This is a rerun of photographers complaining about digital photography and stock photo websites. Despite their worries, there's still plenty of work in shooting weddings and corporate events. Outside of folks like Roger Deakins, the person behind the lens has always has been fungible, so any argument that AI removes the humanity is dishonest.
In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling.
AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served.
The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together.
Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators.
Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.
One way to parse “Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served,” is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage.
If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.
I find that take absurd. Niche long tail interest stuff is the best. Would you really claim that the plethora of smaller groups on Spotify that can make it work are inferior to the mainstream radio acts that got almost all the attention previously?
Niche, long-tail interest stuff is, by definition, garbage to the vast majority of people, though. I understand that you may be interested in collecting chicken bones, but no matter how cheaply you can make a chicken bone documentary, I will not watch it.
Meanwhile, we delve deeper into the audience-of-one dystopia that has unfurled around us. I believe we took great value from having cultural lodestars to set and recalibrate our society’s vision, and we appear to be on the cusp of replacing that entirely with autogenerated nonsense.
That is irrelevant to the discussion that tools which enable cheaper production will allow for more individually directed art for smaller niche interests.
Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value?
If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem.
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edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.)
Here's my response to a child comment:
> No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.
The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through.
Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this.
The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it.
I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before.
The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is.
There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice.
If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.
Asking me for my opinion, getting my opinion, and then telling me it’s my opinion, and then judging my opinion is not a great conversation. I’m left wondering why you asked the original questions (I.e., do I value content and does the internet provide me valuable content) when you had already imagined my answer and drawn an illogical conclusion from my imaginary answers.
Edit: having perused your user page, I think I get it. You’re really passionate about the one man studio thing. I don’t think you’re wrong to do this at all, but it might be worth considering how Leo Strauss would interpret a nation of auteur content producers each producing for an audience of one. Everyone might get exactly what they want, but the coherent unified society does not get what it needs.
In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling.
AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served.
The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together.
Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators.
Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.