Silicon Valley's AI replacement for Hollywood stars you

Silicon Valley talks a good game about "democratising" access to tools, as if they were locked away by guilds or secret societies. I don't have a problem with that: I'm thrilled my teens have been able to have so much access to music and video production. But what if tech wants to subsume the creative process itself? It believes it can, and here's how it proposes to sell it.

In the recent skirmish between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, personified by Sam Altman and Scarlett Johansson, Hollywood came out the winner. Altman, in his obsessive pursuit of the actress to lend her distinctive voice to his chatbot, made himself look like an obsessive stalker who can't take No for an answer.

Today, generative AI is failing to live up to the wild expectations placed upon it - those twenty per cent error rates can't be wished away, and they exclude it from doing a lot of serious work we expected AI to do. And despite ever-larger models, its capabilities remain roughly where they were a year or 18 months ago.

Yet it retains an amazing party trick: the ability to mimic existing works of art, and reproduce them on demand. Tools such as Sora and Google’s Lumiere can generate video from a text prompt. It's "Photoshopping" a moving image, to put it crudely. I expect quite soon to be able to feed it the script of Casablanca, and generate an animation using characters from The Simpsons, rather than Bogart and Bacall.

Altman's creepy pursuit of ScarJo is a big clue that for the sociopaths of Silicon Valley, that isn't enough. Here's what I think it will do, as I explained in my column in the The Telegraph this week.

Generative AI will allow you to write your own movie - and you will be the hero. Think of WestWorld: this is an immersive wish fulfilment, perhaps the ultimate “You-Tube”.

But think of what we might be missing by spending time even more time with ourselves in an AI-generated movie.

Movies take us to worlds and situations we can’t imagine. They are full of sympathetic baddies, which force us to empathise, often with appalling protagonists. They make us question our moral judgements. The world Silicon Valley can create with generative AI, by contrast, is a solipstic one. Social media specialises in what the documentary film maker Adam Curtis calls “feeding the rat of the self”. This takes indulging the id to the next level.

Some ￡4 billion is spend on high end movie and TV production each year. I don't think for a moment that the public will lose its appetite for immersive storytelling, made by so many talented craftspeople, ranging from costume to lighting to set design, to cinematography. Generative AI's strange hybrid of sex toy and video game will find its own niche, I am sure.

My fear is the one expressed by Ed Newton-Rex, formerly of Stability.AI, in a conversation recently. He was referring to the threat of weakening copyright to stimulate - which our Government is keen on.

“A huge amount of capital would shift to AI as they build cheap competitors to creativity in general. It’s hard to see how the UK’s industries could survive that kind of change.” Governments can do a lot of harm by indulging the sociopaths of Silicon Valley.

For the full column, see here.