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by danielvaughn
982 days ago
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I remember watching a documentary about an old blues guitar player from the 1920's. They were trying to learn more about him and track down his whereabouts during certain periods of his life. At one point, they showed some old footage which featured a montage of daily life in a small Mississippi town. You'd see people shopping for groceries, going on walks, etc. Some would stop and wave at the camera. In the documentary, they noted that this footage exists because at the time, they'd show it on screen during intermission at movie theaters. Film was still in its infancy in that time, and was so novel that people loved seeing themselves and other people on the big screen. It was an interesting use of a new technology, and today it's easy to understand why it died out. Of course, it likely wasn't obvious at the time. I say all that because I don't think we can know at this point what AI is capable of, and how we want to use it, but we should expect to see lots of failure while we figure it out. Over the next decade there's undoubtedly going to be countless ventures similar to the "show the townspeople on the movie screen" idea, blinded by the novelty of technological change. But failed ventures have no relevance to the overall impact or worth of the technology itself. |
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I think it's probably more sociological than technical. People love to see themselves and their friends/family. My work has screens that show photos of events and it always causes a bit of a stir ("Did you see X's photo from the summer picnic?") Yearbooks are perennially popular and there's a whole slew of social media.
However, for this to be "fun", there must be a decent chance that most people in the audience know a few people in a few of the pictures. I can't imagine this working well in a big city, for example, or a rural theatre that draws from a huge area.