TED Talks Daily
Will AI make us the last generation to read and write? | Victor Riparbelli
Sat, 01 Mar 2025
Technology is changing our world — and how we communicate — at an astonishing rate. So much so that entrepreneur Victor Riparbelli predicts that artificial intelligence will drive audio and video to replace text as our primary form of communication by the end of this decade. He imagines a world where anyone can create a Hollywood film, receive personalized education or communicate via hyper-realistic avatars — all in the time it takes to read a book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. My fellow readers out there might find today's talk pretty provocative. Syntesia CEO Victor Ripperbelly gives a 2024 talk in which he describes a future of immersive and vibrant video and audio, but not with text or reading. What does that look and feel like?
He paints a picture.
Chapter 2: Will AI make reading and writing obsolete?
Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write. I know that sounds strange, almost unthinkable. Text is everywhere around us. We use it hundreds of times every single day, and it's woven into the fabric of our daily lives. But today, I'm going to make the case that humanity's relentless pursuit of better ways to convey ideas and preserve knowledge doesn't end with text.
I think we're at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication. And I think that future generations will slowly replace text with more intuitive forms of communication, like audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies. And one day, I think we'll look back at reading and writing as historical artifacts, like we do with papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs or cave paintings.
Don't get me wrong, I love reading. This is not a personal vendetta against text. Some of my fondest memories is walking around my local library back in Copenhagen, picking out all kinds of books, mostly science fiction books, returning home to read them, so I could go back there again and pick out the next set of exciting books to read.
I love disappearing into these worlds that were different than the physical world around me. And that, of course, only was amplified when I discovered the Internet at around 10 years old, which opened up an entirely new world of ideas, of music and people. The Internet information was free, and I saw firsthand how technology didn't just change the distribution of content.
Chapter 3: How is technology transforming communication?
It changed the content in itself. The difference between a lively forum and a book is massive, right? A blog and a newspaper, and so on. In music, which is my big passion outside of work, I saw how software instruments and sampling and drum machines gave birth to entirely new genres that had never been possible before.
Not only that, but all the people around the world making new, exciting music could share it with the world without the middlemen of labels. The video games I played got connected to the Internet. You formed communities with people around the world that you didn't know. That's what my parents thought, at least. I started my first business when I was 13 years old in World of Warcraft.
We were 50 people slaying dragons together online. And I would later learn in life that it's actually not that different than running a startup. And those early years of my life sparked a lifelong interest in media and technology, how they change the way that we create, consume, play, and communicate.
And in 2016, I discovered a research paper called Face to Face by Professor Matthias Niesner and his team. They built a system that using neural networks could produce really, really photorealistic video. And when I saw this for the first time, I felt like I'd seen magic.
Chapter 4: What is Synthesia and how does it relate to AI video?
And I was convinced that in 10 years, you're going to be able to create a Hollywood film from your bedroom without needing anything else than just your imagination. That took three years, and I think that's actually going to hold up. I couldn't get this idea out of my mind, and eventually I ended up founding Synthesia, an AI video company.
along with Matthias and Lourdes and Stefan, my co-founders. And this really was a way to kind of marry my interest in media and technology and sci-fi. We started the company with the vision of making everyone in the world into a Hollywood director.
And while that's definitely still a very exciting vision, as the years kind of went on, we realized that as exciting as AI-generated Hollywood films is, it's only the tip of the iceberg.
The really exciting potential about these technologies is that they're going to enable every single piece of content, from text messages to novels to boring corporate training materials, to be brought alive in video and audio. But before we talk more about video, let's talk about text. Text is the original way of compression for human communication.
We encode our thoughts and knowledge into symbols that can convey meaning across time and space. That hasn't always been the case. Thousands of years ago, text didn't exist, and the only way we had to share information was orally.
In 1500 before Christ, the first alphabet was invented, and it essentially took these very complex writing systems and simplified them into just a few characters, laying the groundwork for the modern society that we know today. In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and for the first time in history, we could mass-produce written content.
It would take until the mid-20th century before reading became something for the masses and people slowly became literate. If we fast-forward to today, text is ubiquitous, and it's impossible to live a life without being able to read and write. But as great as text is, it's an imperfect technology. It's very efficient and it's very scalable.
But it's a very, very lossy method of compressing information. It lacks all the nuance and additional information that we get when we speak to someone in real life. Your tone of voice, your body language, where you are, all those things matter for that message, right? Text can be interpreted a million different ways depending on the receiver. But we invented emojis to make it a little bit better.
But even emojis are not perfect. And if you think about visual communication, it's a very intuitive way of consuming information. What if I shared this with you instead? A text description of the image would have taken you 30 seconds to read it with a high cognitive load to take those pieces of symbols and turn them into an image in your mind, right?
