As a kid, I read Ayn Rand, Frank Herbert, Franz Kafka, Arthur C. Clarke, Ernest Hemingway, and many other great writers. Like them, my motivation has always been to tell a good story.
With the ongoing Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution occurring in the arts and business, I’m even more determined to do so because of six predictions I made back in 2022 about AI |
- Videos and Movies: By 2025, the quality of AI-generated video will be such that movies and music videos will appear to be the same quality as the live-action movies we watch today.
- Consilidation in the Artificial Intelligence Industry: During 2025 to 2026, text, voiceover, music, image, video, and up-resing companies will begin to consolidate into companies that offer all of these functions. As of 2024, we’re already seeing this with Runway (video AI) offering a subset of voiceover from Elevenlabs as well as Meta’s recently upgraded video system. This will bring the price down and increase performance.
- On-demand Entertainment: AI will produce custom on-demand entertainment for most people. Since the advent of MP3.com and web-based stores, most people’s top 3 motivations include “convenience.” In the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to tell your web interface to create “a comedy that has a cheerful ending.” The only question the AI will have for you is if you want to appear as one of the characters either passively or interactively. Say or think “go” and your custom movie will be ready to watch.
- Certified Human-made: There will be a niche of people who prefer “certified 100% human-made entertainment,” similar to those who prefer music available on vinyl records instead of even the best digital reproductions. A business that could spring up from this is one that certifies that only humans were involved in the creative process.
- Everyone has a Story: Artists will continue to create art because it’s fun. Just like when phones incorporated cameras and everyone became a photographer, with the assistance of AI, everyone who has a story to tell will be able to make a movie, book, or song about it.
- Live music entertainment will grow as an occasional alternative to the regular AI-generated entertainment that we view at home, on our portable devices, or streamed directly into our brain. It’ll be focused on bringing to life the most popular human and AI-created entertainment as well as historically loved entertainment through tributes to the likes of everyone from The Beatles to Taylor Swift to Hendrix and Beethoven. The niche for up-and-coming artists in a live setting will stay the same from a financial compensation perspective because there hasn’t been good pay in this segment for most of music history. I’ll cover how we can change this scenario in a future article.
It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent but the ones most adaptable to change.
—Leon C. Megginson about Charles Darwin
Partnership with Artificial Intelligence
Recently, two mainstream movie organizations got on board with AI: James Cameron and Lionsgate. I count Cameron as an organization because he has a tech company that focuses on developing and utilizing cutting-edge technology to make movies, with his Avatar series becoming the latest example. But I suspect that Lionsgate understands the bigger picture: On-demand Entertainment (Item 1, above). And I predict they’ll soon have competition from Apple and Netflix.
After all, excluding what will likely become a small group of people (Item 2: Certified Human-made), most people won’t care how entertainment is created as long as it’s a good story.
So, where does that leave humans involved with art as a profession?
Artists interested and willing to adapt to new technology are embracing AI. I’m one of them.
Partnership for Creating Art with Artificial Intelligence
Here’s my evolving process that combines human talent with AI for making music and music videos:
Music
- Human: write the lyrics and music.
- Human: record the demo version of the song.
- Human/AI: records the demo vocals. Based on the melody I wrote and played on either piano or guitar, I then sang the part and tuned it to the singer’s range I had in mind for the song’s final version. Then I fed my demo song, lyrics, and vocals into the AI, selected a voice, and generated many iterations of the new version of my vocals. Finally, I comped (edited) together a reference vocal for the singer. There’s more to this process I’ll provide the details and benefits in a future article.
- Humans: record the full version of the song, mix, and master.
Video
- Human/AI: idea generation and screenplay writing.
- AI (human prompts): record voiceovers and characters.
- AI (human prompts): create images as the basis for the video.
- AI: upres the images.
- AI (human prompts): create video scenes based on the AI images.
- AI: lipsync video to singing, voiceover, and character dialog.
- AI: upres to 4k video.
- Human: edit the video.
Five days later, at a cost of thousands of dollars (including my time), I completed the music video (not including the cost to write and record the music). The time to complete a video will soon be reduced by 25% or more as additional computer servers come online to tackle the time-consuming AI function of up-resizing the video to 4K.
Is the result perfect from a visual perspective? No.
But, every month, this process continues to make substantial improvements.
