Artificial Intelligence

Bring on the unpredictable

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The world is rapidly getting inundated with automated content: We’re seeing faceless YouTube videos grow, TV channels are deploying AI anchors. Some services that can ingest hours of someones audio, in order to generate new speech with their voice and intonation. Others allow you to get your entire body mapped to create a lifelike digital replica. The world of deepfakes is here.

The problem here is predictability and lack of personality. What often makes us interested in other humans is not the predictable part of their behavior, but what surprises us about them: what will they say, ask, or do. Some amount of predictability is important for comfort, but really what hooks us is the unpredictable.

The voices may no longer be robotic, the facial movements might now be in sync with the audio, but I’d like to believe that there are some things in a human being that are human, and inspire intrigue and trust at the same time.

So in a world of people playing it safe with AI generated content, with mass generation of how to videos made from scraping Reddit and Wikipedia, I think there’s going to be comfort in personalities, because they are both predictable and unpredictable, in predictable and unpredictable ways.

There is, of course, talk of Artificial General Intelligence that can replicate this human behavior. I’d like to believe that it can’t, for example, replace me. I suppose you’d like to believe that too.

TV Shows: Addressing job loss fears around AI

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Are AI tools a boon or a bane. On TV shows and on conference panels, I’ve spoken about how AI tools actually make our work easier, and more efficient. Whether an organisation wants to do more with the greater efficiency or make people redundant is their decision, and no fault of the AI tools. It’s important for people to learn these tools, and add these skill sets.

Two TV shows:

My show notes from the Jan 2023 discussion:

  1. Here’s where AI is being used:
  • Drafting legal contracts
  • Designing rooms according to a theme and size
  • Generating written content, such as articles, blog posts, and scripts
  • Creating dialogue for characters in video games, movies, and TV shows
  • Generating song lyrics and poetry
  • Assisting with brainstorming and idea generation for advertising and marketing campaigns
  • Creating chatbot responses for customer service and virtual assistants
  • Finding the right image for a mood
  • Writing emails
  • Creating proposals
  • Writing marketing content
  • Improving emails you’ve written to be more respectful
  1. ChatGPT AI has a clear bias: the dataset that it references. The final output should always be reviewed and edited by a human to ensure it is of high quality and appropriate for the intended use.
  2. AI is going to get better with time. It uses a feedback loop to understand what humans want and what they dont.
  3. AI can improve efficiency and productivity of individuals but an also lead to job losses for some.  The market will change.
  4. Impact industries like data entry, customer service, and other tasks that rely on language. ChatGPT can be used to quickly and accurately understand and respond to customer queries, allowing companies to improve their customer service and support. This can lead to improved efficiency and cost savings for businesses.
  5. The development and deployment of ChatGPT and other language models can also create new job opportunities in fields such as data science, machine learning, and software engineering. People will need skilling.

On AI and its impact on News Media

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I spoke at the Media Foundation Dialogues, organised by the Foundation for Media Professionals, held at the India International centre.

I really don’t think that journalists have anything to fear: AI tools can help them in their work, and will never entirely replace reporting. At MediaNama, we’re already using AI tools for transcription, and have started experimenting with prompts to clean copy, correct grammar, generate tweets from article, suggest article ideas, headlines, questions for interviews, speakers for conferences. We’re also creating tweets, threads, generating text to video, scripts for video. There’s so much more. The list will expand, as we become better at prompt engineering. AI will make things easier for journalists, not more difficult.

Creating and optimising videos for different platforms will be easier and faster. Processing videos will become so much more efficient.

The part that excites me most is how much translation and voice to text and text to voice will become over the next few years. That gives us the opportunity to cater to language audiences in India.

The business model challenges are of course going to increase, especially with increased advertising inventory, and fewer people required to do the same job. At the same time, this helps smaller publications punch far above their weight. How they navigate AI over the next few years is going to be critical.

A repeated some of the points I had made during the discussion, in a separate video for MediaNama: