Generative Tech Is the Next Big Disruption in the Creative Industry

In case you haven’t had enough disruption this year, brace yourself for another major shift in technology that is rewriting the rules for the entire creative industry. For years, the roles of digital creators were to be the dreamers, storytellers and artists of their digital content and the role of computers was to provide the tools that helped bring this art to life. However, today the roles of creatives and computers are blurring as a long awaited technology, called Generative Tech, has become commercially viable in the past few months and is growing at an unprecedented rate. 

As the result of rapid advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning, computers are now auto-generating all types of complex content with just a simple prompt. AI Image Generators like Dall-E can take any text prompt and generate a photorealistic, computer-generated image with such high quality that it may replace the need to do many creative photo shoots. Other Generative Tech tools like Jasper.ai can take an idea and make an entire story from scratch. Over the past year, several new Generative Tech tools have emerged that generate podcasts, websites, and music which begs the question - if computers are now the modern creators, what is the role of creators? More importantly, how will the industry use this technology to reach a new creative horizon by collaborating with computers in a more meaningful way?

Creativity was something we once thought was uniquely human; however, in this article by NFX on the growth of Generative Tech, it describes how this new advancement  “turns deep learning engines into collaborators to generate new content and ideas nearly like a human would.” It involves “what will actually touch us – what you can do with AI as a partner.” 

At Vū, we are a creative technology company, rooted in real-time graphics generation, so this advancement is foundational to our mission of empowering the world to create content at the speed of thought. We believe this evolution in generative tech will democratise the creative industry and remove the barrier of entry for anyone to bring their creative idea to life. In the next few years, we believe three major shifts will occur in the video production industry which will make “content at the speed of thought” possible.

Virtualisation, Automation, and Decentralisation

First, the process of creating video content will adopt virtual tools to make production faster and increase creative capability. This Virtualisation has already begun as we are seeing with virtual production, starting with the use of virtual studios like those in the Vū network, virtual backgrounds, then the proliferation of virtual props and virtual lighting. Eventually everything in the scene, including the actor, will be virtual.

Second, the production processes will automate like we are seeing with AI Generative Tech. AI Orchestrators will be used in command sequences to generate and automate several processes that were once manual. It’s conceivable that a simple text prompt could be generated into a full story which could then be generated into a short movie with a fully generative soundtrack, characters and unique scenarios. This would allow creatives to share their ideas in real-time and move quicker to the creative iteration and revisioning stage to polish their creation.

Third, the creative production process will decentralise globally as accessibility to these tools democratises production, disrupting traditional localised creative clusters like Hollywood. This will allow more content to be made faster than ever and as more people are able to participate in the creator economy new creative ideas will emerge faster than ever.

This month, when OpenAI released their API for Dall-E it marked a pivotal point in time where content generation automation is now available to connect to traditional workflows to start this second disruption. Generating photorealistic, unique content that appears contextually accurate will accelerate us toward the final disruption of world wide accessibility.

At Vū, we believe that everyone has a story to tell and one day that story will help make itself. Until that day comes, we’ll be working hard on bringing this technology to life!