Are we starting the simulation?
I’m blown away after playing with Midjourney, an AI-enhanced image generation tool. Rich, beautiful pictures can be created in ninety seconds from very simple text prompts (”naan falling from the sky”). It’s mindblowing and it’s changing what I believe is possible for the very near future.
Today, when we engage with digital media, our actions and likes are captured as data points. It is widely known that Reels, TikTok, and YouTube take those data points to develop a personalized portrait of our preferences. Those preferences inform algorithmic recommendation for what content to check out next. It’s why it’s so easy to get stuck into a filter bubble.
Tomorrow, using MidJourney and OpenAI’s DALLE-2 as references of potential, it can be more than just recommendation. Our viewing actions will still create data points of our preferences, but those preferences will fuel not just algorithmic recommendation but also content creation. Customized content created on the fly just for you. How you engage with that data-developed content will result in much more personalized content just for you.
This raises all sorts of interesting questions.
What happens when the majority of the content you consume is created just for you? It’s a potentially infinite internet-subculture or digital landscape for you to explore. That’s amazing for entertainment and I’m sure will have epic video game value. But considering people spend nearly half their waking lives in front of screens, isn’t that also just truly living in a simulation? Have we entered the Matrix?
What happens when a dead person’s digital residue is used to create their likeness (as just happened with Steve Jobs in podcast.ai)? Can someone use a private voicemail to create a voice-bot of someone else?
What happens when computer created information is what informs the human-impacting decisions we make? How do we show users machine-made versus human-made content? Do we need to?
I don’t have the answers and I’m just starting to develop the questions. But I feel like we’re accelerating into a new age and it’s going to be wild.
Preet
p.s. I clearly didn’t follow through on the bi-weekly posting cadence! I’m most likely going to move toward this just being more of a hosted blog. My attention has gone toward creating Jeff’s letters (now a top 30% podcast worldwide!) and a new role I’ve started.