Despite the hype, the “Creator Economy” is not new. It has existed for generations, primarily dealing with physical goods (pottery, jewelry, paintings, books, photos, videos, etc) and over the past two decades has become predominantly digital. The digitization of creation has sparked a massive shift in content creation where everyone and their mother are now creating, sharing, and participating online.

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The vast majority of the content that is created and consumed on the internet is visual. In our recent Insights report at LDV Capital, we found that by 2027 there will be at least 100 times more visual content in the world. This Creator Economy is powered by visual tech tools that will automate various aspects of content creation and remove the technical skill from digital creation.

People Embrace Digital Living & Content Creation Booms

What we did online used to not be considered “real life” but now we live as much online as we do in person and this will only continue post pandemic. We work, date, laugh with grandparents, play games, attend cooking classes, concerts, church services & dinner parties; we participate in politics, appear at court, go to school, shop, visit doctors - all via computer screens.

Even post lockdown, we spend an average of 13 hours a day online.

And so we find ourselves in the midst of an evolution: digital is another dimension of our human existence.

As we embrace digital life, it is only natural that we choose to represent and express ourselves in new ways online. We want to digitally express our thoughts, tastes, styles, talents…our creativity. To showcase our personality and uniqueness online in the same ways we do in-person, we are participating more than ever before and generating content. Whether it is text, photos, videos, stories, movies, livestreams, video games or more anything that is viewed on our screens, it is visual content.

Currently, it takes time and often years of prior training to produce a single piece of quality and contextually relevant visual content. It has also typically required deep technical expertise in order to produce content at the speed and quantities required today. But new platforms and tools powered by visual technologies are changing the paradigm.

Computer Vision Will Aid Livestreaming

Livestreaming is one of the fastest-growing segments in online video. Livestreaming is a video that is recorded and broadcast in real-time over the internet and is projected to be a $150B industry by 2027.

Over 60% of individuals aged 18-34 watch live streaming content daily, making it one of the most popular forms of online content.

Gaming is the most prominent content livestreamed today but shopping, cooking, and events are growing quickly and will continue on that trajectory.

The most successful streamers today spend 50-60 hours a week livestreaming and many more hours on production. Visual tech tools that leverage computer vision, sentiment analysis, overlay technology, and more will aid livestream automation. They will enable streamers feeds to be analyzed in real time to add production elements, improving quality of livestreams and cutting back the time and technical skill required of streamers today.

Synthetic Media Will Be Ubiquitous

A lot of the content we view today is already computer-generated graphics (CGI), special effects (VFX), or altered by software (e.g. Photoshop). Whether it’s the army of the dead in Game of Thrones or a resized image of Kim Kardashian in a magazine, we see content everywhere that has been digitally designed and altered by human artists. Now, computers and artificial intelligence can generate images and videos of people, things and places that never physically existed.

By 2027, we will view more photorealistic synthetic images and videos than ones that document a real person or place. Some experts even project synthetic content will be nearly 95% of the content we view. Synthetic media uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to write text, make photos, create game scenarios and more using simple prompts from humans such as “write me 100 words about a penguin on top of a volcano.” GANs are the next Photoshop.

*(L: Remedial drawing created, R: Landscape image built by NVIDIA’s GauGAN from the drawing)*

In some circumstances, it will be faster, cheaper and more inclusive to synthesize objects and people than to hire models, find locations and do a full photo or video shoot. Moreover, it will enable video to be programmable - as simple as making a slide deck.

"Synthetic media will significantly accelerate creative expression and lessen the gap between idea and content," explains Victor Riparbelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Synthesia, a synthetic video platform.

Synthetic media that leverages GANs are also able to personalize content nearly instantly and therefore enable any video to speak directly to the viewer using their name or write a video game in real time as a person plays. The gaming, marketing and advertising industries are already experimenting with the first commercial applications of GANs and synthetic media.

Artificial Intelligence Will Deliver Motion Capture to the Masses

Animated video requires expertise as well as even more time and budget than content starring physical people. Animated video typically refers to 2D and 3D cartoons, motion graphics, computer generated imagery (CGI) and visual effects (VFX). They will be an increasingly essential part of the content strategy for brands and businesses deployed across image, video & livestream channels as a mechanism for diversifying content.

