The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Polls, politics and policy ~ AI spoofs Wes Anderson
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Waka Jumping from their Crossing the Floor.
This week we look, in our politics section, at AI and the economy. Will the rise of high-quality AI replicas in skilled sectors – such as film-making – change the debate about job automation.
And of course, there’s the computer-generated bonfire of information that is Charlie’s Attic – this week including data on the number of American adults who sleep with a teddy.
Can AI outdo Wes Anderson?
We wasted far more time than we should this week watching a series of spoof videos, which remake classic thrillers and blockbusters in the style of auteur film director Wes Anderson. Included in the series are arthouse versions of Harry Potter, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars (pictured). The trailers are a pitch perfect satire of the Grand Budapest Hotel and Royal Tenenbaums Director’s distinctive visual style. But the really amazing thing is that each one is created using artificial intelligence tools like ChatGP – hence how such a large number have been created in such a short space of time.
We do not profess, here at TCC towers, to be experts in the newest frontiers of AI technology – or on the social and economic implications that these changes bring. But with the explosion in examples like those shown above, it is interesting to think about how the debate on job automation could change.
One assumption, backed up by analysis like this from the ONS in 2019, has been that less skilled jobs are the ones most at risk to job automation. This may still be the case. But the rise of very polished AI executions serves as a useful reminder that many different industries and parts of the economy could become less reliant on humans in years to come – skilled as well as unskilled.
Technology is clearly changing the workplace in quite profound ways, be it through AI, robotics and data algorithms. The long term implications of this are not yet fully clear, at least to us, and for a long time this had felt quite abstract. It will be interesting to see whether the political debate about job automation is altered by these high profile viral examples.
And finally, the socio-political Black Mirror that is Charlie’s Attic:
