Veo 3 screams redundancy. But not for the people pushing the button...
The astonishing capabilities of Google DeepMind’s Veo 3 have caused a wave of chatter across social media. If you haven’t seen the evidence, it’s worth checking out. The text-to-video platform is allowing people to create hyper-realistic video with synced audio soundtracks - often from fairly basic prompts.
As a result, we have video of artificially-generated characters bemoaning their lack of autonomy and speculating that they might be controlled by prompts. They discuss what they should talk about, now that they can talk. To describe it as a creepy and bewildering dystopia is not really doing justice the scale of the problems now being created.
There are many, many reasons to be fearful of this astounding technology. These include the deep-fake benchmark ratcheting up about 20 notches and the use of the tech in political disinformation and psychological warfare. There’s also the issue of our not being able to trust anything we see and hear. (As others have argued, the danger may not be that we believe things we shouldn’t, but rather our not believing or dismissing the stuff that’s real.)
As you know though, the central theme of my recent book is about human redundancy in the face of AI. Unsurprisingly on LinkedIn, we immediately see people claim that Veo 3 won’t take their jobs, but just allow them to extend their creativity and expand their horizons. They’ll be able to create more adventurous content for their marketing communications and entertainment platforms much quicker, leaving them additional hours in the week to… errr… create yet more content perhaps?
These people completely and utterly miss the point. Even though Sam Altman foresees 95% of agency work in marketing being done by AI (meaning many of the button-pushers and bot-whisperers may actually lose their jobs in due course), the more immediate impact is on people who are not at a desk prompting the tech.
Veo 3 means redundancy for actors. It means redundancy for camera operators. It means redundancy for costume designers. It will spell disaster for make-up artists, location searchers, catering companies and security businesses. That’s because this tech isn’t just coming for video that is currently used to promote gyms and smoothies, or commercials for airlines and cars, but it will also become the way in which TV shows and movies get constructed. It will be how news is presented.
Of course, we’re not there yet. And this is part of the problem. People can’t quite believe what’s around the corner. As I’ve said in my book, we think as humans that we will always be needed because we have always been needed.
When the UK entered World War II in September 1939, there began what was called the ‘phoney war’. No bombs were dropped on London. An expeditionary force set itself up on the continent. Everyone carried gas masks, but wondered whether they would ever be needed.
We’re in the equivalent of the AI phoney war right now. We’re preparing for something that we can’t quite imagine. And because it hasn’t yet hit, we tell ourselves that it won’t.
Those in Silicon Valley know different.