The greatest hurdle to generating animated content today is the skill - and the resulting time and budget - to create it. A traditional animator typically creates 4 seconds of content per workday. Motion capture (MoCap) is a tool often used by professional animators in film, TV and gaming to record a physical pattern of an individual’s movements digitally for the purpose of animating them. An example would be something like recording Steph Curry’s jumpshot for NBA2K

Advances in photogrammetry, deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling camera-based MoCap - with little to no suits, sensors or hardware. Facial motion capture has already come a long way, as evidenced in some of the incredible photo and video filters out there. As capabilities advance to full body capture it will make MoCap easier, faster, budget-friendly and more widely accessible for animated content creation for video production, virtual character livestreaming, gaming and more.

“AI has already made its way into high-end animation, VFX, and games in the form of noise and artifact removal as well as increasing image resolution - saving artist time & compute while extending creative reach,” Vaibhav Vavilala, Computer vision expert, Former Technical Director of Pixar says, “In 5 years, we could be looking at AI suggesting new 2D and 3D characters and even animating them for subsequent fine-tuning by expert artists."

Nearly All Content Will Be Gamified

Gaming is a massive industry set to hit nearly $236B globally by 2027. That will expand and grow as more and more content introduces gamification to encourage interactivity with the content. Gamification is applying typical elements of game playing such as point scoring, interactivity and competition to encourage engagement.

Games with non-gamelike objectives and more diverse storylines are enabling gaming to appeal to wider audiences. With a growth in the number of players, diversity and hours spent playing online games will drive high demand for unique content.

AI & cloud infrastructure capabilities play a major role in aiding game developers to build tons of new content. GANs will gamify & personalize content, engaging more players and expanding interactions and community. Games as a Service (GaaS) will become a major business model for gaming. Game platforms are leading the growth of immersive online interactive spaces.

People Will Interact With Many Digital Beings

We will have digital identities to produce, consumer and interact with content. In our physical lives, people have many aspects of their personality and represent themselves differently in different circumstances: the boardroom vs the bar, in groups vs alone, etc. Online, the old school AOL screen names have already evolved into profile photos, memojis, avatars, gamertags and more. Over the next five years, the average person will have at least 3 digital versions of themselves both photorealistic & fantastical to participate online.

“Twenty years from now Earth's population will be 30 billion,” says Dave Smiddy, Former Head of Product at Intel Studios, “10 billion will be us, the real humans. 20 billion will be our digital humans."

Digital identities (or avatars) require visual tech. Some will enable public anonymity of the individual, some will be pseudonyms and others will be directly tied to physical identity. A growing number of them will be powered by AI.

These autonomous virtual beings will have personalities, feelings, problem-solving capabilities and more. Some of them will be programmed to look, sound, act and move like an actual physical person. They will be our assistants, co-workers, doctors, dates and so much more.

Interacting with both people-driven avatars and autonomous virtual beings in virtual worlds and with gamified content sets the stage for the rise of the Metaverse. The Metaverse could not exist without visual tech and I will elaborate on that in a future article.

Machine Learning Will Curate, Authenticate and Moderate Content

For creators to continuously produce the volumes of content necessary to compete in the digital world, a variety of tools will be developed to automate the repackaging of content from long-form to short-form, from videos to blogs or vice versa, social posts and more.

The systems will self-select content and format based on the performance of past publications using automated analytics from computer vision, image recognition, sentiment analysis, and machine learning. They will also inform the next generation of content to be created.

In order to then filter through the massive amount of content most effectively, autonomous curation bots powered by smart algorithms will sift through and present to us content personalized to our interests and aspirations. Eventually, we’ll see personalized synthetic video content replacing text-heavy newsletters, media and emails.

Additionally, the plethora of new content will require ways to authenticate it and attribute it to the creator both for rights management and management of deep fakes, fake news and more. By 2027, most consumer phones will be able to authenticate content via applications.

“The days of consumers relying on synthetic content detection are ending,’ Andy Parsons, Director of Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe. “Authenticity & provenance are the tools we have for restoring a sense of shared, objective reality and trust.”

It is deeply important to detect disturbing and dangerous content as well and is increasingly hard to do given the vast quantities of content published. AI and computer vision algorithms are necessary to automate this process by detecting hate speech, graphic pornography, and violent attacks because it is too difficult to do manually in real-time and not cost-effective. Multi-modal moderation that includes image recognition, as well as voice, text recognition and more, will be required.

Visual Tech Tools are the Greatest Opportunity in the Creator Economy

The next five years will see individual creators who leverage visual tech tools rival professional production teams in the quality and quantity of the content they produce. The greatest business opportunities today in the Creator Economy are the visual tech platforms and tools that will enable those creators to focus on the content and not on the technical creation.

This article first appeared on VentureBeat.

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