Artificial Intelligence: Video Examples
I just made a music video for the song Darker by Echoes of Nyx using my current video creation process.
(Continues after video)
And here’s another example I made of a 1950s spoof on historical movie trailers for the movie Star Wars.
(Continues after video)
Artificial Intelligence: Art and Jobs
It [AI] can do semi-compelling screensavers and that’s that.
del Toro goes on to say:
The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it requires, it’s how much would you risk to be in its presence.
While I respect del Toro as a director and artist, his perspective is biased because he has substantial financial backing.
I’m always interested in seeing, hearing, or reading a great story told by a master story creator, but I’m more interested in embracing a great story from someone I’ve never heard about- someone who doesn’t have the means.
That’s where AI comes into play from an independent artist’s perspective.
I’ve filmed music videos and movies using everything from film cameras to the latest DSLR systems (digital cameras). Creating the video examples in this article would have taken 6 weeks per video, including preparation work, and tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum.
AI also helps with marketing strategy and content to support the project for a monthly cost in the tens of dollars.
Does partnering with AI take away jobs?
Not from the independent storyteller’s perspective.
Without AI, these videos wouldn’t have been made, much like the hundreds of music videos and movies I haven’t made because of time and budgetary constraints. Multiply that by all of the current and future artists, and a lot of content that wasn’t being produced is now being produced. The people who have been working in the field of AI art during the last few years continue to learn and refine their skills as AI improves. They’re the ones who are helping others learn how to create new movies and videos.
Art and Jobs: Large Corporations
Is AI taking away jobs? Yes.
I’m sure part of Lionsgate’s and future companies’ motivation to embrace AI is to reduce the cost of making a movie. From a business perspective, I don’t blame them. Large production movies cost well over $100 million with some approaching $1 billion, not including marketing costs.
From a consumer, artistic, and storytelling perspective, the results of spending hundreds of millions of dollars is rarely great. Most consumers simply see their monthly Netflix or Apple bill increase while the quality of art, for the most part, continues to decline.
Does the AI industry understand this?
Of course. Runway AI (video generation) has offered grants of up to $1 million to filmmakers working on AI-powered projects. For smaller filmmakers, they’ve launched The Hundred Film Fund.
Do I feel bad for people who are happy in their jobs but will likely lose them in the next 2 to 5 years? Yes.
But, as Megginson said about Darwin: “It’s time to adapt.”
Art and Jobs: Me
Will I lose my job?
Part of my business has already been wiped out by AI (human voiceovers). While we now do AI voiceovers for people and companies who don’t have the time or inclination to learn how to do them with AI, fees for voiceovers used in advertising have dropped to less than $50 and will fall by a factor of 10 as processes continue to be refined.
What about music?
Definitely. The music industry for background music and other non-critical listening music will be gone within two years. It’s already gone for most YouTube videos, and YouTube is the largest video platform (part of Alphabet), according to Nielsen.
- Streaming: 41%
- YouTube: 10.6%
- Netflix: 7.9%
- Amazon: 3.1%
- Hulu: 2.4%
- Disney: 2.3%
- Peacock: 2.1%
- Tubi: 1.8%
- Roku: 1.7%
- Max: 1.3%
- Paramount: 1.1%
- Pluto: 0.7%
- Cable: 26%
- Broadcast: 22%
- Other: 11%
While I’m not an attorney, and this isn’t legal advice, all it will take to overcome the legal ambiguity over music ownership is for an AI music company to start training their systems with music that provides compensation and credit to the human artists underlying their training data.
In a different vein, artists, including Grimes, jumped on licensing AI versions of their singing voices almost two years ago, so that avenue has been available for a while and will continue to grow.
What’s my future as an artist?
We’re in the same situation as we were during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. No one could have predicted the new jobs that were created because of that revolution, and the same is true with the AI revolution.
The only thing I can say with certainty is that the path to future success is by learning and adapting today.
Artificial Intelligence: Learning
I appreciate that this all seems overwhelming. It was the same for me almost three years ago when I started working with AI, and it’s still like drinking out of a firehose with the number of changes that happen on a weekly basis.
Like most people, my motivation has always been to tell a good story and to simplify my business processes, especially the ones I either don’t want to do or the ones that aren’t value-added.
Contact me today if you need help learning how to use AI tools within art and business.
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