Technology

The current trajectory of AI produced media is pointing toward personalized content. Every viewer would have their own exclusive shows and movies. This sounds great on the surface, but is actually mostly terrible.

Media today brings people together, by watching movies together or discussing the latest episode of a new series. With personalized content, not only will none of your friends have seen the show you're watching, but they won't even be able to see it; it lives only in your account on some proprietary streaming service and might even have been generated on-the-fly, never to be seen again.

Additionally, you can be certain that any company producing AI-generated content will put their own biases into it as much as possible. When streaming services push out competition in favor of in-house generated content, viewers will only have access to content skewed one way, further polarizing people based on which service they watch. With personalized content, those biases become much harder to scrutinize, because no two people can watch the same piece of content to compare opinions or analysis.

Finally, if you step back and consider the purpose of watching video content, it's mostly for entertainment. A moderate amount of varied entertainment can be healthy to unwind or pass the time, but an infinite source of "perfect" content encourages unhealthy media habits like binge-watching, and is unlikely to challenge the viewer's beliefs or support their mental health. Distress drives engagement, as social media has proven.

Once studios can produce fully AI generated movies, personalized media won't be far behind. Cheap AI generated personalized media is coming. If it takes hold, it'll push us all further apart.

I hope none of these predictions come to pass, but we'll see whether good intentions win over money this time.