An AI based robot is creating sensations by flaunting humanistic expressions, picking her favorite bollywood star and giving her opinions on women empowerment, businesses such as banking, insurance etc.
Yes that’s Sophia for you, world’s most advanced robot created by Dr. David Hanson of Hanson robotics.
The concept of artificial intelligence is age old, but has been in vogue, since the past decade as smart technology started ruling humans.
But how will these machines know what we want?
Will they get better than us with creativity over time and eliminate the need of humans like it happened due to mechanization during the industrial revolution?
Let us sit back and analyze if AI is capable of changing the game to the extent of driving human storytellers to the edge of extinction.
Man Vs Machine
The one important thing that distinguishes humans from cyborgs is that we feel and we respond with emotions. And more than that we can convey those emotions to others with equal intensity and make them feel the same way. That is the power of storytelling that we possess.
Human mental network is complex with a lot of patterns left unexplained. So there is a long way for us to go before we think about incorporating these emotions in machines.
But as vehement as this argument gets, the fact that artificial intelligence has been evolving cannot be denied. Several experiments carried by techies of the most renowned institutes have given clearance to the fact that machines are successful in empirically reading human reflexes and understanding the emotional arcs.
Machines calculate the Visual valence induced in audience by a certain scene or piece of content. It is evident from this fact that they will evolve and eventually aid in storytelling business.
In attempts of fine tuning AI systems the scientists have grabbed inputs from human responses to motion graphics and what specific elements have triggered a positive or negative response and their emotions.
AI could work alongside humans in the process of storytelling. If humans write a video script, AI could adorn the script with its own inputs of background score and visuals.
It would be like a generator to charge the human storytelling mode.
The system is known to continuously learn from its experiences.
Pitching in AI in the scripting process will hugely influence how content is discovered, created, conveyed and consumed.
Identifying potential concepts
The way content is moulded changes each day. Stories are generated as a result of observations. These observations emerge from triggers and trend patterns. Computers and software are capable of detecting minor deviations from normal patterns and are quick and efficient. It also gets rid of subjectivity.
The human brain tends to get biased towards stories that seem acceptable to the observer. Machines on the other hand rules out subjectivity and brings up a valid and an all round significant content.
The information doing rounds of any topic invokes perceptions in human brain to identify and comprehend. Machines do not get sidetracked and lack other reviewing obstacles which have led them to transcend humans.
What would take humans ages to analyze ,interpret and organize, machines can do it with the blink of an eye. We can only imagine how lives of many professionals working with large amounts of data will be simplified with AI coming into use. With the data sorting being automated, humans can focus and invest more in storytelling
Generate stories
A writer’s biggest fear today is that AI taking over the human race with its ability of content generation.
Big publications are already using algorithms for generating narratives and news.
Researching topics and keywords, apt media and references, formatting are steps in creating interesting articles.
Platforms such as Wordsmith are being used by The Associated Press to generate financial reports with data input.
Quill is a natural language generation software which replicates the input to meaningful statements by analyzing the objectives of the story.
Heliograf is the in-house scripting software used by the Washington Post to publish articles.
NLG platforms have been used for generating short reports on sports, election alerts in the U.S. and tweets.
A machine’s neural system is confined to what its creator has fed it while human creativity is limitless.
According to the MIT’s Associate professor Iyad Rahwan “Human authors have nothing to fear at the moment, but if we can build machines that understand the very essence of human experience, we would have bigger problems than simply losing jobs in creative writing,”.
But that is still a long shot owing to the unbeknownst mysteries of the neural functioning.
Pan it across the media
We live in a world where the word “viral” no longer instigates panic. It only incites curiosity. The media does not control how content flows anymore. It is the giants of social media who do.
Facebook,Twitter, Instagram own classified algorithms which determine which content occupies their user feeds. Search engines decide what content should be retrieved for the user based on the patterns of his search.
Rather than stressing over the fact that AI might outshine the human race in the story telling business why not contemplate and incorporate machine learning in the content discovery.
Automation would bring about exceptional transformation in storytelling right from tracing target audience for a story to reverse mapping the audience psychographics to find out what story would intrigue them.
Given the fact that, the one size fits all theory does not work with the audience today, the giants of the digital world have started using data driven approaches to target audience.
News organizations have adopted the idea of headline testing which involves generating multiple title versions for a piece of content or article. The testing is carried out with an A/B testing tool which splits the traffic reaching the website and finds an optimize title based on performance metrics.
Extrapolating this idea, machine learning can be deployed to determine article or title length, expanse and position of the visuals etc based on the device on which the content will be retrieved the most.
Scientists will stop at nothing to make AI the ubiquitous element of technology in near future.
So it is wise for us to give up on the narcissism and embrace the apparent future-the progressive idea of content creation which is the humans and humanoids mulling things together.
Let’s Wrap It Up
The human nuance and data powered intuition are capable of creating path-breaking stories if used the right way. Just imagine a sci-fi story created with point blank tech details and aesthetic emotional arcs as a result of the man-machine alliance.
The human subtlety and mechanical calculations are quintessential to each. And maybe far in future machines will surpass the creator.
There is no reason to look at emergence of AI as a peril to human storytellers. The advent of AI will only revolutionize the concept of storytelling.