Nearly 20 years after Web 2.0, AI is once more shaking society to its foundations.
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In 2006, TIME broke with its usual tradition of naming a “Great Man” as its “Person of the Year.” (Previous winners splashed across its glossy covers included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh and Mahatma Ghandi.)
Instead, this year’s recipient was … you. “Yes, you,” ran the headline. “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
Web 2.0 was the tool that produced this development.
It shifted the still-burgeoning Internet from “read only” to “read-write”, enabling millions and millions of web denizens to interact with content instead of passively consuming it like some giant digital newspaper. More than any other site, YouTube exemplified this development. Launched a year prior, it put creators in the driver’s seat.
Web 2.0 Broke The Creative Dam
This shift weakened Hollywood gatekeepers and its aging studio system. Anyone with a WiFi connection could now upload their video for all the world to see. And comment upon.
This last part is key. It wasn’t simply that anyone could now add to the web—not just read it. Another revelatory aspect was the social component. Facebook launched two years prior, catapulting social media into the public consciousness. Suddenly, you could present your content to crowds for their adoration. Or scorn. Or rage. Or any other emotion.
Two decades later, Web 2.0’s shock wave is still rippling through culture. What’s unique about this moment is that the creator community now has another powerful tool at its disposal: AI.
Like every major technological shift, it carries opportunity and risk.
Hollywood’s Slow-Motion Demolition
Before exploring that future, let’s check back in on Tinseltown. Its current decline mirrors the publishing industry circa 2006. As Variety just reported, “October was a bust at the box office as big-budget tentpoles and awards contenders like Disney’s Tron: Ares and Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine struggled to sell tickets. Overall revenues for the month were tragic with $425 million across all titles, the worst collective haul since October 1997…”
Gatekeepers in both Hollywood and publishing commanded immense power in their heydays, an outgrowth 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 on YouTube.
On the one hand, such content democratization is liberating. Subject to reach, it platforms anyone desiring a voice. On the other, it’s decimated our monoculture. Gone are the days when we read the same books or watched the same shows. As Abhinandan Kaul writes for Medium, itself a web 2.0 blog that undermined legacy media like 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 the faintest clue what the other is watching. You’re in one corner of the net where Kendrick’s diss to Drake is a cultural earthquake; they’re in another where it’s all sigma male edits of Patrick Bateman and Awadh Ojha’s motivational reels. You both laugh. Just not at the same things.”
Content Creators 3.0 Are Here
AI is poised to reshape culture far more in the coming years, for good or bad, leading to what we might call the rise of Content Creators 3.0, so named due to their adoption of AI. In January, I sought to understand what’s coming, describing what I saw as the YouTubization of Hollywood for Forbes. I suggested it wouldn’t be long before the public casted themselves in videos much like the plotline from Ready Player One when the technology arrived.
It’s advancing by the second. As ResetMedia explains, “Virtual production is no longer a luxury reserved for big-budget projects. With tools such as Unreal Engine, creators can design peerless virtual sets, shoot, and never step out of the studio. Texturing and lighting AI is so sophisticated that entirely creating worlds on a laptop is now feasible for solo filmmakers.”
AI gives independent creators unprecedented capabilities. OmniTalker produces “perfect lip sync” from any image or video so that anything someone says matches up onscreen. Helpful for creating talking head videos, especially for marketers, these can also be used for the spate of deepfake videos flooding the internet and undermining trust in legacy media. There are even sites like flexclip.com offering creators tutorials on how to “generate fake news articles” and make “prank news videos.”
While it’s helpful that new avenues are open for Content Creators 3.0, there are real dangers for artists who are concerned by replaced not just by fast-moving technology, but technology offering synthetic copies of themselves.
The Power and Peril of AI on Creativity
This captures the double-edged nature of technological progress. New benefits and problems emerge from any innovation, but especially the AI juggernaut. When it comes to the latter, Hollywood is reeling from a similar challenge the music industry faced years ago with its Napster debacle: piracy.
Morgan Freeman recently spoke out about the problem so many actors face now that it’s possible to misappropriate their likeness with AI. “If you’re gonna do it without me, you’re robbing me,” he said, according to eWeek. The site also reports, “Actors such as Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves, and Stephen Fry have similarly spoken out about the ‘creepy’ advancement of 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.”
Sadly, Hollywood isn’t alone in its pain.
Many other creatives are being harmed from AI piracy. Video game voice actors are especially feeling the squeeze. Cissy Jones, whose credits include Baldur’s Gate III and Starfield, has raised the alarm about such intellectual property theft. She was quoted in The Guardian saying, “It is very easy to steal a person’s voice. At the beginning of 2022 it took six hours. At the beginning of 2023 it took three hours. Do you want to guess what it takes right now? Three seconds. Anything you have on Instagram, TikTok, any YouTube videos, anybody can create a digital version of your voice from just that. Is it perfect? No, but the technology is not getting worse.”
Now For the Remix
There is another major shift unfolding alongside YouTubization, what I call Remixization. You can observe it in the many mashups of popular songs re-performed but in another genre. These have been around for some time, but some might argue they are increasing in their “quality” due to the ever-advancing sophistication of AI tools. Examples include “Smells Like Teen Spirit (1960’s Country Version)” by Red Dead and “Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters” (1950s Chicago Blues Fusion) by Tape Mind.
It is unclear whether fans or the artists themselves welcome these creative liberties. How the law will interpret potential copyright infringement is also murky. For now, we can see the effects of Remixization in a related story. The first AI-generated country song, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, just reached number 1 on the Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. “‘Breaking Rust,’ however, 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 credits listed on Spotify,” per People.com.
This development highlights a core tension in Remixization. So many top AI models, like OpenAI, were trained on content lifted from the internet, often without artists’ knowledge or consent. As AI continues progresses technologically, it can use such data to produce emergent artistic content the original creators never imagined. Or sanctioned.
TIME got it right nearly 20 years ago when it observed creative power shifting vertically to horizontally. It took a few years for Hollywood and, more recently the gaming world, to feel tremors from the earthquake already threatening the publishing and music industries. Nowadays, we stand at an inflection point, caught between the twin forces of YouTubization and Remixization, wondering how much more AI will disrupt society.
Where content goes in the coming years is uncertain. But it’s taking us all with it, like it or not.