Just over one week ago, ChatGPT creator OpenAI shocked the creative community when it announced its new “Sora” text-to-video generative AI model. Sora boasts photorealistic video and promises, ultimately, to deliver it in high-definition, cinematic quality, raising questions about what roles film schools will play in the future.
It’s just the latest generative AI tool that any user — no matter how versed they are in the arts — can use to unleash previously unimaginable creative possibilities. Its power is both democratizing and daunting, causing many in the creative community to understandably fear the shedding of traditional industry jobs at its hand. Tyler Perry, in fact, just halted his $800 million studio expansion and blamed his decision on Sora’s “mind-blowing” power.
The generative AI optimists’ view
But tech optimists see things differently, believing that generative AI’s power promises entirely new categories of industry jobs. Creative prompt engineering — the human skill to “dial in” the perfect story or film with text or voice — could be one of them. Even more transformational is generative AI’s anticipated power in the hands of storytellers. No longer constrained by traditional fixed storytelling “packaged” formats like the novel, audio podcasts, video shorts, video series and films, creatives will be able to build basic frameworks for stories on top of which their audiences can build, refine and package themselves.
Think of it this way. An artist essentially creates sufficiently fleshed out — and hence, copyrightable — story building blocks and makes them available to audiences to create their own personalized creative works, rather than just the fixed one that the artist puts out into the world. It’s kind of like using Lego bricks to build on top of the company’s famous foundational green baseplate. There are limitless creative possibilities.
Imagine a scenario in which a writer lays out a basic skeletal story-scape, populates it with one or more “must use” main characters, and then makes it available to the world. That basic foundational story package becomes their Lego-like “baseplate.” Audiences, attracted to that story or the creator behind it, can then use generative AI to choose their own desired format in which it is told (short story, novel, audiobook or podcast, animated video, video game, episodic series, Hollywood-style film), the story’s setting, its additional characters, and its overall more specific plot points and story arc. Consider it a menu of infinite story possibilities.
Grimes and endless derivative works
Essentially, this means endless derivative works (and derivative works on top of those derivative works) that are endlessly monetizable. Blockchain technology perhaps can finally be that long-promised great creative hope and mechanism to track and pay out the artist, after the artist has first set the basic rules of the game that all users must follow — including compensation and distribution terms.
Artists can, at least conceptually, also define other essential creative guardrails to preserve fidelity to their vision — prohibiting the use of guns and violence, false, defamatory, or overtly political content, for example. The entertainment industry is already deeply familiar with those types of restrictions that are frequently found in content licensing arrangements.
A screenshot of a video of a Dalmatian on a ledge rendered by OpenAI’s Sora (OpenAI)
We already see this happening in the music industry with innovative artist Grimes leading the way. Grimes has always been tech-forward, well before she wed former Tony Stark Elon Musk. Less than six months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT rocked our worlds in late November 2022, Grimes launched her own entirely new kind of music platform Elf.Tech that made her voice and music “stems” (essentially music’s Lego building blocks) freely available to her fans to create their own Grimes DNA-infused works. Grimes’ only condition to fans was that if any of their derivative works became commercially successful, she would share 50% of its royalties.
Grimes, in other words, created an entirely new kind of creative platform and business model for musicians that both delights her fans and potentially deepens her pockets. It also keeps Grimes’ “brand” alive on an ongoing basis, rather than just when she releases new music. Generative AI optimists would say that these fan-created derivative works complement, rather than cannibalize, Grimes’ own music. Her fans still anxiously await her new art, precisely because they want to experience her unique human personality and latest authentic and wholly original creative vision. It’s not an either/or proposition.
In the optimist’s view, there is no reason that other forms of creativity — including written, audio and visual works — can’t follow that same path, at least in some meaningful fashion. Take horror master Stephen King who churns out fully fleshed novels that thrill. Now King can augment those published novels — which are fixed with his singular vision — by publishing unlimited Lego-like story “blocks” that flow from his restless mind, but for which he has no time to fully render. With OpenAI’s Sora or other forms of generative AI, King can now give those Legos to his insatiable audience so that they can create their own horror franchises. Meanwhile, he would share in the success and monetization of it all. King would also continue to monetize his own fully written new standalone works, of course.
Viewed in this optimistic light, generative AI’s essentially infinite creative possibilities exist for all forms of media. Taking the King example further, his audience could decide whether to generate their own King-based story in written, audio or visual form — which takes us back to OpenAI’s Sora and considers it in a more positive creative light.
Generative AI’s threat is real, but fear is not an option
To be clear, generative AI poses real threats to creators and to the overall media and entertainment business (I frequently write about that sobering reality). But it’s also important to assess transformational new technology stoically and learn to leverage it to expand possibilities, much like the entertainment industry ultimately did with Internet streaming. After all, generative AI’s box — like the Internet’s before it — is open and here to stay. We must all learn to live with it.
We are less than 15 months since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT into a largely unsuspecting world. We correctly see the perils it poses to the creative community and the real human jobs that underpin it. But it’s also critical to accept, consider, and experiment with generative AI’s entirely new possibilities because that too is a form of creativity — so long as we never lose sight of the humanity at the center of it all.
Reach out to Peter at peter@creativemedia.biz. For those of you interested in learning more, sign up to his “Fearless Media” newsletter, visit his firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz, and follow him on Threads @pcsathy.
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