App Idea: Netflix Showrunner On-Demand

One class of artificial neural network is called Stable Diffusion. This is the algorithm behind apps like Dall-E, which can interpret a sentence in the English language (or any human language) and generate a mostly realistic looking image of what you described. Some of the most interesting images generated by these AIs are called "style transfer," where you ask it to create an image from (let's say) James Cameron's Terminator film in the style of the early 20th century directory Fritz Lang, and you'll see what the T-800 looks like as a steampunk robot fighting against a Kyle Reese character who looks like a German film star of the 1920s film Metropolis.

Before long, it will likely be possible to ask a streaming service like Netflix to generate a any TV show you desire, on demand, making you the showrunner. All of it, from the story line, the setting, the background, the world the characters inhabit, the dialog, the music, the cinematography, everything will be generated by an artificial neural network. It is just a matter of time before we there is enough computing power to make this possible.

Even without any insider knowledge, I guarantee that as I write these words, pornographic websites like RedTube, PornHub, and XVideos are dumping their profits into training neural networks to generate video any pornographic scenario one could imagine. An effective neural network that could do this would be worth more than a mountain of gold.

I also guarantee that all the real-life people who are featured in the videos that are used to train these neural networks will never see a single penny of those profits. They are entitled to be paid for the work they do, but they will not be, and there is nothing in the law that would defend their rights against this sort of abuse of the images of their bodies, since the end result is not an image of their body, but the image of their body statistically averaged (so to speak) with images of thousands of other people.

Sorry to end on such a solemn note, I want to emphasize that now is the time we really need to begin discussing policy that defends the rights of humans against use of their image or personal data to train artificial intelligence by tech companies and sell that data back to people at unfathomable profit margins. It is already happening today. Google is recording your Internet browsing history and using it to train neural networks that decide which ads to show you. Unless there is policy to stop them from abusing your data in yet-unimaginable ways, they will abuse your data.