It won’t be a nuclear bomb. This will be the water in which the frog bathes. The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) may be more gradual and sneaky than sudden and explosive. Depending on how the digital giants plan to market them in the coming months, generative AI applications will only raise the temperature of the water.
Published at 6:00 a.m.
The English-speaking webosphere has already found a word to describe this emergence of digital content created from scratch by generative AI: it speaks of “ slop “. In French, we could say “residues”, or “rejections”. Content of no real value, created only to fill a void in the digital space.
Generative and creative
It starts with mundane content, like an introductory letter accompanying your resume when applying for a job. “Point our AI at your LinkedIn account and it will even write your CV for you,” suggested a Google representative last week, praising the effectiveness of its Gemini Live application.
SMEs could also be interested: a hotel could decorate its walls with cheap, royalty-free fake paintings. The girl with the pearl earring et American Gothic will take it for their cold. A trendy store will be able to play background music without paying royalties to any artist.
You could even get away from certain thankless family tasks, added the Google representative. An automated dialoguer will entertain your elderly mother who complains, alone in her retirement home, about not being able to call you every day.
These are very concrete examples of the use of generative AI cited these days by representatives of Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to convince the public and businesses to adopt their technology.
The video now
The American media which first spoke of “ slop “, “AI residues”, referred to these elements of content generated automatically, and sometimes clumsily, which allow you to build a website, write an email or illustrate a document in one minute.
“That low-cost e-book that seems like it’s the one you’ve been looking for, but isn’t quite it? Those posts on your Facebook feed that seem to come out of nowhere? It’s slop », recently illustrated the New York Times.
To this is now added audiovisual. The release by OpenAI of a public version of Sora, its tool for generating videos from a simple text sentence, allows us to imagine that TikTok, Instagram and other social networks will soon be flooded with fake videos.
This is the stated objective of OpenAI. His introductory Sora video shows giraffes, an animal that lives in sub-Saharan Africa, frolicking in the tundra. It’s impossible.
Sora AI produces videos up to 20 seconds long, in high definition (1920 x 1080 pixels), horizontally or vertically. “We hope this preview version of Sora will enable creators around the world to better tell their stories and push the boundaries of storytelling in video form,” OpenAI explained during the unveiling of its new product.
The Californian non-profit organization has initiated a change in its structure in order, precisely, to become a (very) for-profit company. OpenAI hopes that “content creators” will adopt Sora AI to create videos that will flood social media, of course. And which will help it become profitable.
AI in the office
OpenAI is moving quickly, because in the still nascent generative AI market, competition is fierce. We already know that the next updates of the Android system, on devices from the main brands sold in Canada, will be used to integrate Gemini, Google’s AI, into every corner of their software.
Microsoft is also moving quickly. Since last summer, its Copilot application has been at the heart of the improvements to its office suite and its Windows system. Apple has just launched Apple Intelligence, its own generative AI app, in Canada. It’s in English only. Its French counterpart will probably be downloadable to your iPhone, iPad or Mac in the first half of next year.
To stand out, OpenAI has decided to opt for a subscription plan whose price varies depending on the scale of the task to be accomplished: for $20 per month, you can generate text, images or short videos as desired.
At $200 per month, you will be able to ask, either written or orally, to carry out more complex tasks to produce professional quality documents.
According to some sources, OpenAI would like to eventually offer a subscription at $2,000 per month for businesses. Is it overpriced? No, it’s a bargain: OpenAI thinks each of these subscriptions could replace an office worker.
The water is starting to heat up!
