Just as I was thinking of making a cute AI video of my dogs, Open AI shut down Sora.ai. Boohoo, much, not. Sora was OpenAI’s attempt to create a TikTok—but for AI-generated video. Type a prompt, and get a movie clip. People went to town generating deepfake videos – take a look at this amazingly accurate and realistic video with Sam Altman!
Interest declined quite rapidly after the launch hype. So at least the hypothesis that we would watch AI made cat videos all day long has been disproved. Yay, for human intelligence!
What is Mickey’s take on this?
Sora users created videos using copyrighted characters. Disney strangely rewarded OpenAI with a $1 billion investment! Luckily, apparently no money actually changed hands and Disney has escaped with its assets unmauled by AI.
They can now shop around and see what they want to do with their library of characters. As an aside, you can create anything with the original Steamboat Willie – that one is no longer copyrighted due to old age.
India’s well-funded Mythik.com which uses characters from mythology to tell stories doesn’t seem to be doing well either. Have we hit the limit for how much content we can consume.
Everyone is a Publisher. Just don’t count the eyeballs.
I’ve been publishing this newsletter for over ten years, I’m a LinkedIn Top Voice, and am the author of two books on marketing. But my mother, with the occasional Whatsapp group photo, is also a publisher. We differ only in the size of our audience.
This was the promise of digital – everyone can be a publisher! It was fun while it lasted – I had friendships based entirely on their Facebook or Twitter presence. Then, somehow, most of us ran out of exciting things to say and we stopped creating and started just consuming.
With AI the competition for eyeballs is even more intense and the winnowing out has already begun. It’s way easier to make cute videos, but super harde to capture the finite attention of the human or bot eyeball.
The movie Dhurandhar does NOT use AI
They shot real humans such as Ranveer. And it is a hit movie already! Amongst Oscar winners, Sinners, Hamnet and One Battle after Another did not use AI.
Forget publishing, everyone can now be a CEO!
Till recently, saying you were a solopreneur conjured up this image of a person slaving long hours freelancing or coding or crafting. The assumption – at least amongst your friends and family – was that of you were successful you would hire more humans to scale and make your life easier.
With AI, you can get agents to do your work for you! And scale without any human companions. You’re the boss of a company of one human and infinite bots. Congratulations!
The downside? Anyone with a computer can do the same. So competition is going to rise.
Melania’s new friend Figure 03
Melania Trump is often portrayed as a bit friendless. So when she steps out with a humanoid robot it definitely catches our attention! This one was positioned as an alternative to a human teacher.
Priced at around $20,000 I can see its value! I am often tempted to buy stuff on quick delivery to avoid a trip up three flights of stairs to get something 🙂
Playing around with AI one of the most frequent questions on the WA community groups is “Is Claude down?” so maybe we’re not ready to outsource the fetching and carrying of essentials to AI. Yet.
The future is “small batch” not “mass produced”
Once upon a time, not so long ago, every item in your home was made by someone. That made it expensive to procure and therefore most people had to go without. For every beautiful hand-crafted teak easy chair there was a house where everyone had to sit on the floor. For every hand-woven Kanchipuram sari there were people who could not afford clothes. For every slow-cooked biriyani there were people eating leftover rice with a pickle.
Then came mass production and while the rich drowned in a surfeit of consumerism, the poor could at least afford the basics.
Now, with new technology, it is possible to recreate something close to “hand-made” but at much lower prices. Swiggy’s NOICE and ITC’s Baked Creations are a manifestation of this trend. They still have a much higher shelf life (and hence preservatives) than hand-made, but it is better than mass manufactured.
I expect this trend to show up across every sector where mass manufacturing is prevalent. Including education. So Melania’s new robo friend is going to be handy for more than fetching your missing glasses!
Tell me what your recent AI adventure is! Mine is making product videos that are not quite creepy 🙂
Happy weekend!