AI and Change

Note: I wrote this a few years ago, when OpenAI first launched Sora, December 9th 2024. Wild to see how technology has progressed since then.

Yesterday, OpenAI revealed it’s latest toy to the world. Sora’s new videos and animations is currently blowing social media up. Twitter is ablaze with the ludicrous applications and possibilities of this tool. Meanwhile animators and videographers may be wondering how do I get ahead of this? What does it mean for my job in 5 years time? It’s a fascinating time to be alive in right now. We are at the cusp of a generational shift in technology: the mass adoption of public-level AI tools. By public-level, I mean tools which can be quickly learnt and used by the public and not by the boffins in lab coats and engineering degrees. These tools have spread out to everyone, from the schoolteacher looking for effective teaching assignment tips, to doctors, who want a quick way to simplify their internal workflows to government officials who simply want to be able to write better emails. The rapid proliferation of AI tools has certainly changed my life. My documentation responsibilities has seen a profound shift: reports and briefs take a fraction of the time. Additionally, the reports I pass onto higher levels now benefits from having another set of eyes go through them. On the flip side, I’ve found that many of the essay questions I’ve put on hiring questions are now redundant. Since I write quite often, I know there’s unique idiosyncrasies for each and every person who has put pen to paper: how they frame a sentence, how they describe colours, what verbs they use for specific actions. They will all be unique and individual. When you use an AI writing tool, you strip that all away for something that’s probably very good but also very generic. Any good writer can tell if someone has taken their whole essay to the AI workshop. If not tell, then definitely an inkling or thought that ‘hmmm that’s a very funny way to phrase that’. This is especially visible in people who do not have the strongest English skills. Given the AI tools predilection to be overly verbose and jaunty, a novice writer will naturally think that’s the better way to write. Time will tell how this plays out.