Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: How to make money using artificial intelligence?

Attention reader: this is a purely experimental article. As the New Year is a time to make balance sheets and forecasts, there are always texts pointing to what is expected from technology in the year that is just beginning.

But it is relatively rare to see speculation about technological changes in the long term, or even the very long term. To fill this gap, this article asks some purely speculative questions: “what if…”

What if artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and others become the dominant forms of content production on the internet? Last week, a video went viral teaching how to make money with these artificial intelligence tools on the internet.

Here’s the formula: go to ChatGPT and ask them to script a 1500-word video on whatever subject you want. Take the text and paste it in the Pictory tool, in the “script to video” function. The tool will then automatically create a complete video based on the script you entered, also using artificial intelligence.

Go to the Synthesia tool and choose a virtual human being to be the character in your video. Paste the text there too and the chosen character will read the text, as if it were a real human being (there are many options for ethnicities and body types). Insert clippings of the character’s speech in the first video. Then head over to Fiverr and pay $2 (R$10.45) to have someone design a striking cover for your video.

Post everything on Youtube and other platforms, and earn money as the video gains views. If you’re feeling lazy, go to Upwork and hire a remote assistant who can do all of the above for you, at a cost of $4 per hour, endlessly.

And what if the result of this is to flood the internet and its platforms with content self-generated by artificial intelligence? On the surface, the content appears to be coherent, interesting, and even enticing. In reality, the content is full of errors, false information, dangerous tips and insanity that doesn’t make any sense.

With that, the internet is poisoned with infinite content produced by artificial intelligence (including pornography). Nobody can tell what’s generated by humans or machines anymore, and that removes the incentives to really create anything new.

The possibility of this situation creates an urgent need to mark content generated by artificial intelligence as such, distinguishing it from “real” content. No western country can come up with a solution to this, and the problem perpetuates itself in an informational echo chamber forever.

What if nuclear fusion, which in 2022 saw concrete and relevant progress, becomes a reality? Does this mean that humanity could achieve coveted energy independence, in a clean and sustainable way? What would be the consequences of this energetic abundance?

It may be that it is the basis for us to become an interplanetary civilization. For example, with nuclear fusion mastered, humanity could covet building a “Dyson swarm” around the sun. A megastructure composed of mirrors capable of capturing and redirecting portions of solar energy.

This unimaginable amount of energy could be used for “terraforming” projects on the moon, Mars and beyond. Allowing those who are dissatisfied with the ways of humanity on their planet of origin to look at the sky and dream of a new beginning in a distant star.

Happy 2023!

• It’s over – knowing how to distinguish between what is created by humans or by AI
• Already – danger of flooding the internet with AI-generated content automatically
• It’s coming – attempt to solve the problem through regulation, with uncertain chances of success