2024 03 01
Wow, it’s been a lot of vertical images lately… Txa Txa Supper Club #30 at See You Soon Chicago. January, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Tyler Perry is a billionaire and massively successful filmmaker. This is why, when he recently announced he’s pausing plans to expand his Atlanta studio because of AI, people listened.
➡️ Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost”
I saw a wide range of responses to the headline online, from AI bros proclaiming movies will soon be fully automated, to others upset he’s not investing a billion dollars into a film studio as a way to combat the rise of AI. Regardless of what you think about the headline, my guess is that the reality of his decision to halt work after surely spending millions of dollars on the project was made more for exesting economic reasons than because Sora released a few automated videos that look like a high end video game render. These AI videos, released only by the company that is producing the renders (and surely only gives us the best of the best), do look quite remarkable at a glance, on a phone, in low resolution — and yes, it clearly shows where things are heading — but I also don’t think we’re going to fully automate away our arts and entertainment despite it sort of feeling like this is where we are heading.
Currently, the AI stories making the headlines are how good it is at making photos, videos, writing stories, graphic design, etc … all the fun and creative things humans enjoy doing. What’s less exciting to read about is how AI can replace the less glamorous professions such as tax preparation, legal copyrighting, software coding, logistics.
There’s no doubt in my mind that AI is coming for all of us and will massively transform the world in the coming decade (if not this year). Just look at the NVIDIA stock price and you’ll see this is what the stock market believes. I think the AI revolution (a new Industrial Revolution) is already transforming corporate America in less obvious ways: namely employee headcount. Corporations are letting go and/or pausing hiring as they figure out all the ways to best implement AI into their corporate structure while replacing as many humans possible. The economy still feels relatively okay, but a storm is a brewin’. These changes aren’t yet mainstream news stories but I think soon everyone will start to feel the effects of someone they know losing a job because it is, at least attempting to be, outsourced to artificial intelligence.
Scott Galloway put out a nice piece (linked below) equating the corporate use of AI to the human use of diet drugs. We all do it, we just don’t like to talk about it.
➡️ Corporate Ozempic
I just wish I could automate a way to not think about AI so damn much these days.
-Clayton
PS - want to dig into this even further and get even more depressed? This video is worth your time and paints a largely bleak picture about our not-too-distant futures
PPS - My CPU is a neural net processor; a learning computer!
