An Entertainment + Tech Tasting Menu
Politics & Creators - Facebook Paid Events - GPT-3 & AI Tools
Welcome back to Entertainment + Tech. Each week will cover an interesting way technology & entertainment are colliding and where things might go from here. The goal is to serve as the starting point for a conversation: we need more people who stand in both the entertainment and tech worlds if we’re going to build great products & create great content.
I really want to hear from any and all of you what you think of the newsletter. I’d especially love to hear about interesting companies or topics you want me to talk about.
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This week will be a little different–I’m in the middle of moving, which is taking up most of my headspace & time. Instead of the usual essay, here are a couple articles I saw this week that touch on topics I find interesting, along with my quick thoughts.
Politics & Creators
First up: Should Politicians Adopt the Creator Playbook? by Benjamin Grubbs, a media VC and former director at YouTube. Grubbs points out the low YouTube engagement for Biden & Trump, despite the importance of the age groups YouTube could give them access to.
The statistics he pulls are interesting. Some of my notable takeaways:
Across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, & Twitter, Trump gets significantly more views.
Not every view is an endorsement of him–since he’s a highly visible public figure, some views would just be users wanting a first-hand view of the news [1]–but if Trump’s visibility & earned media are a big part of his campaign, he’s getting the numbers. Trump is certainly the more visible candidate.
Facebook & Twitter pull in much bigger audiences. This makes sense from a product & platform perspective.
Facebook & Twitter are built around conversations, which makes the kind of content these politicians are producing more viable there–users want to react, talk about the content & the candidates, share/snark on their timeline.
YouTube is built around the video itself, which isn’t a model that the content or personalities of these candidates are attuned to.
Trump has a 4x advantage in the amount of YouTube content being created about him.
Again, not all of it will be positive, but people are far more likely to talk about him on YouTube. This could speak to the enthusiasm of creators, or to the fact that Trump is a topic that will bring in views.
So if there’s a big voting block out there to be influenced, and so far candidates have failed to reach them, there are two straightforward directions I expect will become important in the future.
Politicians as Creators as Politicians
In the US, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a prototypical example of a politician who gets social media. She engages with constituents & fans through Instagram stories & Twitter clapbacks. Whether or not you agree with her policies, the content itself is authentic, because AOC is well-versed in these platforms. She gets their norms and their ethos, and in turn, these platforms have helped her grow her presence as a politician. As younger politicians enter the fray having grown up on Instagram & Twitter, I expect to see more politicians in her mold engagement-wise.
A bigger example is Kim Kataguiri, who at 22 became Brazil’s youngest congressman ever. He went viral for a political argument he posted on YouTube, grew it into a larger following, and rode that into Congress. [2] Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, though not quite a YouTuber, is also known for his presence & popularity there.
The presence and visibility afforded to creators is a huge advantage in attention. They make their own media. Younger aspiring politicians might see being a creator as a viable path to their career, and politically-minded creators may find themselves with enough juice behind them that they might as well make the leap into politics.
Creator Support
Not every candidate is a creator or can reasonably be one. The question, then, is how they can get access to these voters.
The simplest is paid advertising on these platforms. Ad spend is a standard campaign strategy, just a matter of figuring out where to put it.
Another avenue that’s likely to grow is how campaigns provide support to creators. Engaging with creators provides access to the audiences that have already been built. Making it easier for a creator to create or find benefit from it will spur them on. Depending on the creator and their reach, there are different tools available. For big channels, a campaign can invest more time, like an exclusive interview. For the small channels, they need to find ways to scale, like providing media assets. [3] Essentially, these campaigns need to make it easy & worthwhile for creators to talk about them.
Overall, as the current crop of young voters grow up with new norms around media consumption, politicians will have to follow. If they’re well-versed in the platforms of the future, they’ll be at an advantage.
Facebook Paid Events
Next, Facebook Launches Paid Online Events for Creators in Variety. [4] The point is pretty straightforward from the title: Facebook is allowing creators to start charging directly for online events and is testing similar functionality for Messenger Rooms.
In a straightforward reading, it makes sense that Facebook is moving along the value chain and cutting out companies like EventBrite. However, I like the signal sent by making creator payments a first-class citizen on Facebook’s platform. Generally, monetization strategies for creators on major platforms have revolved around advertising (and of course, Facebook’s business is just ads, plus or minus a few percentage points), either through pre-roll ads or through brand sponsorship of content.
