FUTURE
A Couple of Thoughts on the Future of Human Creativity
early reflections on OpenAI’s SORA text-to-video model breakthrough

"Remember this day", a popular columnist of some well-known media would write — the world will never again be as it was before the release of OpenAI’s SORA text-to-video model, a development that shocked millions around the world and seems to be just the beginning.
And likely, they will write, invoking fear about how hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, how thousands of companies, both small and large, and dozens of startups, poised to release or having already launched similar products, will face bankruptcy, and how the entire world of video production and all creative industries will be irrevocably changed.
Oh yes, I’m hearing this song…
“It’s just the beginning, it’s not the end Things will never be the same again It’s not a secret anymore Now we’ve opened up the door Starting tonight and from now on We’ll never, never be the same again Never be the same again”
So it will be. But there is one big ‘but’.
Hasn’t the world already gone through this? Wasn’t photography supposed to kill painting, and cinema — the theater?
The more technologies appear for content generation, whatever form this content may take, the more productive these technologies and the higher quality the result, the more “handmade” human creativity will be valued.
A vivid illustration of a future where machine intelligence surpasses human capabilities is seen in chess. From the moment it became undisputed that computers play chess better than humans, the interest in ‘machine vs. human’ or ‘machine vs. machine’ chess competitions vanished. Instead, there was a surge of interest in ‘human against human’ chess, which, thanks to the same computer algorithms, cloud technologies, and the freemium business model, has acquired wonderful new forms and scales.
So it will be with other areas of interest to humans. The presence of increasingly powerful and high-quality algorithms for creating anything will over time lead to even greater interest in purely human expressions of creativity, even if such expressions also use machine algorithms and models.
And if soon we should expect more strict requirements and better tools for labeling content created by machines, in the future it will be obvious that everything not specifically marked as created by humans was made by a machine, and this will not need to be somehow marked. Instead, human-made content will not only need to be indicated but will want to be noted, as it will confer a separate higher status to such content, even if its quality is worse than machine-made. Your images on the website, if hand-drawn by a person, and videos shot with real people in real nature, will give your site, your company, you personally a higher image and status among clients, partners, and in the human community as a whole, compared to sites where images are generated by a machine.
People will get tired of artificially generated content very quickly.
No! It will continue to be generated. In huge volumes. But it will be of no interest to anyone.
Prepare for even the most ordinary things to require an author’s human making to attract anyone’s attention.
And the most in-demand technologies will not be those determining what is made by a machine (since everything will be presumed machine-made unless proven otherwise), but rather technologies for confirming that the creation process was human-led — be it in part, in majority, or from start to finish. This applies regardless of the content type, such as confirming that I personally wrote this text from beginning to end. It might have taken an hour or more (I didn’t keep track, though an algorithm might have), especially since I rephrased several sentences multiple times to find the most suitable wording. Me, a human, did this, hoping it will resonate with other humans who read it.
So, no matter how many algorithms appear, and no matter how powerful they are, writers will write, artists will paint, creators will create. And people — will watch this, listen to it, and talk about it. Because for a person, nothing and no one is more interesting than another person, even she herself is less interesting to herself than another.
And there is only one reason for this, which is that people die, and machines do not.
So watch out! As soon as you see that people are there but they no longer die, it will mean the reign of machines has begun. You’ll notice this by starting to generate your own cool texts and perfect videos. Without any effort or thinking why. At a blink of your beautiful artificially alive but dead eye.
But don’t worry, it won’t come soon. And meanwhile, like it or not, the writers will be writing. The painters will be painting. The artists will be creating. And people will still be dying. Because, fortunately, so far, they can.
