Disruption in Hollywood: The Army of the Dead is on the march.

“Her” (IMDB)

May 23, 2024

If you search for “Artificial Intelligence content” you get a week-long reading list of news commentary. So much reading that an AI large language model summary wouldn’t be a bad idea.

We’re still figuring this out. AI seems to promise the unknown at best, apocalypse at worst.

In this dream landscape, we can’t leave alone our fascination with the ambiguity of hybridized human and AI creativity. Our imaginary world is populated with androids, Terminators, Replicants, and Borg-zombies and Officer Data from Star Trek.

Or Scarlett Johansson.

The voice-only star of Her, a 2013 movie about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant, made a splash this week when she called out the Microsoft-controlled OpenAI for impersonating her voice in their new products.

An expected to and fro ensued on whether this is a clear cut case of stealing the actor’s intellectual property or…well you can read OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s side of it yourself.

This kind of headline-grabbing incident is to be expected as the AI giants grapple with making the choice between licensing and permission-less taking of creative talent and content. A recent news item is OpenAI making a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to license a body of news content.

This brings me to the latest blog post from media futurist Doug Shapiro.

A former Time Warner media executive, Shapiro thrives at looking around the corner and prognosticating the video entertainment industry’s direction.

He starts with the widely held assumption that Hollywood’s spending binge on high-cost video production is coming to an end. Here’s a chart demonstrating what many consider an unsustainable growth in blockbuster production budgets:

He moves on to another widely held assumption: that the relentless downward trajectory of content cost through technology is transforming YouTuber creators into the new marketplace power. Significantly, Shapiro sees new AI-assisted tools delivering better and better production values and, pushing from the other direction, he shares a belief (not well documented) that video consumers are getting less and less picky about production values.

Always colourful, Shapiro thinks the sheer scale of the YouTuber creation community will overwhelm the Hollywood/Netflix model for premium video content:

Just to be clear what I mean by this, I’m not making the case that we’re going to have a GenAI-created or -enabled blockbuster movie any time soon. What I’m arguing is that GenAI will democratize high quality production, and in doing that, it will exacerbate a low end disruption that’s already underway from creator content...

The last thing I’ll say—and then I’ll stop and we can hash this all out—is that I think another question is how quickly could this happen? I drew a parallel between the last disruption [by Netflix] and this pending one. And I think in a lot of ways, this could happen much faster.

One of the things to keep in mind is just the math of this, how overwhelming the math may be. Last year, Hollywood put out about 15,000 hours of TV and film, and there were 300 million hours uploaded to YouTube. If .01% of that is considered competitive with Hollywood, that’s twice Hollywood’s annual output.

To me, there’s always this Game of Thrones analogy where we can argue Disney versus Sony versus NBCU versus WBD versus Netflix versus Amazon—it’s like the Lannisters versus the Snows versus the Targaryens, while the Army of the Dead is amassing at the wall.

That’s what the industry needs to be worried about—the Army of the Dead. So that’s one thing, the math is overwhelming. This isn’t one disrupter. This is 10 million disruptors, 20 million disruptors.

Shapiro has lots more to say about who might survive the Army of the Dead: top-of-food-chain creators, working actors, below-the-line production workers. It’s worth reading the whole thing and he’s got great graphs.

The blog is a transcript of a panel discussion, you can watch it here.

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