users tire of its novelty.
In the meantime, attention oversaturation is at risk of worsening, which, without proper attribution channels or even legally mandated marking of what content is AI and what is not (except for China, which recently passed legislation to that effect) could have serious negative impacts on audiences’ perceived value of digital entertainment and subscription spend. Regulation will have to be passed to curb the tsunami of AI content to come – or else the privatised NFT sector will likely step into the gap to offer their own competing stamps of certainty in a quickly-moving industry.
OpenAI has opened the floodgates, but more will come.