Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I'm the host of this show
Reversing Climate Change. I'm a long time climate tech and
carbon removal entrepreneur and I did a fun little experiment
today and I'll tell you all about it.
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It helps me get this show out to more people, which is what you
want. And hey, thanks for listening
here. I'm going to start telling you
now about what is this weird little show you're about to
enjoy. So D Script and ChatGPT are
doing a thing now where you can enter a prompt into ChatGPT and
D Script. We'll make it into a video, a
proper video with AI generated voice with images to match.
It's a brave new world. I have a friend who's very into
AI art and what the future holds for it, and I have some thoughts
about it. And they're not perhaps the
normal ones that you would hear, but I have a former career.
I wouldn't say like the most successful career, but I
previously worked in Los Angeles screen writing and producing and
doing various jobs on film sets. And I know some people who have
been very successful and they were successful immediately
drafted out of college or during college successful.
I also know people who were grinding for 10 to 15 years and
are just now starting to pull through and to have a really
nice career. And I know people who went to
very good schools, did everything right, and are now
only barely catching on to the first major rung on the ladder.
And I know people who have struggled for a long time and
haven't made it or have since moved on.
So I know a pretty wide range of people who have had various
types of success in the creative arts.
And I have one friend in Los Angeles who's very smart.
This person went to an Ivy League school.
He's a great writer. I've read several of their
scripts and finally, after a decade plus, got staffed on to a
procedural show. And they're not that good in
general. As a genre.
They are more likely than many things to be filler.
Think of all the shows that have vocational framing to them.
You know, if it's a Police Department, it's about doctors,
it's about fire departments, it's about crime scene
investigations. They're very formulaic.
They are not things that have a lot of what we consider to be
some of the best artistic attributes of television.
You know, I'm, I'm not going to be comparing this to something
like Succession. It's the first thing I thought
of that we might consider a a form of very dark comedic art.
I was reflecting on the career of Vince Gilligan from Breaking
Bad and Better Call Saul, because Vince Gilligan came from
a quasi procedural background. He wrote for The X-Files and
X-Files as many things, but it is also procedural.
It is a monster of the week show.
It's campy. No one's gonna be remembering it
100 years from now as a show, perhaps like something like Twin
Peaks that will still be referenced decades from now as
being one of the best things that come out of television as a
medium. It it's one of those shows that,
you know, it's, it's pulpy. It's Pulp Fiction.
That's part of the fun of it, though.
By the way, this is none of this is a dig at X-Files per SE.
There are plenty of shows and types of content that I consume
that are pulpy in similar ways, and that's fine.
But Vince Gilligan was a staff writer for a long time and as
far as I know, fairly undistinguished.
And then he writes the Breaking Bad script and he just gets
catapulted. And it probably took him, I
don't even know, 20 years of cranking out procedural scripts
and working on these shows that are decent to good shows but
certainly not the best of the medium before he was able to go.
And what I worry about with people who get their start with
procedural television like this is that it is most likely the
easiest show to AI generate possible.
I am sure if it doesn't already exist, someone's going to do it
soon. They're going to go through and
feed all public court records and all police records into AI
and start cranking out shows for all the things that they haven't
done. For the most successful types of
shows, all of that data is going to be mined.
And my friend who worked hard and went to a great school,
there's not going to be a job for these entry level writers to
just grind and work and get their skills up to become the
next Vince Gilligan. I think a lot of those jobs are
gonna vanish and writers rooms are gonna change in that way.
The people who are just like the people I named at the beginning
of the show, who are drafted out of college or from college while
they're still students, they're probably gonna be OK 'cause
they're just a certain level of talent that is obvious to
everyone. The people I know like this, by
the way, none of them were surprising to me.
There were people that I knew where I'm like, yeah, you're
really, really talented. And it's obvious to everyone
that this is going to happen and those people will still get work
and still be successful. But for the people who probably
more like me or, or my friend, I've, there's like a lot of
development and sanding down those rough edges in practice.
And I think there's gonna be fewer positions available.
And that's what I worry about for the generation of art.
That being said, I'm also pretty excited about customizability
here because I'm going to have access to content that is going
to blow my mind and be some of the kinds of stories that I
love. I would not be surprised if my
favorite content five years from now is something that AI
generated with me in mind. And one thing I think about with
AI that's really interesting to me is that I think in the
future, as this video details, we're going to be able to
increasingly be able to just prompt very closely the kinds of
stories that we like and tweak them and customize them.
And I find that to be a very strange thing because we
primarily consume media alone. Well, actually, I don't know
about that. I imagine many people consume
quite a bit of media alone, and it's very much algorithmically
targeted to your very specific tastes.
