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In 2006, TIME broke with the usual tradition of naming a ‘Great Man’ as ‘Person of the Year’. (Previous winners splashed on the glossy covers include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh and Mahatma Ghandi.)
Instead, this year’s recipient was… You. “Yes, you,” the headline read. “You rule the information age. Welcome to your world.”
Web 2.0 was the tool that brought about this development.
It shifted the ever-growing Internet from “read-only” to “read-write,” giving millions and millions of Internet users the ability to interact with content instead of passively consuming it like a giant digital newspaper. More than any other site, YouTube exemplified this development. It was launched a year earlier and put the creators in the driver’s seat.
Web 2.0 broke the creative dam
This shift weakened Hollywood’s gatekeepers and the aging studio system. Anyone with a WiFi connection could now upload their video for the whole world to see. And comment.
This last part is crucial. It wasn’t like everyone could now add to the web, not just read it. Another revealing aspect was the social component. Facebook launched two years earlier and catapulted social media into the public consciousness. Suddenly you could present your content to the audience for their worship. Or contempt. Or anger. Or any other emotion.
Twenty years later, the shockwave of Web 2.0 is still rippling through culture. What’s unique about this moment is that the maker community now has another powerful tool at its disposal: AI.
Like any major technological shift, it brings opportunities and risks.
The slow-motion demolition of Hollywood
Before we explore that future, let’s take a look at Tinseltown. The current decline reflects the publishing industry around 2006. As Variety just reported: “October was a box office failure as big-budget tentpoles and awards contenders like Disney’s Tron: Ares and Dwayne Johnson’s The crushing machine difficulty selling tickets. Total revenues for the month were tragic at $425 million across all titles, the worst combined revenue since October 1997…’
Gatekeepers in both Hollywood and publishing had enormous power in their heyday, a result of strong profits. But technology has steadily chipped away at their hegemony. In our post-Web 2.0 world, anyone can publish a book on Amazon KDP without going through a publisher. Anyone can also bypass the studios to post their latest video to YouTube.
On the one hand, such substantive democratization is liberating. It is accessible and offers platforms for everyone who desires a voice. On the other hand, it has decimated our monoculture. Gone are the days when we read the same books or watched the same shows. As Abhinandan Kaul writes Mediumitself a web 2.0 blog that undermined older media such as TIME: “Now you could be sitting next to someone on the Delhi Metro, both on Instagram, both ‘plugged in’, and neither of you will have any idea what the other is looking at. You’re in one corner of the net where Kendrick’s diss to Drake is a cultural earthquake; they’re in another where they’re all sigma-male adaptations of the motivational roles of Patrick Bateman and Awadh Ojha. You’re both laughing. Just not at the same things.”
Content creators 3.0 are here
AI is poised to shape culture much more in the coming years, for better or for worse, leading to what we might call the rise of Content Creators 3.0, so named because of their adoption of AI. In January I tried to understand what will happen by describing what I saw as the YouTubeization of Hollywood for Forbes. I suggested that it wouldn’t be long before audiences started casting themselves in videos that resembled the storyline Ready Player One when technology arrived.
It’s improving by the second. If Reset media explains, “Virtual production is no longer a luxury reserved for big-budget projects. Tools like Unreal Engine allow creators to design unparalleled virtual sets, shoot and never leave the studio again. The AI for texturing and lighting is so advanced that creating worlds entirely on a laptop is now feasible for solo filmmakers.”
AI gives independent makers unprecedented possibilities. OmniTalker produces “perfect lip sync” of any image or video, so everything someone says matches on screen. Useful in creating talking head videos, especially for marketers, these can also be used for wave videos deepfake videos flooding the internet and undermining trust in traditional media. There are even sites like flexclip.com offering creators tutorials on how to “generate fake news articles” and create “prank news videos.”
While it’s helpful that new avenues are opening up for Content Creators 3.0, there are real dangers for artists concerned about being replaced, not only by rapidly advancing technology, but also by technology offerings synthetic copies of themselves.
The power and danger of AI on creativity
This reflects the double-edged nature of technological progress. New benefits and problems arise from every innovation, but especially from the AI juggernaut. When it comes to the latter, Hollywood is reeling from a similar challenge the music industry faced years ago with the Napster debacle: piracy.
Morgan Freeman recently spoke about the problem so many actors face now that it’s possible to exploit their likeness with AI. “If you do it without me, you’re robbing me,” he said eWeek. The site also reports: “Actors like Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves and Stephen Fry have similarly spoken out about the ‘creepy’ advances in voice and image replication technologies. Just last month, Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda urged people on Instagram to stop sharing AI recreations of her late father.”
Unfortunately, Hollywood isn’t the only one feeling the pain.
Many other creatives are being harmed by AI piracy. Video game voice actors in particular are feeling the pressure. Cissy Jones, whose credits include Baldur’s Gate III And Starfieldhas raised the alarm about such intellectual property theft. She was quoted in The Guardian saying, “It’s very easy to steal a person’s voice. In early 2022 it took six hours. In early 2023 it took three hours. Want to guess what it takes now? Three seconds. Anything you have on Instagram, TikTok or any YouTube video, anyone can turn that into a digital version of your voice. Is it perfect? No, but the technology isn’t getting any worse.”
Now for the remix
Another major shift is taking place YouTubeizationwhat I call Remixization. You can observe it in the many mashups of popular songs that are re-done, but in a different genre. These have been around for a while, but some might argue that their “quality” is increasing due to the increasing sophistication of AI tools. Examples include Red Dead’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit (1960s Country Version)” and Tape Mind’s “Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters” (1950s Chicago Blues Fusion).
It’s unclear whether fans or the artists themselves welcome these creative freedoms. How the law will interpret potential copyright infringement is also murky. For now, we can see its effects Remixization in a related story. The first AI-generated country song, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, just reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. “However, ‘Breaking Rust’ is not a real person at all. ‘Walk My Walk’ is a song created using artificial intelligence by someone named Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, according to the credits on Spotify,” said People.com.
This development points to a core tension Remixization. So many top AI models, like OpenAI, are trained on content pulled from the internet, often without the artists’ knowledge or consent. As AI advances technologically, it can use such data to produce emerging artistic content that its original creators could never have imagined. Or sanctioned.
TIME got it right almost twenty years ago when it saw creative power shift from vertical to horizontal. It took a few years for Hollywood and, more recently, the gaming world, to feel the tremors of the earthquake that was already threatening the publishing and music industries. Today we stand at a turning point, caught between the two forces of… YouTubeization And Remixizationand wonders how much more AI will disrupt society.
Where content will go in the coming years is uncertain. But it takes us all with it, whether we like it or not.
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