📑 The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us

Charles Arthur maps the evolution of AI-created content until now and ponders where it might be heading. This is a useful reflection, touching on the rise of algorithmically organised sites, as well as apps and frameworks such as MidJourney, GPT-3 and GAN. Thinking about this, he has a stab at what might be next.

• You could hook up GPT-3 to MidJourney and get it to try incantations to produce pictures, and feed the output to GANs tuned to pick output that humans will like

• Once that’s working, try doing the same with the text-to-video generator hooked up to GANs tuned to pick output that humans will like

In the end, Arthur explains that the future is already here and is progressively taking shape around us.

All the disparate bits above might look like, well, disparate parts, but they’re available now (and that’s without mentioning deepfakes). The trees are here, and the forest might be starting to take shape. Here’s an example: a 40-page comic book about monsters, free for download (PDF), by Steve Coulson, in which all the images are drawn by MidJourney. It’s very, very impressive.