Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on AI, author of 18 books

OUR LIVES ARE totally dependent on the integrity and completeness of online search engines such as Google. 

However, for a decade now, search engines have been stuck in a rut. 

Search algorithms may be smarter, but they are still too easily deceived by poor content, and all they do is direct people to web pages. But what if there is no web page that answers the question properly?

Can we create new web content on the fly, in real time?

That was one of the motivations for Google to invest $2bn in Anthropic, as a rival to OpenAI ChatGPT. However, if most people start reading AI summaries of online content, in answer to queries, then actual website visits will be reduced, and that really matters to those whose content has been raided by AI to generate those summaries.

As a result, next-generation AI search may end up destroying the quality of online content, causing it to degrade and go out of date, by removing financial rewards for website owners.

By 2023, 60% of professional musicians were using AI to make music in some way, for example composing (11%), mastering (final adjustments of albums; 31%), or generating artwork (38%).

Music can lift the human spirit, inspire, empower, soothe and heal.

AI will redefine the music industry, creating delight for listeners while triggering outrage in musicians and producers. 

In 2023, The Beatles released a new song after forty-five years, using AI to process an old demo tape by John Lennon which was spoilt by noise interference, just one small example of the musical deluge to come. 

That track was almost universally acclaimed as a wonderful addition to The Beatles’ repertoire.

Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on AI for media, TV, movies etc, author of 18 books

THE FASTEST GROWTH in AI spending will be in the media industry, and film-making / movie-making is just one example of this.

Total media spending on AI will increase by at least 30% a year for the next decade.

Globally, media companies are already investing $20bn a year on things ranging from image production to video game development, detection of fake stories and plagiarism, production planning, sales and marketing and talent finding.

Every aspect of media production is already undergoing a massive revolution.

Indeed there is no other sphere of life apart from software development that is changing so radically and so fast in response to AI.

Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on AI / software development, author 18 books

OVER $2TN WILL BE SPENT by companies and governments on AI between now and 2030, and most of that will be extra people costs, employing vast numbers of systems developers and AI experts, which tells you all you need to know about job prospects in the IT sector. 

But as we will see, developers and their computer systems make mistakes which can take decades to become apparent, and all kinds of errors will find themselves worked into AI, some of which will have very serious consequences.

One of the areas of work that in theory will be most impacted by AI is coding software itself. Over the last two decades we have already seen the development of a growing number of high-level languages, where words and phrases are interpreted by software to tell the system what to do.

And the software industry is one where many wild forecasts have been made, alleging that major disruption and redundancies will surely happen on a large scale. Indeed, surveys of software developers show that 30% believe that their own jobs will be replaced by AI ‘in the foreseeable future’ – but how soon is that?

And are they right?