Will AI make us the last generation to read and write? | Victor Riparbelli

Summary

Summary of TED Talks Daily Episode: "Will AI Make Us the Last Generation to Read and Write?" by Victor Riparbelli

Introduction

In the March 1, 2025 episode of TED Talks Daily, host Elise Hu introduces a provocative and forward-thinking presentation by Victor Riparbelli, CEO of Synthesia. Riparbelli explores the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human communication, particularly questioning whether AI will render reading and writing obsolete for future generations. This detailed summary captures the essence of Riparbelli's argument, his insights into the evolution of communication technologies, and the profound implications for society.

Thesis Overview

Riparbelli begins with a bold assertion:

“Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write.” (02:22)

He acknowledges the ubiquity of text in our daily lives but contends that humanity is on the brink of a new era where AI-driven communication methods—such as audio, video, and immersive technologies—will supersede traditional text-based interactions. Riparbelli envisions a future where reading and writing will be perceived as ancient practices, akin to "papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs."

The Role of Text in Human Communication

Riparbelli provides a historical perspective on the evolution of 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.” (06:15)

He traces the development from oral traditions to the invention of the alphabet around 1500 BCE and the printing press in 1440, highlighting how each advancement exponentially increased the dissemination and accessibility of information. Despite its efficiency and scalability, Riparbelli critiques text for its limitations in conveying nuance and emotional context, which are inherently present in spoken communication.

The Rise of AI-Enabled Communication

Transitioning to the present, Riparbelli examines the shift towards richer media formats:

“We’re at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication.” (02:45)

He cites the exponential growth of video and audio consumption through platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts. The integration of AI in these mediums has enhanced their accessibility and engagement, making them preferred over text for information consumption and content creation. Riparbelli's personal journey—from a passionate reader and internet enthusiast to founding Synthesia—illustrates his deep-seated belief in the transformative power of AI in media.

The Decline of Text and Rise of Media Consumption

Riparbelli presents compelling observations on contemporary media consumption habits:

“The more we consume video, the more bored we are by text.” (10:30)

He notes a cultural shift where individuals prefer dynamic and interactive content over static text, driven by the convenience and immersive experience that video and audio provide. This shift is not merely a preference but a fundamental change in how humans process and retain information, challenging the dominance of text-based communication.

AI's Role in Content Creation

A pivotal part of Riparbelli's argument revolves around AI democratizing content creation:

“With AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director, producing Hollywood-grade video without needing any training at all.” (14:05)

Synthesia's advancements in AI avatars and digital humans exemplify this potential. These technologies enable users to create highly realistic and personalized video content effortlessly, breaking down traditional barriers of cost and skill. Riparbelli emphasizes that AI will not only enhance individual creativity but also revolutionize industries by making sophisticated content creation accessible to the masses.

Implications for Education and Entertainment

Riparbelli delves into the transformative effects of AI on education and entertainment:

“Education is going to be turbocharged with these new AI systems.” (15:30)

In education, AI-driven personalized learning experiences can adapt to individual student needs, making learning more engaging and effective. Similarly, in entertainment, AI will enable the creation of interactive and endless narratives, blurring the lines between content consumption and participation. This personalization extends to integrating interests and preferences, such as having favorite celebrities teach school subjects, thereby fostering deeper engagement and retention.

Ethical and Societal Questions

Riparbelli concludes by addressing the ethical and societal implications of an AI-dominated communication landscape:

“There’s a Pandora’s box of questions. Do you care if our content is AI-generated or not?” (16:50)

He raises critical questions about authenticity, trust, and the human connection in AI-generated content. Issues such as the replacement of human actors with digital avatars, the emotional impact of interacting with AI entities, and the potential loss of traditional skills like reading and writing are explored. Riparbelli urges society to thoughtfully navigate these challenges to harness AI's benefits while mitigating its risks.

Conclusion

Victor Riparbelli's TED Talk presents a visionary outlook on the future of human communication, positing that AI will fundamentally transform how we create, consume, and interact with information. By highlighting both the opportunities and challenges, Riparbelli invites listeners to reflect on the inevitable evolution of communication technologies and their role in shaping an “awesome future.” His compelling narrative underscores the necessity of embracing innovation while conscientiously addressing the accompanying ethical and societal dilemmas.

