Read the full transcript of entrepreneur Victor Riparbelli ‘s talk titled “Will AI Make Us the Last Generation to Read and Write?” at TED Talk conference on October 19, 2024. This talk captures a thought-provoking TED talk by Victor Riparbelli, exploring how AI might transform human communication and potentially make traditional literacy obsolete for future generations.
TRANSCRIPT:
The End of Reading and Writing as We Know It
VICTOR RIPARBELLI: Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write. I know that sounds strange, almost unthinkable. Text is everywhere around us. We use it hundreds of times every single day, and it’s growing into the fabric of our daily lives. But today, I’m going to make the case that humanity’s relentless pursuit of better ways to convey ideas and preserve knowledge doesn’t end with text.
I think we’re at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication. And I think that future generations will slowly replace text with more intuitive forms of communication, like audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies. And one day, I think we’ll look back at reading and writing as historical artifacts, like we do with papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs or cave paintings.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading. This is not a personal vendetta against text. Some of my fondest memories is walking around my local library back in Copenhagen that you’re seeing behind me here, picking out all kinds of books, mostly science fiction books, returning home to read them, so I could go back there again and pick out the next set of exciting books to read. I loved disappearing into these worlds that were different than the physical world around me.
The Internet Changed Everything
And that, of course, only was amplified when I discovered the Internet at around 10 years old, which opened up an entirely new world of ideas, of music, and people.
In music, which is my big passion outside of work, I saw how software instruments and sampling and drum machines gave birth to entirely new genres that have never been possible before. Not only that, but all the people around the world making new, exciting music could share it with the world without the middlemen of labels.
The video games I played got connected to the Internet. You formed communities with people around the world that you didn’t know. That’s what my parents thought, at least. I started my first business when I was 13 years old in World of Warcraft. We were 50 people slaying dragons together online, and I would later learn in life that it’s actually not that different than running a startup.
From Gaming to AI Video
And those early years of my life sparked a lifelong interest in media and technology, how they change the way that we create, consume, play, and communicate. And in 2016, I discovered a research paper called Face-to-Face by Professor Matthias Miesner and his team. They built a system that using neural networks could produce really, really photorealistic video.
And when I saw this for the first time, I felt like I’d seen magic. And I was convinced that in 10 years, you’re going to be able to create a Hollywood film from your bedroom without needing anything else than just your imagination. That’s in three years, and I think that’s actually going to hold up.
I couldn’t get this idea out of my mind, and eventually I ended up founding Synthesia, an AI video company, along with Matthias and Ludus and Steffen, my co-founders. And this really was a way to kind of marry my interest in media and technology and sci-fi. We started the company with the vision of making everyone in the world into a Hollywood director.
And while that’s definitely still a very exciting vision, as the years kind of went on, we realized that as exciting as AI-generated Hollywood films is, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The really exciting potential about these technologies is that they’re going to enable every single piece of content, from text messages to novels to boring corporate training materials, to be brought alive in video and audio.
The Evolution of Human Communication
But before we talk more about video, let’s talk about text. Text is the original way of compression for human communication. We encode our thoughts and knowledge into symbols that can convey meaning across time and space. That hasn’t always been the case. Thousands of years ago, text didn’t exist, and the only way we had to share information was orally.
In 1500 B.C., the first alphabet was invented, and it essentially took these very complex writing systems and simplified them into just a few characters, laying the groundwork for the modern society that we know today. In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and for the first time in history, we could mass-produce written content. It would take until the mid-20th century before reading became something for the masses and people slowly became literate.
The Limitations of Text
If we fast-forward to today, text is ubiquitous, and it’s impossible to live a life without being able to read and write. But as great as text is, it’s an imperfect technology. It’s very efficient, and it’s very scalable. But it’s a very, very lossy method of compressing information. It lacks all the nuance and additional information that we get when we speak to someone in real life. Your tone of voice, your body language, where you are, all those things matter for that message, right?
Text can be interpreted a million different ways, depending on the receiver. Is this good news or bad news? It’s very hard to tell, right? But we invented emojis to make it a little bit better. But even emojis are not perfect. People are still debating if this smiley is happy. Is it pissed? Is it planning to kill you? The debate goes on.
