How AI might influence Storytelling
A look into what might be ahead for the application of AI in storytelling
If you are not living under a rock then you will know that our lives are being modified every single day with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Back when I was a kid in the era of no smartphones and no high-speed internet, trying to find transportation for traveling to a place was a hassle. It never felt like a problem until the internet made it easy for us.
I remember that we had to go to travel agents to book any sort of vacation trip i.e. flight tickets, hotel bookings, etc and yes, it was quite an inconvenience. But now, we do not even blink an eye when we decide to go for a vacation as we can do all the bookings right from the comfort of our home through the internet.
Now, when I look back to those days, it feels like we were living in dark ages.
This is the effect of any transformative technology that changes our lives; before we know it we cannot imagine a life without it.
Now, you might be wondering, How is this related to AI and storytelling?
AI is the next transformative technology that has already changed our lives. We are surrounded by the applications of AI and we use those services without even realizing it.
Whenever we are using Google Maps to drive to a place, the backend system utilizes an AI system to navigate us through the traffic ahead to get us to the destination in less time.
The same goes for dating sites that use our input personality traits to give us a list of possible future life partners. We are putting our future in the hands of AI.
AI and Arts
Researchers in the AI field have always been fascinated by the use of AI in arts.
In the early days, AI researchers used nature-inspired algorithms called Evolutionary Algorithms for generating art, and the field is called Evolutionary art.
But the arts produced by the Evolutionary art field were not photos of people or highly detailed scenery but rather visual patterns. It is still an active research area with dedicated AI conferences and journals.
The hype about the use of AI in the arts field started after the invention of the generative adversarial network (GAN) by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014.
These GAN models are deep learning models that are very good at generating realistic images and human faces that do not exist in the world. These models are the state of the art in the field of generating images.
In recent years, a new type of model has started to generate good results. These are called “Diffusion Models” and they can generate images based on the text given by the user (like Dall-E, Stable diffusion).
If you are interested in trying out such a model, you can check out the website for free: Midjourney. Following are some of the image results for my input text queries:
QUERY: “Robot painting a scene”
QUERY: “ufc match between ironman and kungfu panda”
Based on these results, it is not far-fetched to think that these models will be the next state-of-the-art surpassing the GAN models.
Note that these images are completely new and most probably you will also never get the same images even if you use my queries.
What are the implications?
As can be seen, AI is becoming very good at generating realistic images and now can even be used for generating images that can describe an input text.
Using the current progression trend of AI, I would like to share my thoughts on what might be ahead of us.
Our inner artist will be released
We human beings are creative in nature but not all of us are gifted with the skill of drawing/painting our imagination.
With tools like Midjourney, people will be able to communicate their inner creative side to other people with much ease just like how easy it became to travel to a place after Google Maps became a part of our lives.
More specifically, we will be able to generate images for relaying our ideas. This will be very helpful for new writers who will need illustrations for their book covers and the stories inside.
This will lower the barrier to entry for new writers and hence there will be more explosion of ideas using such tools.
New tools for Storytelling
The current state-of-the-art AI system can generate images based on the text given to it. So, it is not far-fetched to imagine someone building an AI system that can generate videos using text.
This is because a video is just a sequence of images played at a certain speed in time to give the illusion of movement in the picture.
This video creation capability from the text will help generate videos for any book that we read online. This will be a new milestone as we will not have to wait for some big production house company to make a movie for some book.
We will be able to just pick a book and query the AI to generate a movie for that book. This will probably be a new way of consuming books just like audiobook is the new form of consuming books at the present time.
Conclusion
We are living in a time where we see the world of technology evolving in front of our eyes.
The potential use of AI in art gets me excited whenever I start to think about the future and how we will be consuming the new technology, especially the potential use of AI for storytelling.
I know that it is hard to predict the future but I hope that it will be a future where the use of AI has led to the betterment of human lives.
