Drake used Tupac to diss Kendrick Lamar.
The homie Preach hit me up with thoughts. In his mind it’s both wildly disrespectful but also a problem.
Drake effectively used intellectual property, the likeness of Tupac without consent.
Everything with this beef can be called a marketing stunt.
He raises a valid point with regards to the IP of a likeness. While I don’t see this as a big deal, it is entirely possible a company can steal your identity to market whatever they want.
The concerns Preach hit me with are super valid and as I think about it will bring our world into an entirely new era. Without someone validating authenticity, everything can be questioned as a fake.
Did Drake even write Push Ups?
Big industry is likely going to replace human stars with AI
At least one of these Hollywood folk is going to sell their likeness to a studio.
That studio will make an entire movie featuring the likeness of that celebrity. It will be someone high profile who knows how to act real good.
The movie will get nominated for a bunch of awards and then all of a sudden scandal arises. Someone will break an NDA and confirm that the actor never acted.
It was all AI.
Chances are when that happens if the movie was really good, a lot of people will let that fact slide.
The next time studios will be more transparent. No one wants a repeat of the big AI actor fiasco.
Despite the rah raging online, because enough people liked the AI performance, they are now willing to go give the next few films featuring AI stars.
People will start protesting it and fighting it, which will make even more people check out the movies. Then even more will support the fake actor trend.
The laws will be updated to prohibit big business from using real people. They’ll find loopholes and create fully “animated” movies that look photorealistic featuring AI casts.
In the current lonely state of parasocial relationships, enough people will go, “Good enough”, and accept the fake people before them.
Then one day Hollywood will avoid humans and just use the fully programmable virtual stars they’ve created to shell products instead.
Scary, but will we let this happen?
Without protections in place we are in for a messy few years of fake news
When you see any video or content piece you should wait before reacting.
We’ve already passed the threshold where realistic fakes are everywhere. While most people don’t have access to top tier tools, they are coming.
Soon enough it will be very reasonable for trolls to cause absolute mayhem online.
Politicians will endorse fakes as long as the messaging aligns with their platform. Even if Drake published the song on his platform there is reasonable doubt that can be had to Push Ups validity (I think it’s real).
These tools are being let out into the world soon and anyone will have access.
If we think back to the last US election cycle, we learned that Russia and other countries really do use troll farms to cause chaos.
Imagine what we will see once we can get anyone to say anything.
While I love AI and think it’s wonderful I can’t deny there is some scary stuff to come. The other day I saw a car that had been keyed. Instantly my brain went to revenge as the motivation.
Imagine the revenge stuff people will do with AI.
A jilted lover could lace real facts into a deepfake made in the voice of the person who scorned them.
I already see Elon Musk and others trying to sell me things all the time in these awfully produced, clearly fake ads.
There should probably be some checks and balances in place before too many celebrities use dead people to break the internet.
AI is likely going to make a lot of mediocre people focus less on their skills
The rise of ChatGPT has motivated me to focus more on honing my writing skills
My prediction is that many people will see how AI makes things easier. Then they stop working on their fundamental skills.
In some cases it won’t make a difference, like using a denoiser plugin versus recreating the effect by hand. In other cases it will matter a lot, like hearing whether or not the denoising effort worked in the first place.
Does the denoise effort require some other effect now for the song to sound good?
There is a lot to be said for practice. Even using AI to create art for you will become an art in and of itself.
Through practice you can find your own style, proving how you are unique. This process takes time and likely a lot of failure.
AI cannot give you swagger. AI can help you work on improving your existing swagger but anything it comes up with is derivative by nature.
When you let AI do the work for you, like I do with my article thumbnails, it feels very sanitized.
I know the people who use AI will compensate for the sanitization of machines, but humans are so uniquely sloppy it will never be the same outcome as when we do it.
In order to turn their sloppy imperfections into beautiful art, humans need to work on their skills.
AI will be extra problematic for lazy people
At first AI will come through and steal identities and make everything look easy.
Then we will discover the new version of mediocrity found in the world of AI. In the same way that all companies steal each other's logo ideas, we’ll start to see other AI trends.
Uniqueness will start to manifest itself amid the clones of the AI universe.
When the dust settles it will be like it is now.
Most people’s newsletters look the same. The content is stylistically different, but all functions as a newsletter should.
Then all of a sudden you find someone who couldn’t care less what the rules are and makes something amazing you actually want to follow.
AI’s future is going to be like that. This sea of mediocrity mixed in with truly great art. All you need to do is open up Spotify to get a sense of what that is like in real life.
It will be crappy how foul a lot of corporate entities are going to act. It’s questionable if Drake should have used Tupac to diss Kendrick. In the meantime all of this is coming and we should be prepared.
Keep your swords sharp and don’t get lazy now.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone