Caribbean people must become uploaders, not downloaders, if the region is to capitalise on artificial intelligence (AI) opportunities, especially in relation to the creative industries.
That is the advice from leading creative industries expert Dr Keith Nurse, who is president of the College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago.
“The Caribbean is becoming a nation of downloaders rather than uploaders. With AI the challenge is, do you have content uploaded? Are you uploading it? And if the answer to those two questions no or not yet, or not ready, or whatever, you are going to be bypassed,” he warned.
“And then, for all intents and purposes, you do not exist. If it’s not on the Internet, as my kids say, it doesn’t exist. So now is the time for us to rapidly scale up, we are properly behind but it’s never too late.”
Nurse observed that “everybody is talking about the challenges with AI and so on, but the point is that AI will disrupt anything that is generic”.
“So if you are producing generic content, it will wipe you out. So human intelligence has to step up and generate more authentic, interesting, dynamic content to stay in front of AI,” he stated.
“Places like the Caribbean have a little bit of wiggle room, because AI is not going to come and use our content just yet, because our content is not as monetisable or as profitable. AI will go for the most profitable content first.”
He said a shortcoming the region had was that “a lot of Caribbean content is not even digitised”.
“Do we have on a platform somewhere all the Caribbean films that have ever been produced. No. Or all the Caribbean books that have been produced by all of our authors, especially our more seasoned, established authors? Where are their works? . . . We have been fairly weak in terms of digitising our content and so the downside of that is that as we progress, our young people are now going to be utilising content that is not our content so it’s probably going to get worse,” said Nurse.
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