How AI can Really Challenge Movies
Don’t hide AI in writer’s rooms. Make AI the center of the show.
Almost everyone I speak with in the entertainment business sees ChatGPT and as-yet undeveloped AI technologies as a new way to write scripts or generate animations, and replace screenwriters and animation artists in the process. That’s dumb, on many levels.
First off, machine-generated writing sucks. It’s a reversion to the mean. Ask ChatGPT to write something, and it will create the most derivative and predictable version of that thing it can muster. That’s its job. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the desire to replace Hollywood’s humans with AI misses the real opportunity. AI is better and more interesting than that.
As Marshall McLuhan once noted, whenever a new medium arises the first thing it does is use the previous medium as its content. The first television shows were just stage plays, with a single camera in the audience capturing the action. It took decades before DesliLu popularized the “swing set” and shot the first three-camera sitcoms.
The first content of the text-only Internet was actually the medium of mail, but the first truly commercial medium it absorbed was television. The main thing we do on the Internet is stream TV. We’re still just in the baby stages of the Internet’s…