The Power of Visual Communication
And if you think about visual communication, this is an image. It took all of you a few seconds to look at this image and understand it, right? It’s a very intuitive way of consuming information. What if I shared this with you instead, a text description of the image? Would it have taken you 30 seconds to read it? The high cognitive load to take those pieces of symbols and turn them into an image in your mind, right? And even if I gave you 30 pages of description, you would always imagine a different image than what you’re seeing behind me right now.
Once we add a time dimension, as in video, this problem massively compounds. So it’s not that strange that since the invention of text, we’ve been innovating towards richer and more intuitive ways of exchanging information. We invented radio, TV, internet, VR, social media, and now AI.
The Rise of Video and Audio
In 2024, it’s very obvious that people want to watch and listen. If you look at the digital economy, TikTok is the fastest-growing social network. It’s also the fastest-growing search engine, which is very interesting. Video and audio is everywhere in the apps that we use. We send voice notes on WhatsApp. Now we’re on dating apps. When we shop, we watch product videos.
And my thesis is that the more we consume video, the more bored we are by text. And I have to say, this is also true for me, even though I love reading. When I learn something new, I usually start on YouTube, on TikTok, or listen to a podcast. And only if I’m really, really invested in something, I’ll take the hours out of my day to read a 200-page book. It just doesn’t feel that much like it’s worth it anymore.
And for a lot of you, you probably feel the same. Do you want to learn music theory from a long book or from a video on YouTube that has audio? Do you want to listen to the news on a podcast on the way to work or fold out this physical piece of paper somewhere? Most people feel like this.
The Guilt of Modern Media Consumption
But we all have this guilt. I have, at least. I feel guilty when I watch videos and when I listen to podcasts instead of picking up a good old-fashioned book. When you hear the commentary on this, young people are unable to focus anymore. They need constant dopamine hits from cheap content that they scroll through on their social media apps. They don’t get outside their room anymore. Exactly the same thing parents have been saying for 200 years.
I have a prerogative idea. What if we’re all just tired of overly dense, slow information? Books with too many pages. Newspaper articles with filler. What if we become much more sensitive to the quality and the conciseness of the content that we consume because we now have infinite choice? What if the current generation of kids are able to learn and absorb information much faster because of technology, not despite it? Is the problem us, or is the problem text?
We still read a lot, right? We just read from many different sources every single day, not just a book and a newspaper. We read our messaging apps and our social media networks.
and our blog. We listen to long-form podcasts. It’s very growing, right? But we still have this idea that books are morally superior in some sense. And even though I’m giving you this talk, I still very much feel it. I don’t know why that is. I’ll let someone else do the research on that. But it’s definitely very interesting how we psychologically attribute more value to the written word.
The Economics of Content Creation
So why is so much information still text if we really prefer video? It’s pretty simple. The answer is cost. Cost in time and cost in money. Today, we have to pick between the speed and scale of text or the accuracy and engagement of video content.
And so there is this underlying economic incentive where only the content and the ideas and the knowledge we deem important enough gets converted into video and audio formats. And so in the entertainment industry, this means that we get Fast and the Furious 278 rather than avant-garde cinema from film students. In the corporate world, this means that the Super Bowl ad is a video, but the fire safety video is a long, boring document.
How AI Will Transform Content Creation
And this is about to change in a big, big way. AI will change that equation completely. With AI, we can get both speed, scale, accuracy, and engagement. AI can create highly photorealistic content digitally. Computers can learn what the world looks like and it can replicate it and remix it in amazing details.
This is going to usher in a new wave of creativity. And it’s not going to be driven by Hollywood. It’s going to be driven by YouTubers and young people with great ideas who will take these tools and tell amazing stories.
AI Avatars and Digital Humans
At Cynthesia, we focus on AI avatars, digital humans that sound and look like us. They can even be us if you make a clone of yourself. Today, our avatars already interact with millions of people every single day. They teach school subjects, they onboard restaurant workers, provide health guidance, and sell products in more than 130 different languages. And they’re getting really good. Very soon, they’ll be very difficult to distinguish from reality.
