One constant in our ongoing civilization is a continuous branching of complexity. Assuming civ continues, how does your entertainment become more tailored to you as you imagine it?
Decades ago I wanted a game where a world building economy game, industry and domestic simulators, real time war strategy, and a first person shooter that bridges to an adventure/explorer were all combined into one. This is a game where all of these roles could be filled by autonomous AI characters, but where recruiting and filling roles creates dynamic complexity that is advantageous for all. Each layer of gameplay dictates the constraints of the next while interactions across layers are entertaining and engaging for all.
It does not need to be gaming. What can you imagine for entertainment with tailored complexity?
The trouble with this is you will never stumble onto something you had no idea you liked.
For instance, I’m not a fan of metal music or folk music. If there was a gatekeeper I would have never heard Mongolian metal band The HU.
something you had no idea you liked.
What a great description of creativity!
I mean ironically “the algorithm” is this but with curating instead creating content and people talk about being surprised all the time.
Most models introduce a little bit of randomness or boundary pushing precisely for the reason you mentioned
I think of it this way.
I read people talking about the huge differences in styles between 2024 and 2000 and how everything changed.
Then I look at the styles in 1960 and 1984 and see really big changes.
The algorithm is going to err on the side of what I’ve already liked. It’s not going to jump in with something totally off the wall.
It can even be worse - pigeonhole you and only offer what it thinks your demographic wants.
My music tastes are a bit of everything, but I listened to a bit of classic rock and now it only wants to give me that and conservative podcasts
I started watching YouTube recently but it really seems to have pigeonholed me very differently than what I’ve followed
Yes and no right? Again randomness or “temperature” is pretty standard
“The same thing every day” is likely to appeal to few.
The echo chamber effect or honestly the worse effect showing just the worst of people you disagree with, is a real issue though. Kind of an effect of selection bias though too
That’s how I predict the next generation of social media will be. Completely AI-generated. Your feed, every single post you see, every comment, every like, everything. Imagine, no human moderator ever needed because they can generate content compliant with every single governance body in the world and advertiser-friendly. Post/comment you posted will be seen by no one, but LLM will comment on it and agree with you, giving you fake internet points.
Worst of all? The vast majority of people are going to love it. Do you remember when GenAI first came out and people hated it? Now fully AI-generated channels/content creators are everywhere people shared the hell out of it.
We are not far from there tbh, just need more desensitization about GenAI tech in the population.
I think you will find that the easiest media to access will always be the dumbest. The trick is when to decide that you’re done being the smartest person in the room and go find other rooms.
I see people complaining about this quite often, but I do not experience it. I never watch AI stuff other people are producing, but I do not participate in other social media platforms. I use all of the FOSS tools and platforms that result in no ads or content forced upon me. I watch several people on YT regularly, but I have all the tools in place to prevent ads, and of the people I watch, all have academic credentials and a reputation.
I think generative AI has a bright future, but not in some negative vane. It will supplement as a tool, not replace people or other content. All tools can be abused and many are abusing AI. There problem here is a culture of no ethics and acceptance of abuse. If you’re unwilling to stop watching or using a platform, then you have proven that these techniques are viable and profitable. Your willingness to walk away is the determining factor. Over time, culture will evolve to walk away from and seek out content that fits the individual instead of self suppression to fit what is easily available.
I imagine a video content platform (movies, series, short form, etc) that generates the content as you watch it, and adjusts in real time based on your engagement, with optional prompting. Like I could start out by prompting it with “a show like The Office, but if it were directed by Tim Robinson; prioritize my laughter” and it takes it from there, adjusting as it goes to include more of what makes me laugh.
This would of course have to be run locally. I’d never sign up for something this invasive if it were connected to the internet at all
Have you noticed how LLMs are more like this now? My older starting context stories don’t work any more, but I can start cold with one sentence and get into the same spaces fluidly.
I think people will like something that is even more immersive in their interactions than just a window into a show like program. AI really needs to be grounded in collaborative interaction. I don’t picture that changing. The show becomes more of a friends around a campfire meta-dynamic in a context of your choosing. I do a lot of this already with my own science fiction universe and a LLM.
I absolutely think this will be very popular, but I (and many others, I’m sure) often like to just sit back and mindlessly watch- I don’t always want to participate in the entertainment.
Especially if we get FDVR though- it could be like blending video games with TV/movies
I know what you mean about tuning out. For me, even with engagement, I’m still able to largely tune out. I use text models a little differently in that I am in a full text editor like setup. The model will continue my character’s part of the interaction. The more I change and alter this, the more it shapes what it generates for me. Eventually it becomes so collaborative that I am only making small changes to all characters. It becomes both disconnected and entertaining for me very quickly. I’ve been doing this a whole lot for over a year and have developed the language to interact well with alignment patterns and behaviors. I see that learning curve decreasing with time and making this more main stream. We really need better compute hardware though so that multi modal interaction is more feasible.
Instagram and Facebook feeds already work a lot like this. They throw in a few random posts between the ones you’re actually subscribed to see and after a while you’ll realise the random ones are more of the sort you lingered on for longer and there aren’t so many of the others.
The problem, for both the viewer and the content server, is that this technique gets stuck in local maxima, that is, after a while it tends to serve exclusively one kind of unsubscribed content and stands little chance of broadening into the viewer’s other interests, assuming there are any.
From an outside perspective, this is a good thing in a way because it gets that viewer out of the clutches of the content server for a while once the viewer is sufficiently bored, but it’s a bad thing if you’re a viewer hungry for content, and especially bad for the content server who is desperate for that viewer to stay, eyes glued to the site, where they will see more of the advertisements that pay for everything.
Since I was a teenager I dreamed of a strategy game where you could zoom in so far you are in personal combat, but can zoom out to a tactical, or strategic, or higher level. Total War Warhammer is kind of this.
I’m my childish mind I imagined each fighter in a battle controlled by a human on both sides. Then you could rank up and determine tactics, succeed and you determine strategy.
This will never work of course, but to a naive mind in 1997 it seemed like the coolest new thing.
I don’t play games much anymore but when one grabs my attention I go hard. Hoping Stalker will be good.
We will get whatever companies and algorithms push at us, just like social media. The idea that media is tailored to us is a bit of a myth in my opinion when that tailoring can be overridden at the whim of an advertiser paying more than the competition.
I’m also not sure that tailoring things is really good for personal growth. Of course we all have tastes and prefer certain genres in terms of things like games, books, movies, music etc but having just tailored content seems like a bit of a dead end street where its more and more difficult to find experiences you’ve never even considered, let alone tried.
I’m looking for a bigger picture perspective, like a few centuries from now when there are space colonies and far more humans exist than the present.
I understand how disconnected this can seem in the present, but there are thresholds in the future that will disconnect the present struggles and constraints. In a world of hundreds of billions of people, viability changes, and so does the niche market.
In the present, it is possible to fully control all aspects of entertainment and media. It is not the easiest path, but I do it. No one forces any media on me, and I never watch a commercial for anything, but I also sit behind and maintain a whitelist firewall and will not use any website or service that obfuscates their web credentials or relies on JavaScript.
Ultimately, in the big picture, you put up with the nonsense and that determines the behaviors of the market.
