The subtlety of my titles is what you all love about this newsletter right?
404 Media has a really good look at what I am sure many people in Hollywood and the tech world think will be the future of entertainment. This monstrosity:
That is a trailer for an AI generated move. It has all the problems with AI generated content, but TCL+ insists that it is going to end up on their free channel that comes with their TV sets. Obviously, this is a terrible movie — none of the lip-syncing matches, the images are all different styles, the characters don’t look the same form frame to frame, and the video has weird artifacts that mark it as clearly AI (there is one scene of the lead female character in particular that reminds of the scenes in Total Recall when people are about to die on the surface of Mars). The point of this is to feed content to their free add supported channel in order to get more personalized info about viewers to sell them more ads.
Now, you may reasonably ask if this is going to work. On its face, it is terrible. Who would engage with this? But as the 404 media article points out, Google search is already overrun with AI generated garbage meant to generate ad revenue for the producers. Google doesn’t mind because it is close to a monopoly in the online ad space and so when dollars are spent on ads, even on spam AI pages, Google gets a cut. And so Google orients itself to these pages, usefulness be damned. This movie is the Google Search of free television.
TCL+ claims to have worked with writers and actors and other creatives ort create this slow motion nightmare. And I can believe them, though I am sure they were not paid anywhere near what they would have gotten for doing a real movie. Otherwise, why produce and release such obviously inferior material? even Skynet would recognize that trailer as a sad joke. I do not think that this kind of material is going to show up in movie theaters or on pay streaming services anytime soon. No one is going to pay for Uncanny Valley But Worse: The Movie. But on free services? If tis cheap enough an get any engagement? this might be the way of the future.
And that is one of the harms that AI will and is doing. It will drive out creatives in the same way that it is driving out journalists. People who can afford and are willing to pay for subscriptions to news sites get solid journalism. People who are willing and able to pay for subscription streaming services get human created, human centered art. Those who cannot get disinformation, nonsense, and horrifying nightmares posing as rom-coms. The new digital divide will be less about getting on the internet and more about getting useful, interesting material on the internet.
And, of course, since there is less money in subscriptions than there are in ads, there will be fewer creative jobs just as there are fewer journalism jobs (yes, I know the role private equity has played in gutting newsrooms. Often local newsrooms are profitable, just not at the margins that can support private equity dreams of avarice and/or they debt load they place upon these places when they acquire them. But the destruction of the ad market for local journalism has played a significant role.). While I do not think imitative AI will successfully produce watchable movies and TV shows, the attempt will do a lot of damage. In the same way enough people tried to find an ad or private equity driven mode for journalism and gutted newsrooms in the process, enough people will try and create AI content for their free ad supported channels that a significant culling of creatives is likely to occur. The damage AI does is in the here and now, always, not in the future.
And that is the danger of the hype. Imitative AI is not preordained to do, well, anything its hype masters tell us it will do. It is unlikely to live up to any of those claims, given its current trajectory. But will try to make the hype real, at least long enough to profit from it. If we don’t step in and enforce basic, common sense protections on these systems, then we will end lose a lot of creative work in the same way we lost a lot of journalism. And we will all be poorer for it.