So this is basically just using YouTube as a FAST service.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years.
And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years.
When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Hollywood never made Steampunk Vampire Hunters of Ganymede, but in the future there will be creators filling every void. There won't be much reason to revisit old catalogues that don't cater to modern audiences unless it's to satisfy curiosity or watch one of the shining diamonds in the rough.
There will be a few legacy titles that endure (Friends, Star Wars), but most of it will be washed away in a sea of infinite attention sinks.
We're about to hit post-scarcity, infinite attention satisfiability. We've already looked over the inflection point, so it doesn't take much imagination to reason what's next.
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Edit: copying my buried comments from below to expand on this.
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I have direct experience with this field.
I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.
We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.
You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.
Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.
Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.
I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.
By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI. By successful, let's say something that wins a non-AI award (For example, an Oscar or Emmy) or receives something like a 70% positive review on rotten tomatoes, IMDB, or some other metacritic platform that is not specifically made for reviewing AI art.
I do not believe the AI will live up to the hype of "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years."
I think we'll see long form AI, I don't think it will be high quality or even something that most people want to watch. The only people that will want to watch that sort of AI slop are AI enthusiasts who want AI to be amazing.
I don't think LLMs can write nuanced character arcs, so let's not include them.
On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?
I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.
If you can make that adjustment, then I think we have a bet.
AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.
I would also bet that sometime in the next 10 years, we'll have a masterpiece of cinema on our hands where the heavy lifting (visuals, sound, even screenwriting) was largely done by an AI, helpfully nudged and curated at important moments by human experts. Or, by just one person.
It doesn’t need to win awards or prestige.
Someone needs to say “play me new episodes of the office or arrested development” and it needs to generate something that resembles the office or arrested development. People can have the noise on in the background, and it won’t matter if it isn’t quite coherent or super funny.
That’s just not how humanities work
I think it's more likely that once Gen Z is the oldest surviving generation, maybe no one will watch any content longer than a TikTok due to attention span degradation and Hollywood just churns out vertical 2 minute videos direct to phones rather than release movies, and those would be some mixture of AI and human-created work.
The argument is that few will watch the majority of WB's back catalogue, because their time is being spent with all the other attention sinks.
This places a monetary value on the content, not a social or cultural value.
Things like Netflix realized it too and buried the "Continue Watching" at a randomized index in an endless carousel, added Autoplay and even starts autoplaying something different after you finish a series. And of course, newer things like TikTok have always been this way. All these things are, I'd argue, user-hostile in that they're optimizing toward, in the extreme case, complete addiction.
I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.
We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.
You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.
Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.
Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.
I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.
AI can copy things that are already copied, but you’ll never get something as paradigm shifting as Toy Story 1.
Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'll have their way.
There will be amazing art made using AI, and AI will enable extremely talented creators that could have never made it in the classical studio system.
Don't be so pessimistic.
We're going to have "Obra Dinn" and "Undertale" equivalents in film soon. Small scale auteurs sharing their mind's eye with you.
Yeah, boy, I'm glad humans are making novel stuffs.
Here's a really small scoped short film made with the limited tools available half a year ago. It accomplished simple storytelling with limited tooling:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
You're going to see more and more ambitious stuff soon. We're beginning to have the ability to control characters, have consistency, block, and steer.
Couldn't work out if this channel is the creator but there a bunch of them - https://m.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos
If the singing is ML-generated then I think that's pretty impressive too.
Looks like the channels started out as still images with Ken Burns Effect only 2 years ago. That's some progress.
I've personally been involved in doing this very thing, but just look at the apps for like Max where they have their linear channel offerings within the same UI as their VOD. While Max isn't ad supported, it's a similar concept.
