Navigating the new attention economy: The impact of AI-generated videos

WE HAVE a new challenge in the digital sphere, thanks to new AI generated videos. Last week, Open AI released Sora and Meta delivered Vibes. Both of these tools have unleashed an avalanche of AI generated videos.

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Users, including some OpenAI employees on social media, have been revelling in their ability to create outlandish content involving real-life characters-a consequence of unusually lax rules set out by OpenAI, the company behind Sora.

That's despite the AI giant purporting to have some rules designed to prevent IP infringement.

Fast Company contributing writer, Chris Stokel-Walker, has outlined why we are not ready for a world of AI generated videos. This piece highlights some of her findings about this new attention economy.

She highlights that, "Social networks, which were once designed to connect us with one another have now been subsumed by AI slop. She also makes the point that we are now confronted by a steady scroll of the unreal and outlandish content, and not a single human involved. She goes on to say that this has experts worried about our ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and how it can tamper with our temperaments. One expert indicates that "it isn't entirely surprising that businesses are effectively following the money as to what we've seen over the last 12 to 18 months, particularly in terms of AI generated video content."

Some of the most viewed videos on platforms like YouTube Shorts, traditionally home to human-only content, are now AI-generated.

At a surface level, it may be easy to dismiss these videos as just harmless fun. Scholars, however, are beginning to sound warning bells.