At SXSW, Greg Brockman touts the ability of generative A.I. to make a more “interactive” entertainment experience for users.
BY J. CLARA CHAN
Were you one of the millions of fans who wished HBO’s Game of Thrones didn’t end the way it did? Fix it with A.I.!
That’s, at least, one of the use cases that OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman proposed for his company’s generative A.I. program ChatGPT. Likening the technology to a group of “assistants” who aren’t perfect but are “eager and never sleep,” Brockman said ChatGPT could help do the “drudge work” for writing and coding but also have the ability to add a more “interactive” entertainment experience.
“That is what entertainment will look like,” Brockman said at a Friday panel at SXSW. “Maybe people are still upset about the last season of Game of Thrones. Imagine if you could ask your A.I. to make a new ending that goes a different way and maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something.”
Hollywood creatives have already begun considering the potential impact — both good and bad — that ChatGPT could have on the TV and filmmaking process. As The Hollywood Reporter examined in January, organizations like the Writers Guild of America West have said they are “monitoring the development of ChatGPT and similar technologies in the event they require additional protections for writers,” though screenwriters interviewed by THR said they could see ChatGPT as a tool to aid the writing process, rather than replacing the work of writers.
Media companies like BuzzFeed have been more open about embracing A.I. for content like personalized quizzes via the application programming interface from OpenAI but are stopping short of using the technology to write news articles.
During his SXSW panel, Brockman said ChatGPT would be most primed to take over the types of jobs where users “didn’t want human judgment there in the first place,” like those involving content moderation.
“Every aspect of life is going to be sort of amplified by this technology, and I’m sure there are some aspects or people or companies that will say, ‘I don’t want that,’ and that’s okay,” he said. “I think it’s really going to be a tool, just like the cell phone in your pocket, that is going to be available when it makes sense.”
OpenAI has received a major influx of cash from partner companies like Microsoft, which has invested $10 billion into OpenAI as part of a multiyear deal that will give the tech giant access to the generative A.I. programs.
When pressed about ChatGPT’s propensity for spewing misinformation and concerns about the possible sentience of chatbots like Microsoft’s Sydney (the latter of which Microsoft has since placed limitations on), Brockman hedged that those shortcomings were growing pains.
“We want to build trust and figure out where we can trust, figure out where we put the guardrails,” Brockman said without delving into the specifics of future updates for the chatbot. “This is the pain of the learning.”
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