I came across an interesting story the other day. A company in Japan made a TV commercial for their product using an AI performer. The story is a little light on details. What, for instance is an AI performer? The ad features a CGI woman. The story tells us that her face was generated by an AI program that designed it after scanning "a large number of faces". We are, however, left wondering if her animation, her "acting", was produced entirely by AI or if it was manually animated by humans. The story uses the word "AI performer" so this would suggest the AI animated the character itself, but nothing is explicitly stated.
Regardless, it's an interesting gimmick and it introduces some questions.
But first, watch the ad:
You can easily understand the commercial message: drink this green tea and you will become younger and healthier.
Here is the story in English. It doesn't give many details, as I said before. The Japanese version of the story doesn't give any more.
The label design of the green tea bottle was also designed by AI. Although it does mention that human designers finalized the design.
Not a great design, but not any worse than what human designers usually dream up. Looks fine to me.
Then again, I'm not an actor or designer so I can't really judge the AI performer or the bottle label design. I suppose actors and designers may be much more critical than I am.
In my opinion, though, that doesn't matter. Much more interesting than this single commercial is what this commercial tells us.
AI will get better, as we've talked about on Hive many times, and eventually AI will be more creative/smarter/more capable than humans. That's inevitable as long as the technology keeps improving, and technology will keep improving unless some natural disaster or war stops it. The only question is how soon before we reach this point? It'll probably be much sooner than any of us think, because technological progress is speeding up as we move further up the exponential growth curve. Soon it will go vertical and we will make as much progress in a single day as we have in all of human history; then double that for the next day, and double it the next, and so on: the singularity, in other words, to give this point a name. You may think that's hyperbole. How could all of human technological progress be condenced into a day? But it's not! As this fantastic article details, technology has been ever speeding up. It is not hyperbole at all to say we are already high on an exponential growth curve, and the singularity will be here within our lifetime.
(I fully recommend you go read that article. It is really fantastic.)
I think this commercial is interesting because it represents to me that this will happen whether we want it or not. Many on Hive and elsewhere have written much about how we need to avoid AI anything, how it could lead to a future where all that makes us humans is lost and we become both lazy and stupid, allowing AI to do everything for us until we are like children and can no longer survive by ourselves. They did a Star Trek episode about that in the 1960s. Pretty good one.
Despite the caution from some of us, however, others are already embracing AI and are speeding towards this future as fast as they can, and it is this group that will push forward all of this technology, no matter how hard the other group drags their feet. This AI TV commercial may be the first, but it will soon be joined by others until it becomes more often than not to see AI performers.
And eventually, no more human performers. Another job will be lost to AI. Unlike robots of the past that mainly replaced blue collar jobs, AI will replace all jobs. Just as the automobile put horses out of a job, AI will put humans out of a job.
Capitalism won't be able to survive this. I mean, capitalism is already facing some challenges lately, but when there are no more jobs for humans, what then? I wonder what comes next.
What do you think?