Are we moving into a DIY digital future?
Amidst all the endless hype-cycles that emerge, spin, die or transform into new cycles, it is often difficult to get a sense of any particular underlying direction of travel with digital innovation.
The latest hype is of course AI which brings with it a cascade of utopian and dystopian reactions via an emphasis on the term 'intelligence' in the acronym. However, it strikes me, that if we ignore the 'I' element in AI and focus on the artificial aspect, on the artifice, then it fits comfortably in a direction of travel that is not actually new, but is just a continuation of what has been happening all around us (without us necessarily noticing) for well over 15 years – a direction of travel that is at its most basic a reduction in cost of production and cost of distribution that is driving a DIY revolution.
AI may feel like an earthquake, but actually its just a judder on a much deeper and much older movement of digital plates.
DIY Entertainment
There is a whole new global generation being brought up on YouTube, TikTok and other content – a generation which barely engages with the media we love in the 'mainstream' space, and who worships individuals that the majority of us in LinkedIn will hardly have heard of. MrBeast, at the top of the pile, has over 240m subscribers in YouTube, with a single video easily gathering 50m views. And there's many, many others in that pile, with innumerable leaders in endlessly varied niche interest groups.
I believe the truly important side of the new images and videos being produced by AI is that it's bringing into the home capabilities that were previously available only to big-budget Hollywood blockbusters – and with it an ever greater boost-in-the-arm to that world of homegrown talent functioning outside of the 'mainstream'.
Online video streaming permitted DIY broadcasts. Smartphone cameras permitted DIY recording. AI is opening the doors to DIY fiction and drama, and this will no doubt result in individual superstar storytellers that, just like the influencers in social media today, will rise to serve a global audience with a huge tail of niche followings.
Perhaps it could be called the democratisation of production. But that's probably too wishy-washy a definition. I think the reality is much simpler – the costs associated with recording media have already plummeted and it looks like with AI the costs for fictional production will plummet too. If any business was asked 20 years ago whether one individual could create a global 'TV' channel with a quarter of a billion viewers without any capital investment, I'm sure they would have scoffed at the idea.
Is the rise of DIY fictional storytelling going to transform the entertainment space? In the context of video and images, we should really think of AI as just lowering the cost of CGI. Prime and others currently spend $1bn+ on fictional drama, but just as we have seen with Marvel, these huge costs generate a risk-averseness that stifle innovation. The non-fiction revolution of influencers is still very much at its beginning – but as the new generation ages, it will dominate ever more. AI looks like it's simply going to broaden that domination.
Yes, there is the very real question of IP and the necessity for AI to use existing materials, but if the tech companies can sort out appropriate revenue sharing then such things could be resolved and allow everyone to benefit appropriately –and with it ensure that AI isn't just regurgitating the same old, but that the system will also motivate and reward those who truly create the new.
DIY entertainment will not remove the need for talent - to create a DIY Lord of the Rings equivalent you will need to have the combined talents of J. R. R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson – something few of us have! The generative capabilities of AI will assist in crafting a vision, but it won't replace the need for talent. However, it will remove many hinderances to someone's use of their own talent.
DIY Business
One of my pet loves is bubble.io, a 'low code' environment that allows you to build web and mobile apps without the need for the full gamut of engineering skills typically required for such things. It comes already integrated into a database so coding frontend and coding backend is basically all one and the same.
Alongside the rise of low code tools is the rise of AI's ability to generate code. However, here, just as with DIY entertainment, I think we should focus on the artifice element and not the intelligence element. I don't believe AI will be able to generate some new amazing digital service simply by someone having a conversation with it. Just as DIY fiction will require talent that understands the nature of story telling and plot engagement, so a DIY digital business will require someone who understands not just business and money making, but understands and sees potential hidden away in technology that others cannot. It is, I believe, low code rather than AI which is the real revolution here, allowing one to work with technology like clay: to shape and play with it whilst still seeing and engaging in the underlying elements, in the same way a storyteller works with plot and character.
DIY Learning
I'm pretty certain that schooling for those under 18 will remain a highly structured, on-site experience – not only because a large proportion of learning at that age is about developing intrapersonal skills, necessitating real world interaction, but also because most parents are keen not to have their kids at home all day!
However one can see a much diverse future for post-school learning. Tapping into my own experience, I find myself studying part-time with a mix of formal materials from the Open University and a wide range of other materials I find online – materials that have come about as a consequence of the lowering of production costs and opening up access and distribution with digital.
With DIY learning I find the chat element of AI fills a gap – it enables me to explore an issue in a conversational way, similar to that I'd expect from a tutor. Critical to using AI for learning is a conscious awareness that the AI chatbot can give you incorrect answers (e.g. that it is not 'intelligent'!), but I have found if you treat the conversation as a dialectical experience, where you constantly challenge the response the AI gives you, then you are able to explore a wide variety of different angles and viewpoints.
I don't believe any of this is a threat to the human tutor, but it does strike me that it will be a threat to those universities whose brand/quality is in any way questionable. However, there does feel an important element still missing that will need to be cracked if this is to be a true revolution – something I think of as the socialised pathway of learning. We benefit by learning together as a group, debating and supporting each other as we work towards common goals. Specialist spaces such as Quora do point a way towards a more collegiate social experience than provided by typical social media, but they lack the structured group progression formal institutions provide. It feels though that it will only be a matter of time before this has been cracked and with it the potential for DIY learning truly released.
When we couple the ability to rapidly build new services via low code, with the huge rise in open API architectures that permit any new service to take advantage of existing 3rd party services, the barriers to entry for business are being reduced constantly. However, this then comes with an ever increasing challenge of how to get noticed and stand out from the crowd – a crowd that can only get bigger as technology develops.
A challenge for every business, old and new
Changes in supply, demand and control
In YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc, we have seen the rise of 'influencers' - DIY individuals who have made global names for themselves. And for every one superstar 'generalist', there are thousands of DIY specialists who have built a name for themselves in a niche interest area.
However, we have also seen the rise of near-global monopolies in the platform arena, with the ongoing success of any DIY superstar deeply connected to their complying to the algorithms & demands of the platforms. It would appear that for every shift in power that opens up the 'DIY' approach, the delivery platform increases in power too. We could almost think of it like two sides of a coin – the power that is (at least currently) distributed across millions of large and medium sized business is slowly splitting, with part of it shifting to an ever larger number of DIY services and the other part shifting to an ever smaller number of platforms. And AI is best thought of not as a new part of this redistribution, but as an accelerator of a very much established process of change.
The changes in balance of power and control are most readily visible in the political sphere, with Twitter, Facebook and others having the power to deeply influence the outcome of elections and to drive forward new political parties.
Experiment with the Future
It feels like the changes we see in the political space are just a harbinger of deeper changes that will affect us all as business people. However it is not as fast as we think, and much of the truly radical change is deeply linked to generational change, but taken together it is a collection of changes that will open up massive new opportunities for businesses & individuals but will also threaten and challenge existing ways of doing things in ways few of us can second guess.
However, there is no need to sit back and wait. Although the future is uncertain, the very forces that are shaping the changes are also creating opportunities for us to experiment and try out new radical ideas in a low cost and iterative manner. Using low-code and AI, new ideas can be brought to market at a fraction of the cost of just a few years ago. At Atticmedia we have seen many hype-cycles come and go, and have developed the expertise to separate the wheat from the chaff. Get in touch with us for a free, and entirely without obligation, chat about the challenges you are facing and how these new tools could help you.