John Attanasio is the CEO of Toonstar.
I can’t recall the precise second. It might need been throughout an AI occasion that I attended final summer season the place a high union exec proclaimed that she “prefers candles to electricity” in entrance of a cheering crowd…or it might need been final fall, post-writer’s strike decision, after I warned that the challenges for Hollywood weren’t over and somebody on X (previously Twitter) thoughtfully responded with “Die AI Scum.” Or maybe it was final month when the viewers at a SXSW panel with OpenAI loudly and often booed audio system who professed any good thing about AI. However I do know that in some unspecified time in the future throughout that sequence of occasions, I spotted the backlash to speak of AI in Hollywood was no atypical worry of a brand new expertise. And on this case, it’s a worry that can solely delay the troubles plaguing Hollywood if it persists.
Worry of latest expertise, and the modifications that include it, is definitely not new. We are able to hint all of it the best way again to The Luddites smashing looms in England in the course of the industrial revolution. However the existential disaster presently going through the leisure business has been within the making for many years and it has nothing to do with AI. Distribution fragmentation pushed by the rise of web video and social media platforms has disrupted the gatekeeper period and the monopoly on entry to audiences of the mega-network and cable days. Add to that, there’s now a enterprise mannequin imbalance, courtesy of the streaming wars, which drove up the price of manufacturing and advertising so excessive that primary financial guidelines (i.e. earnings) had been forgotten. The consequence? Ongoing legacy business consolidation and the seemingly never-ending layoffs which have haunted the studios for greater than a decade.
Virtually any author, actor, or agent will let you know about how exhausting it’s grow to be to get something bought, not to mention made. “Keep alive until ‘25” is a thing, which is apparent in the testimonials featured in this recent LinkedIn post from many skilled behind-the-camera professionals who haven’t labored in months, and are on the cusp of promoting their properties to outlive.
Final however not least, youthful generations have new tastes and habits which were born from legacy alternate options equivalent to YouTube and TikTok which have considerably challenged the media industrial complicated. A latest Harris Ballot reported that almost three-fourths of Gen Zers and millennials want unique content material over franchises and wish extra content material from small, impartial creators. So why not lean into this pattern and provides youthful audiences what they need?
Hollywood needs to be embracing these wishes, however it’s not. As an alternative, it’s caught in prequel-sequel-reboot purgatory and targeted on brute drive big-name, big-budget blockbusters within the hopes of combating fragmenting distribution and altering enterprise fashions. Twine Jefferson made an impassioned plea on the Oscars this 12 months for studios to make 20 $10 million motion pictures or 50 $4 million motion pictures as a substitute of a single $200 million film as a result of there are too many nice storytellers on the market who can’t get their tasks made. And guess what, with that many nice storytellers and with audiences who need their tales, it doesn’t must be that means.
And that is completely the place AI can enter the image as a part of the answer. AI-powered instruments will help democratize manufacturing capabilities beforehand solely out there to the massive studios and put this superpower within the fingers of those gifted impartial creators who’ve been left behind by the legacy system. AI will help ship cost-effective, studio-quality productions which in flip will unlock alternatives for brand spanking new and various storytellers, create new job alternatives, and fulfill the demand from millennial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha audiences. And these are job alternatives and unique tasks which are simply not within the playing cards from legacy Hollywood.
The proponents of AI in Hollywood have discovered to develop thick pores and skin round this situation. We’ll take the insults on X as a result of consider it or not, we’re lobbying to save lots of the business, not destroy it with robots. And in reality, it’s not the robots we needs to be nervous about. As within the case of all human historical past, within the phrases of historian Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” It’s the unhealthy actors who use tech to do hurt that we have to fear about.
It’s true that with every new technological innovation, jobs are certainly misplaced whereas new efficiencies are reaped, and new sorts of jobs are created. AI isn’t any totally different. It would get rid of jobs. However to speak of a sensible method to utilizing AI in Hollywood is to soak up all of the worry and anger of a group of creatives that’s borne the fallout of an business that misplaced its means lengthy earlier than AI. And if we let worry take over, we’re going to lose the possibility to handle and management AI in a means that may assist get our business again on its toes.
Perhaps the phrases of Matthew McConaughey’s indelible Rust Cohle character put it greatest proper after his personal existential reckoning, “It’s just one story. The oldest. Light versus dark.” However not “light vs. dark” as in tech vs. people, however “light vs. dark” as in people doing good vs. people doing hurt. And possibly that is the second after we discover out what sort of people we’re.
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