That’s an alright model, but it’s awfully reductive. There’s so much more value in the relationship between creator & fan than just sneaking a product in front of a viewer’s eyeballs. Fans care deeply about supporting creators directly, being connected to them, and knowing that they have helped their favorite creator do their work. The successes of Patreon & Cameo build on that relationship.
In Facebook’s case, it’s exciting to see them build a tool to help creators monetize those relationships. This aligns Facebook more clearly with supporting creators. If Facebook stands to make more money here, and they’re well positioned to do so as a social giant, how else are they going to help creators find new audiences, connect more deeply with their fans, and provide other ways for fans to support them?
Is AI Coming for Your Job?
A bunch of articles on GPT-3. My take doesn’t actually depend on you reading these, but they’ll provide more context:
What GPT-3 can do (and what it can’t) in Meatspace Algorithms
OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin by Manuel Araoz
A college kid’s fake, AI-generated blog fooled tens of thousands. This is how he made it in the MIT Technology Review
GPT-3 Dr. Seuss poems about Elon Musk by Arram Sabeti
Hard Jobs
People worry about AI automating away blue-collar jobs, but it will come for creatives first.
Manufacturing jobs are surprisingly hard, computationally. Meatspace Algorithms brings up Moravec's paradox, which points out that the tasks we think are hard, like reasoning or math, are actually computationally easy. The trickier problems are all the complex sensorimotor functions that our brains have evolved to handle over millions of years.
The bar for AI quality in these jobs is also extremely high.
They’re real-time: the window from sensing all the way through to task completion is short.
They have real-world consequences: it’s hard or expensive to undo many physical actions
Humans may be in the loop (physically): humans have to be kept safe, and the AI has to model the possibilities for what that messy, unpredictable human might do.
All of this put together means that it will be a while before most manufacturing jobs can be truly automated.
Easy Jobs
Turns out there are a lot of jobs AI can do where the deadlines are much laxer, the output has no direct effect on the real world, and the human in the loop is a huge advantage. People are creating AI legal assistants, accountants, etc. If the AI there makes a mistake, no problem - you have a human check the output, quickly correct mistakes, and everything’s great. The AI still saved them time and lowered billing costs for the client.
Now, I’ll admit I was being dramatic saying AI will come for creatives. Araoz’s blog post is pretty good, but we’re still a long way off from coherent and meaningful scripts written entirely by machines. AI is great at generating content, but it doesn’t actually know whether it’s any good or accurate.
Consider the Dr. Seuss poems. There’s a smattering of clever bits throughout, but they’re definitely not great. It also took the author several hours of work to get them. Once he had parameters and prompts set, though, he could pump out an absurd number of lines–it was just a matter of filtering through them. The content wouldn’t be good without the human. I consider this using AI as a tool, and more will come along.
Tools
Even with AI tools, there are four big ways humans still need to be involved (for now):
Construction - someone needs to build the tool. This might be the eventual art creator, building a tool to express themself in a new way. As I talked about previously, tools open up new possibilities.
Direction - someone needs to point the tool at a problem. GPT-3 is a huge model that “knows” a lot of stuff, but a creator needs to direct it with the prompt.
Curation - someone needs to sift through the output and pick out what’s good.
Editing - someone has to take the output and correct it where needed.
I’ll come back to do a deeper dive into potential AI tools in a future week, but for right now I’ll say: a lot of people are putting out pure GPT-3 samples they’ve generated as an example of what’s possible. I’m more excited to see how people can scale their output by letting AI do the heavy lifting, then applying their creative skill and eye to make it their own. I’m excited to see how people who lacked access before can use these tools to express their vision. [5]
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[1] Some of those views would be Sarah Cooper watching on repeat for her next lip sync video.
[2] Buzzfeed had a great article about Kataguiri & his movement.
[3] Or Michael Bloomberg offering $150 to micro-influencers to make memes about him.
[4] I’m not diving into the Apple Tax aspect of the article. I’m no legal scholar, but my expectation is that Apple is probably fine antitrust-wise, but they’ll take a beating in the public PR war.
[5] To me, this has similarities to the no-code movement. Now, knowledge of a particular tool or skill is less of a barrier to creation. As an example, Jordan Singer’s Figma plugin which lets you specify in words how an app should look, then generates it.
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