According to a Twitter poll that closed this morning, Elon Musk should step down as CEO of Twitter. Musk had written on Twitter that he would “stand by the results of this poll.”

The billionaire started voting last night after a chaotic weekend for the site. Over recent days, Twitter has suspended prominent journalists (at the time Most of them returned) And Prohibited promotion From other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Truth Social.

Before tweeting out of the poll, Musk apologized for making significant policy changes unilaterally and said Twitter would only ban accounts whose “primary *purpose* is to promote competitors.”

The poll closed at 6:20 a.m. ET. In all, more than 17.5 million votes have been cast. A majority of 57.5% said Musk should step down. As of press time, Musk has not commented on the results of the vote.

For every problem you can think of, there is someone offering a solution that involves AI. Artificial intelligence can help solve such intractable problems as climate change and hazardous working conditions, which is what the most enthusiastic technology boosters promise.

It could even fix the much-infamous “Game of Thrones” finale, if you believe one of the industry’s staunchest supporters and a featured speaker at this month’s South by Southwest conference.

“Imagine if you could ask your AI to come up with a new ending that goes a different way,” said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, the research group behind ChatGPT and the image generation module DALL-E. “Maybe you put yourself out there as a main character or something, have interactive experiences.”

Rewriting an HBO show so that your digital likeness can slay dragons might seem a bit trivial for a technology like artificial intelligence. But it’s an app that’s getting a lot of attention, including at South by Southwest (or SXSW), the annual tech and culture fair that swept Austin, Texas, this week with movie nerds, celebrities, and venture capitalists.

During the conference, attendees imagined what chatbots, deepfakes, and content creation software would mean for the creative industries.

In a live podcast recording called “Generative AI: Oh God What Now?” Two technologists thought about how many creativity-driven jobs machines would take. In the lively pitch session “Shark Tank,” the entrepreneurs proposed new ways to integrate AI into entertainment, such as splitting audio stalks or automatically visualizing movie scripts. A SoundCloud executive told another audience that people who categorically reject the AI-generated sound of music are “a bit like the synthesizer haters” in the early days of electronic music.

And it’s not just SXSW attendees and speakers who are excited about the space. According to market research firm PitchBook, venture capitalists have signed 845 AI-related deals totaling $7.1 billion so far this year, despite a technology market beyond that. palpitation.

In Los Angeles, home to the entertainment industry and a growing tech sector, companies are already looking to bring AI into the production cycle in Hollywood. Santa Monica-based Flawless focused on using deep fake style tools Editing the actors’ mouth movements and facial expressions After principal photography wrapped. Playa Vista’s digital domain brings technology to bear on stunts.

“AI can be a great tool to help democratize a lot of aspects of filmmaking,” said Tye Sheridan, an actor who has starred in films like Ready Player One and the rebooted X-Men series. “You don’t need a bunch of people or a bunch of equipment or a bunch of complicated software with expensive licenses; I think you really open up a lot of opportunities for artists.”

Together with VFX artist Nikola Todorovic, Sheridan founded Wonder Dynamics, a West Hollywood-based company focused on using artificial intelligence to facilitate motion capture.

In a demo Sheridan and Todorovic showed to The Times ahead of their SXSW panel, the software took an early scene from the James Bond movie “Spectre” — of Daniel Craig erratically walking along a Mexico City rooftop — and removed the actor to replace him with an animated CGI character. and poignant. The benefits, for Sheridan, are immediate.

“I mean, you don’t have to wear silly-looking motion capture clothes anymore, do you?” Sheridan said.

But despite all the hype, some remain skeptical, wondering just how exciting the venture capital-fueled foam is.

It was just a year ago At SXSW 2022It seems that these techs all work in the cryptocurrency field. But soon the encryption values I backed offthe organizers He was shocked and industrial supports explode. Even the reversal — the other “next big thing” Silicon Valley has touted in recent years — has so far proven disappointing.

It doesn’t help that the tech entertainment space has its own trail of unfulfilled promises. Remember the 360-degree virtual reality movies? Remember 3D TVs?

The rise of writing AI has alarmed unions representing screenwriters, who fear that studios might replace experienced film and TV writers with software. This year, the Writers Guild of America will demand that studios regulate the use of material produced by artificial intelligence and similar technologies as part of negotiations for a new payment contract this year.

“We’ve been through various hype cycles before, not just with artificial intelligence but with other types of technological innovation,” said David Gunkel, a media studies professor at Northern Illinois University who focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies. “And so the smart thought is always to be careful about how much prediction you make about drastically changing anything, because in some cases it doesn’t.”

