The future is deep faked

AI has an imagination. What will it mean for content?

AI is starting to generate content: Deep fakes, new music in the style of The Beatles, and AI that can write coherent text.

Combine that with recommender systems and A/B testing, and AI will start to create personalized and optimized content.

AI animating famous characters. Source: Wired

AI for content can only do so much:

A/B testing, recommending articles, ad targeting. AI serves you its best guess of what you want.

But it can only recommend content that already exists 🙃.

Synthetic media is part real, part fake.

Synthetic AI starts with human-generated content, and tweaks it. Use a Snapchat filter to make yourself look younger. Remix music to make it a bit more upbeat and optimistic.

And synthetic media will only get more expressive over time.

Semantic photo editing

Generative recommendation

Combine: 1) the AI that creates or edits content; with 2) the AI that understands your preferences and recommends content. AI can imagine, and it can also think critically. This is the future of recommendation.

Who will this affect?

Journalism

Journalism before: Twitter delivers news and commentary you want to see: relevant, reinforcing your existing biases, and getting you riled up. Headlines and content are A/B tested for engagement and salaciousness.

Journalism after: Instead of just testing content that already exists, AI can dream up content on its own — and the incentives will be even more directly understood and exploited by AI. This could be bad!

Music

Music before: Pandora and Spotify recommend music to you based on your preferences. They can only find songs that have already been created by human artists.

Music after: AI generates music for your tastes.

Online advertising

Ads before: Digital ad targeting is a perfect scenario for A/B testing and optimization: constant feedback and lots of money moving around with measurable performance goals. But still, ad platforms can only serve up ads that humans have designed.

Ads after: The AI works on the ad creative itself, constantly altering, tweaking, and personalizing photos and videos to optimize for relevance and performance.

In the famous Minority Report scene, AI synthetically generates a talking woman based on its understanding of what Mr. Yakamoto would engage with.

Isn’t that the coolest thing you can possibly work on? Learn more: Bloom.