Metamorphosis: How AI Enables a New Paradigm for Work and Play

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Text-to-image AI systems such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Midjourney are growing in popularity and capability right now, giving creators a revolutionary new way to produce content.

Generating images from text prompts is a radical new approach to artistic creation and creative expression. But it also gives us the first glimpse of a fundamental shift in how we can better communicate and collaborate with our machines. And it is this underlying innovation in human-computer interaction that will disrupt the near future possibilities of how we can work and play.

Mediamorphosis is a term coined in the 1990s by Roger F. Fidler to describe a conceptual framework for "a unified way of thinking about the technological evolution of communication media".

Three decades later, we have entered an era where literal mediamorphosis, or metamorphosis of media, is possible, where one medium can be transformed and transmuted into another in minutes with AI tools. In this new production process, any input data can become a sound, an image or a text which, in turn, can be recombined to generate other sounds, images or text. You'll soon be able to choose your preferred entry point and get started by humming a melody, drawing a picture, selecting a spreadsheet, or even just moving your arms or eyes.

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In December 2021, Meta presented a prototype system for using AI to automatically animate children's drawings, and in July this year presented Make A Scene, its new concept for exploratory research on AI allowing everyone to bring their imagination to life using simple text and sketch prompts.

According to MetaAI Research, "To realize the potential of AI to advance creative expression, people must be able to shape and control system-generated content. It must be intuitive and easy to use in order to that people can take advantage of the modes of expression that suit them best, be it speech, text, gestures, eye movements or even sketches, to bring their vision to life in the medium that suits them best, including audio, images, animations, video and 3D.”

We are rapidly approaching a period that will be characterized by the rapid democratization of creative media production. The best way to strengthen the top of a pyramid is to widen its base.

In August, short-form video giant TikTok added a rudimentary AI green screen effect to create background images, rendering a text-to-image process ad...