What ChatGPT will really disrupt is the cost of content creation

On March 27, an open letter calling for a moratorium on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 was signed by Musk, Stuart Russell, author of "Artificial Intelligence: Modern Methods," Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and thousands of other tech people, pushing the discussion about ChatGPT to a more general level.

Musk and others' worries that AI will run out of control without safety supervision is due to a sense of human self-responsibility, or another way to eat grapes and say grape sour, it is difficult to conclude for a while. But from a historical perspective, not all carps can jump through the dragon gate, and the node of productivity iteration is always accompanied by one or another opposition. This is why soon after the open letter was issued, some netizens released a cartoon of "When the electric light was first used, people compared it to an uncontrolled demon that would electrocute everyone to death" to satirize this fanfare stop.

Since OpenAI announced the opening of plug-in systems to third parties, ChatGPT is destined to disrupt everyone's cognitive habits and existing industry models.

The issue of AI's safety ethics certainly requires a headache. But in the face of unstoppable evolution and change, as a content creator, we should consider more about: how to become the helm of individual destiny at the moment of the singularity.

Panic and excitement coexist

Since the launch of ChatGPT-3.5 late last year, every update of AIGC's technology is washing away the perception of the content creation industry. Even this washout cycle is getting shorter, from a big news in a few months to now waking up to a new world almost every day.

More and more industries and people are involved, NVIDIA CEO Huang Jenxun proposed that "the iPhone moment of AI is coming", and Bill Gates' "AI era has opened", all of which support this "big has come" moment.

At the main forum of the just-concluded Chengdu Network Audiovisual Conference, the CEOs of several leading domestic Internet content platforms also mentioned the impact of the AIGC wave on the content industry.

Chen Rui, CEO of station B, directly announced a data on the spot: At present, the number of views of ChatGPT-related content on station B has exceeded 200 million, and station B has become the platform with the highest quality and richest AIGC content. Sun Zhonghuai, CEO of Tencent Video, predicts that ChatGPT can be applied to the basic editing of TV drama scripts in the future, thereby saving a lot of labor costs. Gong Yu, CEO of iQiyi, said that the team recently studied GPT3.5, GPT4 and similar services in China, "We are engaged in a content-led industry, and artificial intelligence has too much impact on us." ”

The speed of ChatGPT iteration has raised human curiosity and imagination of AI applications to unprecedented heights.

Yu Jianguo, a postdoctoral fellow at Xidian University (UP master YJango), uploaded a video to Station B two weeks ago "[Gradually Constructed] Why GPT4 of 10,000 Words Science Will Subvert the Existing Workflow; Why should you pay attention to Microsoft Copilot, Wen Xin Yiyan and other big models" has more than 2 million views. 2 million plays in the content pool of station B may not be a very eye-catching number, but it needs to be added: this video is 50 minutes long, and as of writing, you can find 1000+ people watching this video at any time when you click into this video.

Behind the explosive growth in demand for AI content on station B, it reflects a state of trembling with both panic and excitement among content creators. Compared with the blockchain and metaverse that have been speculated and collapsed in previous years, the golden finger handed out by ChatGPT to humans is more figurative, more versatile, and has a lower threshold for participation.

Blogger Mu Yao said in his untimely podcast program "In the era of AI frenzy, are people still valuable": "General artificial intelligence is generally considered to be the holy grail in the field of artificial intelligence; And the reason why ChatGPT caused such a shock is because it finally means a bit 'universal'. ”

What is really disrupted is the cost of content creation

At its root, ChatGPT breaks through the limits of human ability to access and integrate information, which means that the concept of "workflow" in content creation may no longer exist.

Or take video as an example, after all, hexagonal warriors who are proficient in topic selection + text + shooting + post-production + audience analysis + fan operation are very few, and in the past, a person with deep content reserves in the field of pendants, who wanted to share his views through video for a long time, either did it alone but spent a fairly long time period, or formed a team to share the part outside the good plate.

Tim of Film and Television Hurricane interviewed at the beginning of the year to collect the workflow of 73 2022 Top 100 UP Lords. Among them, nearly 3/4 of the UP masters have an update cycle of not less than 7 days. Many people say that when they want to transform and break through, the production cycle will become longer, and even increase the pressure of updating.

Therefore, teamwork has become a significant trend in the video creation industry in the past few years, and more than half of the top 100 UP masters interviewed by Tim have introduced teamwork, especially in the technology zone, all choose the team model, and there is no single UP master. But the larger the team, the higher the cost of manpower management.

