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Which brings us to the last three years... to the advent of genAI.
Let’s not split hairs. Today’s genAI is not the technology of yesterday.
Pedants will argue that we’ve “always had this technology,” as early as fifty years ago, in a different form. That nothing is really different, except the marketing. To those pedants: I advise you to listen to the podcast The Last Invention by Longview. This podcast addresses your misleading claim directly, with primary sources whose (still living) voices you get to listen to. I won’t bother refuting this argument, because this podcast does it so much more deftly than I ever can.
Suffice it to say, today’s genAI is not like yesterday’s, in form or function.
When I started playing with Stable Diffusion 1.5 and Midjourney three years ago, I felt the same sense of wonder I felt watching Jurassic Park for the first time. I heard the cockroaches crawling around in the darkness under the neon glow of that monitor, as if I were a child again.
Suddenly, some of my dead dreams stirred to life. I saw a glimpse of the creative possibilities this new technology was offering. I told my friends that in a year or two, given the pace of development I was seeing online, we’d have the tools to create studio-quality films out of thin air. They laughed at me then. And now we have Sora 2, Veo 3.1, WAN 2.2, LTX, CogVideoX, and HunyuanVideo.
By the time you read this, new models will likely be on the market that eclipse the technical prowess of these I’ve named.
Just as YouTube democratized video, and print-on-demand brought publishing to indie creators, genAI gives people who might not have the formal training, access, or physical ability powerful tools to execute their vision. The average joe, the non-visual artist, and the disabled creator can now participate in creative spaces previously closed to them. And this is only considering image and video generation.
GenAI ushers in a moment in history when creators without funding, industry connections, or elite credentials can compete with studios that regularly churn out creatively stagnant "slop" constrained by the market. Small, agile creators can move faster than big corporations. We can iterate, publish, and revise at speeds that used to require entire production departments and huge marketing budgets. GenAI makes it possible to go from idea to execution at speeds never before imaginable, leveling the playing field by enabling digital bootstrapping for millions of creators.
Now I grant, this all feels like an unnatural progression, because of the rapidity at which it's all happening.
- We started by burning images we took of the real world into film, and physically manipulating that film to make the thing. It took forever, and it was extremely expensive.
- Then, we burned images we took of the real world into rewritable disks, and digitally manipulated those images to make the thing. It saved us thousands of hours, and it was way less expensive.
- Next, we discovered that we could actually create the images rather than take them; it was painstaking, and required technical know-how, but we created dinosaurs, and other things that aren’t practically feasible to construct in the real world. It was also expensive and time-consuming, but not nearly as expensive and time-consuming as if we had done it the old fashioned way.
- Fast forward to today: suddenly, we have the ability to generate those same images out of thin air, without technical know-how or thousands of hours of modeling and compositing work, translating our thoughts via natural language into fully fledged simulacra of reality. It’s wildly inexpensive (by comparison) and wildly efficient.
The end result: the more integrated this technology becomes into our processes, the more we can focus our energy on the end result of our creative vision.
That, in my opinion, is the real value of these tools: not in the things it generates, but in that it generates more of our scarcest resource of all: time.
GenAI gives us back time to make meaning, because we spend less time manufacturing the technical components that make up that meaning.
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