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Chapter 5: Why might video and audio replace text?
Once we add a time dimension, as in video, this problem massively compounds. So it's not that strange that since the invention of text, we've been innovating towards richer and more intuitive ways of exchanging information. We invented radio, TV, internet, VR, social media, and now AI. In 2024, it's very obvious that people want to watch and listen.
If you look at the digital economy, TikTok is the fastest growing social network. It's also the fastest growing search engine, which is very interesting. Video and audio is everywhere in the apps that we use. We send voice notes on WhatsApp. Now we're on dating apps. When we shop, we watch product videos. And my thesis is that the more we consume video, the more bored we are by text.
And I have to say, this is also true for me. even though I love reading. When I learn something new, I usually start on YouTube, on TikTok, listen to a podcast. And only if I'm really, really invested in something, I'll take the hours out of my day to read a 200-page book. It just doesn't feel that much like it's worth it anymore. And for a lot of you, you probably feel the same.
Do you want to learn music theory from a long book or from a video on YouTube that has audio? Do you want to listen to the news on a podcast on the way to work or fold out this physical piece of paper somewhere? Most people feel like this. But we all have this guilt. I have at least. I feel guilty when I watch videos and I listen to podcasts instead of picking up a good old-fashioned book.
You hear the commentary on this. Young people are unable to focus anymore. They need constant dopamine hits from cheap content that they scroll through on their social media apps. They don't get outside their room anymore. Exactly the same thing parents have been saying for 200 years. I have a prerogative idea. What if we're all just tired of overly dense, slow information?
Books with too many pages. Newspaper articles with filler. What if we become much more sensitive to the quality and the conciseness of the content that we consume because we now have infinite choice? What if the current generation of kids are able to learn and absorb information much faster because of technology, not despite it? Is the problem us, or is the problem text?
We still read a lot, right? We just read from many different sources every single day, not just a book and a newspaper. We read our messaging apps and our social media networks and our blog. We listen to long-form podcasts. It's very growing, right? But we still have this idea that books are morally superior in some sense. And even though I'm giving you this talk, I still very much feel it.
I don't know why that is. I'll let someone else do the research on that. But it's definitely very interesting how we psychologically attribute more value to the written word. So why is so much information still text if you really prefer video? It's pretty simple. The answer is cost. Cost in time and cost in money.
Today, we have to pick between the speed and scale of text or the accuracy and engagement of video content. And so there is this underlying economic incentive where only the content and the ideas and the knowledge we deem important enough gets converted into video and audio formats.
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Chapter 6: How does AI democratize content creation?
And so in the entertainment industry, this means that we get Fast and the Furious 278, rather than avant-garde cinema from film students. In the corporate world, this means that the Super Bowl ad is a video, but the fire safety video is a long, boring document. And This is about to change in a big, big way. AI will change that equation completely.
With AI, we can get both speed, scale, accuracy, and engagement. AI can create highly photorealistic content digitally. Computers can learn what the world looks like, and they can replicate it and remix it in amazing details. This is going to usher in a new wave of creativity, and it's not going to be driven by Hollywood.
It's going to be driven by YouTubers and young people with great ideas who take these tools and tell amazing stories. At Indesia, we focus on AI avatars, digital humans that sound and look like us. They can even be us if you make a clone of yourself. Today, our avatars already interact with millions of people every single day.
They teach school subjects, they onboard restaurant workers, provide health guidance, and sell products in more than 130 different languages. And they're getting really good. Very soon, they'll be very difficult to distinguish from reality. So with these technologies, we can create anything without the need for cameras.
We can bring our imaginations to life without the traditional barriers of skill and cost. But what's more exciting about all these new technologies is that they're going to make it extremely easy for anyone to create content. We've already seen how keyboards and computers turned all of us into writers. We've seen how PowerPoint turned all of us into designers.
And with AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director producing Hollywood-grade video without needing any training at all. At Syntheser, we've already turned more than a million people into video creators, and it's really fun to see all the things people make videos about, but they don't have to ask their boss because they can just log on and make the videos themselves.
Why do people make videos? It's not a very well researched area yet, but we've been working with UCL in London to figure out how do we learn differently with video and AI video versus text. We did a study with 400 participants. It's still ongoing. We plan to publish the results sometime next year. But there's some really interesting initial findings.
When you just ask people, do you prefer to learn with AI video or text, the results are pretty astonishing. 77% of people prefer to learn through video. So faster and easier content creation will be transformative. But with new technologies, we always invent new media formats. And right now, most AI-generated content is what I call a bridge genre.
We're using it to create old formats with new technologies. Just like the first newspapers, sorry, the first websites looked like newspapers on a screen, AI videos today are linear. They have a beginning and an end. They essentially emulate what we can record with a physical camera.
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