What AIGC will really disrupt is the cost of this technical level.

The existing workflow of most UP masters generally covers three major stages: writing, shooting and editing. Among them, the writing and editing stage, whether it is preliminary preparation such as data collection and information collation, or post-production fields such as data table presentation and image detail processing, have emerged with the help of GPT-4 A variety of process optimization plug-ins have emerged. The AI-assisted shooting stage, and even the AI-based production of the entire video, is also entirely possible to be broken by the upcoming GPT-5.

The cost of the whole process of video production will be infinitely reduced in the AIGC era. The reduction in the burden of each of these workflows ultimately increases the productivity of video creators.

Some people may ask, if you don't need a workflow or a team, isn't it that the functions that were originally performed by others have been replaced by AI. That's right, but who stipulates that the so-called "others" do not have what they want to express? If everyone comes up with ideas independently, "replaced by AI" is a self-bound pseudo-proposition.

This extends to another layer of AIGC's cost of disrupting content creation: knowledge itself, which will also be redefined.

In the past few years, pan-knowledge categories have indeed become the mainstream of Internet content consumption. At the Chengdu Network Audiovisual Conference, Li Ni, COO of Station B, showed the 10 videos with the highest cumulative playback time on Station B, of which 7 were knowledge and course videos. The popular game e-sports content such as S Game, Genshin and Elden Law Ring are all ranked after the high mathematics class, which confirms the evaluation of "Station B is actually a learning website". She also mentioned a set of noteworthy data: in the past three years, the creator of the knowledge category of station B has increased by 86% year-on-year, and the content submission of knowledge has increased by nearly 200% year-on-year.

The hot knowledge track has spawned a group of head creators in subdivided fields, because of the advantages in knowledge reserves, they have gained real income and reputation in the past few years, which has been thoroughly reflected in the B station with the highest degree of Internet knowledge content aggregation in Chinese.

The evolution of AIGC actually weakens the first-mover advantage of the "knowledge reserve UP master", which gives more people who have not had the opportunity to enter the upstream of the knowledge track before.

Just as after the popularization of cloud storage, the space that human beings originally needed to store on the hard disk of mobile phones and computers was released, and the new world faced by "knowledge reserves" was also freed. In the era of AIGC, human habits of storing knowledge are bound to change. When content creators can entrust the accumulated information and instrumental affairs that originally encroached on brain capacity to AI, it is liberated as the most unique thinking power of people.

Let's go back for a moment to the world before ChatGPT technology came into the public eye, when those who could realize their individual ideas with AI received a lot of attention because of the scarcity of this skill. For example, there have been UP masters who crawled all over the Chinese of the Internet's annual factual news data, established an AI model to predict college entrance examination essay questions, and caused a sensation in public opinion after winning the post; There is also the UP master to understand "How did Chinese music become like this?" It took a year to feed 1,500 representative songs of Chinese pop music into a self-built model, let it make an "average song", and the video playback exceeded 5 million.

These topics are not unexpected, but even after watching the videos of those UP masters, they often feel that they are far beyond the scope of their own knowledge and skills, and the high learning cost behind them is prohibitive.

In the AIGC era, content platforms like Station B will definitely usher in another round of outbreak of video creators, because it is becoming easier and simpler for a person to become a provider of new content with the help of AI. What used to be possible to watch others use AI to turn ideas and insights into visual images can now be done by anyone who doesn't know code or even make videos.

In fact, Chen Rui answered investors' questions about AIGC in the Q4 and full-year earnings conference call of station B last month, saying that AIGC allows more creators to create, "especially some content experiences that only professionals could do in the past, and now ordinary users may be able to do it." ”

A whole new game has emerged, and perhaps we should all consider becoming its players.

It just so happened that this week, the open-world game "Zelda" series launched a new "Kingdom Hearts" promotional PV, which added new functions such as "leftover material construction" and "ultimate hand" to design weapons and props by DIY assembly and design of weapons and props on the basis of the high-freedom gameplay of the previous game "Breath of the Wild".

For content creators, AIGC is a weapon DIY-like plug-in that inspires human creativity. It's just that one is a limited game world, while the other is a vast real world.

Looking back at the frenzy caused by Bitcoin two years ago, it is fundamentally because it was the sling that people felt had the best chance to break through class solidification and achieve self-transformation.

The existing AIGC technology allows human beings to look forward to technological reconstruction, knowledge definition, value reshuffle, and even the iteration of civilization forms... Perhaps a more tangible hope.