Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, March 26 (Editor Qiu Siyu) Artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence) - a new technology science that researches and develops to simulate, extend and expand human intelligence. Since the concept of artificial intelligence was first proposed in 1956, the industry has experienced more than six decades of development.
Finally, at the end of 2022, this long slope and thick snow track ushered in a "singularity". Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC: AI Generated Content) has moved into the spotlight, igniting a "technological revolution" in various industries at a faster than expected growth rate. Whether it is "ChatGPT" and Wen Xin, or "Painter" DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion, generative AI is setting off subversive changes in various industries and giving birth to new formats.
The first AI animated film arrives
The Great White of "Super Marines", MOSS of "The Wandering Earth", Red Queen of "Resident Evil"... The AI robot characters in the movie carry most people's imagination of artificial intelligence, but in the real world, artificial intelligence is about to redefine the entire film industry.
Recently, Light Media issued an announcement that it will adapt Jinjiang's novel "Go to Your Island" into an animated film, and released the film's first promotional poster.
The poster was created by AI using image generation AI tools Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and the latest GPT-4 model. Light Media also said that AI will be deeply involved in the development and production of the animated film "Go to Your Island". This also means that "Go to Your Island" will become the first animated film in China that AI is deeply involved in production.
Overseas, teams have successfully used AI to create animations. On February 27, Corridor Crew, the production team behind the film and television, released an animated video called "Scissors, Rock, Cloth" on its YouTube channel Corridor.
In a behind-the-scenes video, the Corridor Crew team revealed that the animation was done with the help of the AIGC tool Stable Diffusion. In layman's terms, during the animation creation process, the team used AI to convert the live-action action video shot on the green screen into an animation style, eliminating the need for complex motion capture and details that required hand-drawn adjustments.
It is worth noting that the animation of "Scissors, Rock, Cloth" is 7 minutes and 21 seconds, and the production team of this animation is only three people. After the behind-the-scenes video was revealed, the animation attracted a lot of attention in the industry, and both its behind-the-scenes video and the animation itself exceeded a million views.
This has led the industry to think - what does AIGC-generated productivity mean for the film and television industry? Wang Changtian, chairman of Light Media, once said in an internal letter to employees, "The progress of ChatGPT since this year has made me more convinced that the combination of AI technology and content creation will enter the substantive stage and will bring great changes to the film and television industry." ”
NPCs with "souls" are born
In games, NPCs (non-player characters) tend to have no "soul". The interactive dialogue between NPCs and players is done by the game copywriting team, usually fixed text, and AIGC may allow game NPCs to really "speak".
In China, NetEase drank the "head soup". In February, the mobile game "Against the Water and Cold" officially announced the implementation of China's first "game GPT", and its in-game intelligent NPC system is completely powered by AI. According to reports, game intelligent NPCs can be infinitely extended based on dialogue semantics and remember the dialogue, so that the NPCs changed by the player can maintain the changed characteristics when they meet again.
In this regard, Huatai Securities analysts Zhu Jun, Zhou Zhao and others pointed out that different from the rigid and sluggish NPC interaction behavior of traditional games, the highly intelligent version of NPCs that continue to learn gets rid of the constraints of the "main plot", and as a member of the open world game, it is endowed with a "soul", thousands of faces, improving the freedom and openness of the game. The gameplay has been greatly improved, and it is also expected to further increase the frequency and depth of user payment, achieving a potential increase in revenue.
In addition to giving NPCs a "soul", AI also plays an important role in assisting large-scale scene construction and more detailed and personalized game settings.
In Microsoft Simulator, players are able to fly the entire globe of 197 million square miles. Microsoft is working with Blackshark.ai to train AI to generate realistic 3D worlds from 2D satellite imagery, and the model can be improved over time.
According to the virtual engine, Blackshark.ai can reconstruct the entire Earth's surface in 72 hours, generating more than 1.5 billion buildings and more than 30 million square kilometers of plants.
With the blessing of AIGC, the creative quality and creation efficiency of game content have been continuously improved, thereby improving the user's game experience and bringing richer game content.
All-around advertising "creative officer"
The creativity of an advertisement is a crucial factor that affects the final communication effect. At present, AIGC is trying to break the boundaries of creative marketing, not only acting as a "creative officer", but also participating in the planning, production and management of advertisements.
On March 15, Coca-Cola released a creative advertisement, which used Stable Diffusion to restore the world famous painting art exhibition, using a bottle of Coca-Cola as a medium to allow interaction between famous paintings, with the help of AI and 3D technology, real shots.
As early as February this year, Coca-Cola President and CEO Zhan Kunjie announced that he would explore new ways to improve marketing creativity through AI and comprehensively improve the company's operational capabilities. He believes that AIGC technologies such as ChatGPT can become an innovative marketing window, polish personalized marketing experience, and empower Coca-Cola's products.
Campbell Soup Company is also adopting AI technology to ensure its innovation in food and beverages. Companies find inspiration by tracking and curating billions of data points and leverage rapid design methods to develop new products that resonate with consumers.
"From an R&D perspective, AI provides a lot of inspiration to our food scientists," said Campbell's chief R&D and innovation officer. "By using the 'Flavor Bank' approach, we were able to develop the product in as little as four months."
In general, AIGC can not only accurately generate text, audio-visual, image and other forms of content, reduce content cost production costs, but also use it for marketing plan formulation, content distribution and process management. A content marketing revolution is underway...
epilogue
AIGC is trying to subvert the entire media industry, and while productivity is progressing, it has also spawned the anxiety of "AI replacing labor", which is also an impact on existing business models. Some creators are hostile to AI tools, and AIGC may indirectly cause the loss of mature creators; On the other hand, in the relatively capital-heavy animation and film markets, some small teams use AI to quickly create low-cost works, becoming "disruptors" in the existing business model.
This also raises copyright issues that cannot be ignored. One of the biggest controversies caused by Rock, Scissors, Cloth is the art style that the creators ended up with using Vampire Hunter D to train the AI. Since generative AI tools rely on Internet data for training, and the industry has not yet standardized it, how to define originality and plagiarism is still unknown.
In addition, the ethical issues derived from AIGC are also urgent issues to be solved in the industry. Since the explosion of AI painting, the function of learning the output picture for specific objects has caused AI painting to fall into a storm, and many communities have also emerged a number of models based on real people, which has caused controversy over the right to portrait of people. How to manage AIGC-generated content well and avoid potential infringement risks is also a mandatory course for the AI industry.