“Hello. I’m Alex, a personal avatar. I am so excited and happy to be here. Can you see how expressive I look and hear how natural I sound? Isn’t it great? Bye for now. Hope to see you soon.”
This video is entirely AI-generated. I’m Alex. They still don’t know when to stop speaking.
So with these technologies, we can create anything without the need for cameras. We can bring our imaginations to life without the traditional barriers of skill and cost.
Democratizing Video Creation
But what’s more exciting about all these new technologies is that they’re going to make it extremely easy for anyone to create content. We’ve already seen how keyboards and computers turned all of us into writers. We’ve seen how PowerPoint turned all of us into designers. And with AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director, producing Hollywood-grade video without needing any training at all, like you can see here behind me.
At Zendida, we’ve already turned more than a million people into video creators, and it’s really fun to see all the things people make videos about, but they don’t have to ask their boss because they can just log on and make the videos themselves.
Research on Learning Preferences
Why do people make videos? It’s not a very well-researched area yet, but we’ve been working with UCL in London to figure out how do we learn differently with video and AI video versus text. We did a study with 400 participants. It’s still ongoing. We plan to publish the results sometime next year, but there’s some really interesting initial findings.
When you just ask people, do you prefer to learn with AI video or text, the results are pretty astonishing. 77% of people prefer to learn through video.
Beyond Traditional Media Formats
So faster and easier content creation will be transformative. But with new technologies, we always invent new media formats. And right now, most AI-generated content is what I call a bridge genre. We’re using it to create old formats with new technologies.
Just like the first websites look like newspapers on a screen, AI videos today are linear. They have a beginning and an end. They essentially emulate what we can record with a physical camera.
Once we combine AI video with reasoning systems like language models, we’re going to unlock an entirely new type of media that’s going to be interactive and personalized. It’s going to be able to think and narrate and personalize content for us.
The Future of Personalized Learning and Entertainment
If you’re learning music theory, you’ll have an assistant that knows your skill level, knows your taste in music, and build a curriculum around that. All of your kids, maybe we’ll have their favorite celebrities teaching them math in school. And they’ll do it in a context that’s interesting for your kid. Maybe that’s soccer or sci-fi or whatever. Education is going to be turbocharged with these new AI systems.
Entertainment is going to change. It’s going to be shaped by the viewers and by the world around it. We’ll probably have interactive films. We’ll have TV series that never end. It sounds weird, but in many ways, this is what a social media feed is, right? It’s just an end-to-story. Your TikTok feed is also an endless stream of personalized content just for you.
And when we combine this with new form factors like AR, VR, brain-computer interfaces, media is increasingly going to appear like real life. Maybe we’ll be transmitting messages to our friends just via thought in the future. And our inbox is not going to be text. It’s going to be videos of all your friends and your relatives’ AI avatars talking to you. It sounds weird, but I don’t think it’s that far off. And I promise you that your fire safety video at work will be a Spielberg-esque masterpiece in the not-so-distant future.
Ethical and Philosophical Questions
These technologies open up a Pandora box of questions. There’s ethical questions, there’s political questions, there’s design questions, and there’s commercial questions. And there are many speakers today sharing great viewpoints in those.
I’ll leave you with a few provocative questions. Do you care if our content is AI-generated or not? Do you care when a film uses special effects or a green screen? Do we care that actors in commercials are paid to play someone else and endorse products that they’ve probably never heard of?
Do we care if actors are real or generated? Are you a fan of Harry Potter or Daniel Radcliffe? Does it matter that Daniel Radcliffe exists in the real world? You’ll never meet him, probably, right? What about Mickey Mouse or Pixar characters? Can we feel something for them, despite them being AI-generated?
Will we trust AI agents, or do you still want to call the call center to speak to a human? Can we be entertained by computers interacting with each other? Would you want to play computers, play soccer, or play chess against each other? Maybe not.
Conclusion
The future is ahead of us, and while a lot of this sounds like sci-fi, it really isn’t that far off. And it’s up to all of us in this room and society to make sure that we build a really awesome future. I think we have the technologies, and I think we have the people to do it. Thank you.
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