Don't believe the hype?
Meditations on the current state of AI
Hey dear subscribers,
It has been quiet here? You are right, we haven’t posted in a while… And while it would be easy to just pin that on holidays and a busy life, these explanations, while not being wrong, would miss an important truth.
I have been having a bit of a crisis thinking about AI and the media industry. As you, readers of this newsletter, know, I have been firing on all cylinders writing about, experimenting with, and even applying generative AI in quite a few real projects.
And this has been A LOT OF FUN!!!
But still, coming back from my summer holiday I found myself wondering: After I did these experiments - what now? And to be honest: I didn’t really know. There was no pressing idea that I just needed to test or get out there and what's more, it felt like I couldn't really apply AI for most of what filled my days as CEO of DRIVE beta. This lead me to very seriously asking myself the question:
Is this just a hype?
Will the impacts not be that big after all? Is this just the next NFT type scenario? Have I fooled myself?
And interestingly it seems like I am not alone with this feeling. At a conference recently I met an executive from a very big production company that had been extremely bullish about experimenting with and integrating AI in their writers rooms just 6 months ago. Now she told me that their experimentations had left them kind of disappointed and that most people had just gone back to doing things the way they always had.
This overall made me kind of sad and somehow disappointed. Was this it?
Suddenly I also saw a lot of the announcements and some of my own work in the AI space tinted in that type of light: “Well it is all ok, but really still so far from production ready.”, “We have done these amazing experiments, but nobody really cares”, “In the end all of this just boils down to cost cutting for shitty social ads.” or “All of this is just a way for the next bunch of consultants and “experts” to make a buck.”. You get the direction…
And that state of mind persisted for a couple of weeks. It was actually quite sticky and kind of underlined by the fact that, during these weeks, I had enormous fun writing down a pitch for a fiction idea, it was one of the most enjoyable things workwise I did this year. And the one thing I did not want to use during that whole process was - you guessed it: AI.
It is a hype!
And then it suddenly struck me: Yes it is a hype, of course it is!
I mean, the level of excitement from, worry about and coverage of the topic since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, combined with my diving head first into the field both as part of and next to my day job fulfills any definition of the word hype!
I personally had been extremely and fully hyped!
And as with any hype - after the peak of inflated expectations comes inevitably the trough of disillusionment. And that is exactly where I was. After feeling that “this will change everything” I had to realize that most things are currently not changed and might not be in the near future either…
This realization somehow calmed me down - because it meant that two things could be true:
The immediate effects of AI on both me personally and the media industry are smaller than I had thought AND the long-term impacts and possibilities will be huge.
What now?
Once that thought had crystalized for me it felt like a blockage had been removed! I started separating my immediate day-to-day work experience from my mid- and long term thinking. While I am currently still writing my emails on a regular keyboard, taking my meetings in person and not as an avatar, doing research mostly using Google and not perplexity, preferring speaking to my real coach to speaking to my CustomGPT version of Jerry Collonna and not being super impressed with most proof of concept AI audiovisual work, I regained my ability to project the developments of the last year or so into the future.
Just taking what has happened in terms of video generation, LLM reasoning, LLM agents, image generation, music generation and voice in the last 3 months into account is so mind blowing that it started getting me REALLY excited about the next 12, 24 and 120 months again!
It also got the creative juices flowing on ideas for experiments and release ready projects powered by and evolving around AI. I will be sharing a lot of this here, for now just a little teaser: The fictional project I had so much fun writing down without the help of AI is, you guessed it, about AI and it includes a really cool AI experiment that will be part of the writers room experience.
I think in this irony lies my personal truth and North Star about AI and the media industry: My goal for experimenting with AI has to been to empower me to have fun doing my job. And if I follow this path, I am sure it will take me up the slope of enlightenment toward the hallowed goal of the plateau of productivity.
But to be honest - I hope the climb on the slope will be long, as I feel the climbing might be the most fun part!
Talk soon.
Thanks for reading along. I hope these thoughts were interesting and maybe even useful to you. I would love to hear from you about your experiences and I am looking forward to returning to your inboxes soon with some of the results of my climbing expedition.
Hannes