I asked ChatGPT about the future of online video. Here’s what it got wrong – and right

By Jessica Stuart, Founder and CEO of Long Story Short Media and Bob Yule , Executive Vice President

We spend a lot of time thinking about the media landscape — past, future, and dizzying present. And, recently, like pretty much every other professional we know, we decided to pose a question about it to ChatGPT, just to hear what it had to say.

As we get consumed by the day-to-day of our fast-moving industry, we wanted to know whether AI could see the future forest from all the current digital trees. So we asked it, “What will be the future impact of online video?” 

Its answer made us pause. 

“While we are in the earliest stages of Global Digital Culture,” it began, “The content of our video will describe the values, beliefs, and cultural norms of our time. Video will create valuable glimpses of the past, offering insights to the early digital age.” 

There was the forest we had been looking for. 

Storytelling is the crux of how we have always communicated. Our history is translated through stories, but our future is too. And now, as self-publishing becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, we’re also producing our present at record speeds. It’s both beautiful and terrifying. 

Video — this powerful mix of images, words, and sounds — can help start wars or pave the way for peace. It can educate us with facts or manipulate us with disinformation. And more and more, the algorithms of how and when we’re served up this content makes all the difference. 

We saw the irony in asking ChatGPT this question — a technology that scrapes the internet for its content and sometimes fabricates its answers. We think it did too, because it added:

“The advent of artificial intelligence and deepfake technology raises concerns about the authenticity of videos. Future generations might need to develop advanced skills to distinguish between real and manipulated content, leading to a different level of skepticism and critical analysis when viewing historical videos.”

Never mind future generations — we need these skills now. 

As producers, we have felt that responsibility for journalistic truth and emotional authenticity since the beginning. And as we’ve evolved as a company, we’re taking on new components of work that feel more timely than ever: countering online disinformation and building communications capacity for other organizations.

For the past few years, we’ve partnered with American University’s PERIL ( Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) ) to harness the power of video to fight disinformation. We started that work in 2022 with PERIL, Jigsaw (a research unit within Google), and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health , experimenting with 30-second videos to find the best ways to counter misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. 

You can read about the “pre-bunking” method — alerting viewers to manipulative techniques before they are exposed to them — used to great effect by that study and see our videos here. We’re now continuing this work testing out messaging approaches with The CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health and the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health through a grant from The National Institutes of Health .

And we’ve also deepened our collaboration with AU PERIL, as part of their new VEER (Violent Extremism Education and Resilience) project. This fall we presented at a workshop that brought together nonprofits around the country to train them on how to use short-form video to help inoculate against misleading content — all to help prevent our loved ones and community members from going down rabbit holes that can lead to radicalization. You can read more about that here.

This kind of communications capacity building work — helping train other communicators and giving them the tools to make their content as effective as possible — has become an increasingly larger part of our work.

For the past several years we’ve been working with RTI International to showcase the important work that’s being done in sustainable development through USAID -funded global education projects. We’ve helped a local team in the Kyrgyz Republic with the Okuu Keremet! project (which means “Learning is Awesome!” in Kyrgyz) creatively communicate the impact of their early reading and math programs through the written word and human-centered video. 

We’re also working with the ILOA project (Improving Learning Outcomes for Asia) to help use storytelling best practices to bring to life the data and learnings of education reform work throughout the region. 

And as we continue to grow, we continue to produce the kind of work we always have…with intention. With journalistic integrity. And with creativity sprinkled throughout to show the power of the human spirit.

We loved this piece we did for this year’s Robin Hood Gala to celebrate 35 years of work uplifting New Yorkers out of poverty.

We worked with artist, engineer, and President of Google's Disability Alliance, Aubrie Lee, to help create "Our Truths Our Power" which you can watch here. This short film weaves together experiences of disabled Googlers from different parts of the world and features disability activist and Oscar nominee, Jim LeBrecht.

And we were inspired by this video we created to open this year’s Clinton Global Initiative, narrated by Michael Douglas.

As we keep an eye on shaping our present with stories like these, we’re also looking to those future generations that ChatGPT referenced, who might one day be studying early “Global Digital Culture” to get a sense of who we were and what we stood for. 

We know that everything we produce becomes a small line in the digital fingerprints we leave behind. And we’re hoping that the stories we tell today help create the kind of future we all want to see.