How much fun would you have looking through someone else's
Instagram feed? Probably not as much as your
own. That's just because the data
that they have on you allows them to serve very targeted
content. And the thing that I like about
the kinds of media that I'm attracted to, especially for
fiction, I like reading old fiction.
I don't like a lot of contemporary fiction.
And it's not because we only used to make really great stuff
and new stuff isn't as good as old stuff.
I don't like that take. I don't actually think that's
true. I think part of it is the Lindy
effect, which is the longer that something has been around, the
more likely it is to persist. And I also like the quote UN
quote, Western Canon classics. I like classics from the East
too, but that's often how it's described.
I like the books, the art, the literature that has survived the
test of time. If you read the Bible, even if
you're not a Christian or Jewish or Muslim, it doesn't really
matter. It's a very influential book.
The stories are everywhere. It's worth reading just for the
literary value alone. And that's true a lot of the
classics that have survived. There's very few quote UN quote
classics that are not worth at least some amount of familiarity
with. I think they're very good uses
of your time to read very old, very long books.
Go read Don Quixote, go read Tolstoy, go read the Bible, go
read Dante, go read the Book of Five Rings, whatever.
Just a lot of these books, they're still around because
they are good. And even if they're not good and
you don't especially enjoy them, the thing that is great about
consuming widely influential media is that you're joining a
conversation with your civilization or the civilization
of another. And that's something that you
cannot get from highly customized material when we're
not really consuming art that others even see, because it's
something that we're generating from custom prompts that were
entering into AI interfaces. I wonder if we start losing the
connection of art that we all share, and even with the
negative version of it is somehow knitting together.
Coming of age, I have strong memories of certain things being
hated by the artsy kids in middle school and high school.
I think it might have been middle school when Creed and
Nickelback came around and there was just as much a cultural
phenomenon to hate these bands, for better or for worse.
What happens in the future where there's enough data points about
you that sublime art can be made that will satisfy you with far
less variance than what you could get from searching out on
Spotify, genuinely, quote UN quote, genuinely made art?
I think that future is coming, and I think we're going to lose
some of the connective nature that art is going to provide for
us. It's going to become
progressively more solipsistic. We will retreat into our own
worlds where the amount of pleasure that we can derive from
a piece of art has been so perfectly customized to how we
like the dopamine and the cortisol to flow at exactly the
right moments will be an ever learning process and we are
going to feel that and that is going to be something that we've
never before had in human history.
I think that's going to make everything that is not
customized in this way largely disappointing.
I don't know how anything that could have the variability, the
uncertainty of non customizability, I don't see how
that couldn't just fail. And as there's more data about
the kinds of stories that we like, that our devices react to,
how our facial expressions and our eyes dilate, it's only going
to get better. And I think there's a good
chance that the future that we're looking into is a lot more
like the Matrix. It's funny to see which of these
pieces of art, especially sci-fi, which makes predictions
about the future. I've long been captured by this
idea of humans at some point had allowed synthetic intelligences
to put them into pods where all of their physical needs would be
met, that they would have a simulated world, and that was
better in some ways. Humans were in the process of
destroying the planet. They excluded themselves from
future participation in the governance, participation in
life on Earth. To retreat into a virtual realm
in order to try to preserve what was left of the planet is my
recollection of it. And I think we're headed in a
direction that's similar to that with AI art.
I think we're going to retreat increasingly into virtual worlds
because they're going to be less disappointing, they're going to
be more fun, they're going to be catered to.
Exactly what we will want. The difficult business of living
as we have known it for all of human, mammalian, eukaryotic
life, probably not prokaryotic, all eukaryotic life.
That is going to be something that will increasingly be seen
as inefficient and dreadful. So I made this weird little
video for a minute and I hope you enjoy.
Thanks for letting me run through some of my thoughts on
the future of the creative arts. In The Matrix, the machines keep
humanity sedated in a simulated world, feeding people illusions
of pleasure and purpose. At first, it seems dystopian.
After all, freedom is supposed to be sacred.
But here's the uncomfortable question.
Were the machines right? If technology can craft endless
entertainment perfectly customized for our every desire,
will we even want to leave our cocoons?
When podcasts, art, music and connection are machine made but
indistinguishable from the real thing, does it still matter who
made them? Maybe AI won't imprison us with
force but seduce us with pleasure, so immersive will
never want to emerge. And if we don't care, what does
that say about us? Were the machines just giving
humanity exactly what it asked for all along?
Is it not strange that this was made by AI from the prompting of
a podcaster wondering about his creative future?