Notable Quotes

• “Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write.” (02:22)
• “Text is the original way of compression for human communication.” (06:15)
• “We’re at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication.” (02:45)
• “The more we consume video, the more bored we are by text.” (10:30)
• “With AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director, producing Hollywood-grade video without needing any training at all.” (14:05)
• “Education is going to be turbocharged with these new AI systems.” (15:30)
• “There’s a Pandora’s box of questions. Do you care if our content is AI-generated or not?” (16:50)

Final Thoughts

Victor Riparbelli's insights present a compelling case for the transformative potential of AI in redefining human communication. As society stands on the brink of this technological revolution, his talk serves as both a visionary map and a cautionary tale, emphasizing the need for intentional and ethical integration of AI into our daily lives.

Transcript

[Ryan]

Hey, Ryan. That was a fast trip. It was like you teleported.

[Victor Ripperbelli]

Yeah, just got in.

[Margaret]

I'll get all my expenses logged, I promise.

[Ryan]

Oh, no, you're okay. SAP Concur uses advanced AI so your expense report will practically write itself. Quite the breakthrough. It's like we've been teleported into the future. All right, so just curious, would you give us written permission to convert your matter into energy patterns and reassemble you at, say, random travel destinations?

[Margaret]

Margaret, are you building a teleporter?

[Ryan]

No. Yes.

[Margaret]

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[Elise Hu]

You're listening to Ted Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. Hi, I'm your host Elise Hu. My fellow readers out there might find today's talk pretty provocative. Synthesia CEO Victor Ripperbelli 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.

[Victor Ripperbelli]

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 in 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. On the Internet, information was free. And I saw firsthand how technology didn't just change the distribution of content, 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, outsider 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. And I was convinced that in 10 years, we're going to be able to create a Hollywood film for your bedroom without needing anything else than just your imagination. That's in 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 lousy 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 could 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 high cognitive load to take those pieces of those symbols and turn them into an image in your mind, right? 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 run 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 when I listen to podcasts instead of picking up a good old fashioned book. You hear the commentary on 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 provocative 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. Read our messaging apps and our social media networks and our blog listen to long form podcasts. Very growing. 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. And so in the entertainment industry this means that we Get Fast and 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 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 Synthesia, we focus on AI avatars, digital humans that sound and look like us. They will 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 who to create content. We've already seen how keyboards and computers turn 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 Synthesia, 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 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 radio. 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. Once we combine AI video with reasoning systems like language models, we're going to unlock an entirely new type of media that's going to be interactive and personalized. It's going to be able to think and narrate and personalize content for us. If you're learning music theory, you'll have an assistant that knows your skill level, knows your taste in music, and build a curriculum around that. All of your kids maybe will have their favorite celebrities teaching them math in school. And they'll do it in a context that's interesting for your kid. Maybe that's soccer or sci fi or whatever. Education is going to be turbocharged with these new AI systems. Entertainment is going to change. It's going to be shaped by the viewers and by the world around it. We'll probably have interactive films, we'll have TV series that never end. It sounds weird, but in many ways this is what a social media feed is, right? It's just an endless story. Your TikTok feed is also an endless stream of personalized content just for you. And when we combine this with new form factors like ar, VR, brain computer interfaces, media is increasingly going to appear like real life. Maybe we'll be transmitting messages to our friends just via thought in the future. And our inbox is not going to be text. It's going to be videos of all your friends and your relatives. AI avatars talking to you. It sounds weird, but I don't think it's that far off. And I promise you that your fire safety video at work will be a Spielberg esque masterpiece. The not so distant future. These technologies open up a Pandora box of questions. There's ethical questions, there's political questions, there's design questions, and there's commercial questions. I'll leave you with a few provocative questions. Do you care if our content is AI generated or not? Do you care when a film uses special effects or green screen? Do we care that actors in commercials are paid to play someone else and endorse products that they've probably never heard of? Do we care if actors are real or generated? Are you a fan of Harry Potter or Daniel Radcliffe? Does it matter that Daniel Radcliffe exists in the real world? You'll never meet him. Probably right? What about Mickey Mouse or Pixar characters? Can we feel something for them despite them being AI generated? Will we trust AI agents? Or do you still want to call the call center to speak to a human? Can we be entertained by computers interacting with each other? Would you want to play computers, play soccer, or play chess against each other? Maybe not. The future is ahead of us, and while a lot of this sounds like sci fi, it really isn't that far off. And it's up to all of us in this room and society to make sure that we build a really awesome future. I think we have the technologies and I think we have the people to do it. Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

That was Victor RipperBelli at TED AI Vienna in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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