Even if the public hype for AI is warranted, the question of exactly what effect this rapidly emerging field will have on the entertainment industry is a thorny one, in part because it raises questions about creativity, originality, and artistic care that aren’t seen when, say, software. For example, making a transcript of an interview or making a dinner reservation.

Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, said that the standard for true artificial creativity has not yet been met by entertainment-oriented AI. Referring to Alan Alda last effort To get ChatGPT to write him a new scene from “M*A*S*H,” Amabile noted via email that the program required significant input from Alda, and even then produced alternately incoherent or unfamiliar dialogue.

“This does not mean that artificial intelligence will not be able to produce a truly funny stage script or a brilliantly affecting film,” she said. But it must be a different kind of AI. We’re not there yet, and I don’t think we will be anytime soon. In my opinion, anyone who claims to know when and how this will happen is engaging in either deception or wishful thinking.”

However, the potential impact of artificial intelligence seems hard to deny. Generative software such as DALL-E and ChatGPT have, within a few months, gone mainstream, filling social media feeds with machine-made images and packing interviews That many PR representatives would envy their human clients.

AI also doesn’t require users to set up a complex crypto wallet or buy an expensive VR headset to understand gravity, and the technology is quickly being integrated into search engines and social media apps.

“encrypt and [the] “The metaverse was two big trends that I think Silicon Valley and the tech industry were hoping would make huge waves,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said onstage at SXSW. His company has begun integrating artificial intelligence into its personality tests. “I think AI is just a much better wave in the sense that it produces a lot of useful things.”

“You don’t think…we’re just going through these fictitious trends until interest rates go up?” asked the interviewer, former New York Times newspaper columnist Ben Smith.

No, Peretti said, this is not another bubble destined to burst. The emergence of artificial intelligence is akin to cell phones or social media: “the massive trends that have changed the economy, society and culture.”

Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute consulting firm, is widely optimistic about AI’s transformative potential. In a trend report her company just released, AI was the only vertical technology out of 10 whose projected impact was color-coded lime green—and this is very relevant—for every industry it tracked, including entertainment.

Webb contemplates a world in which AI software is used to produce many different versions of a single television pilot on a large scale, either to focus on and test them before release or to show different programs to different viewers afterwards.

“I bet sometime in the next few years there’s a horrible industry practice where you have to have many variations before things get greenlit,” Webb said in an interview. And then there’s a predictive algorithm, like, that tries to determine which version has the highest probability of making the most money [money]. “

As promising as AI holds — and as eager as several SXSW panelists were to herald its universal reach — some industry insiders caution against expecting too much too soon from the technology.

A lot of the AI ​​tools that have hit the mainstream in the past few months look good on the Twitter feed but may not stand up to close scrutiny, said Todorovic, the visual effects artist turned AI entrepreneur. “Some of these things where you just think, ‘Oh, I’m just going to write this, I’m going to create the whole movie’ — I think it’s more like … you get a concept for it and you can go and work on it.”

He added, “It’s kind of hype, thinking you’re going to replace all these artists.”

The announcement came just eight weeks into Musk’s turbulent tenure as head of the social media platform. After finding a replacement, he added, he would “run the software and server teams” at the company.

Things came to a head for the billionaire on Sunday. After a turbulent few days in which Twitter banned both Notable journalists and the Promote competing social media platforms – Decisions that were later retracted – Misk Did a poll on Twitter To determine if he should remain the head of Twit.

The results came in Monday morning. More than 17.5 million users voted, and 57.5% said Musk should step down. He had said he would abide by the results of the survey, but waited about 40 hours before confirming that he would, in fact, be vacating the CEO position.

No alternate timeline has been announced yet, and Musk has previously warned that anyone who wants to run Twitter “must love the pain a lot.” And whoever heads the company, which Musk bought for $44 billion, will have a difficult road ahead.

The company has never been profitable, and Musk has warned that it is on the way to bankruptcy. During the controversial billionaire’s tenure as CEO, big companies have done just that Advertising stopped On site. The relaunch of Twitter Blue, a subscription service that Musk announced would be a revenue stream for the company, has been delayed several times. Now that it’s up and running again, it’s unclear how many people signed up.

Problems are mounting elsewhere for Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla. A number of high-profile investors have complained vociferously that Musk’s erratic leadership of Twitter has taken a toll on the auto company, whose stock value has plummeted from nearly $400 at the start of this year to just $138 today. Because most of Musk’s wealth comes from his Tesla stock, so does he not longer The richest person in the world.

musk partner In Twitter Space last night during which he said the future of Twitter has been improved by his leadership. “That’s why I’ve spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he explained. “This company is like, basically, you’re in a plane that’s going toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls not working.”