Will algorithms take over Hollywood and make personalized video the dominant way people entertain themselves?
Like me, my friend Shelly Palmer is in the futurist business—peering into trends, technologies, and tea leaves to make sense of what’s coming. Last week, Shelly published, “Hollywood’s AI Blind Spot: The Fatal Mistake That Will Kill the Industry,” which I recommend reading in full.
However, to speed us along in this article, I asked Perplexity.ai to summarize Shelly’s piece into three succinct bullet points, which it did (I tweaked it a little):
- Hollywood is fixated on Generative AI’s impact on existing workflows, overlooking its potential as a revolutionary new storytelling medium.
- Gen AI-driven personalization threatens to disrupt traditional shared viewing experiences, representing a fundamental shift in content consumption.
- The industry must embrace AI as a creative tool for dynamic, personalized storytelling or risk obsolescence in the face of this technological evolution.
I both agree and disagree with Shelly.
A paradigm shift?
I agree that Generative AI “represents an evolutionary leap in narrative experience” akin to the jumps from print to radio to TV. Here’s how Shelly puts it:
The mistake Hollywood is making now is the same one it has made before. The first radio broadcasts were just recordings of vaudeville shows. The first television broadcasts were cameras pointed at radio hosts. The first streaming services were just clips from TV shows uploaded to the internet. It took years for each medium to develop into its own distinct artform. Generative AI is at that same inflection point.
Coincidentally, around the same time that Shelly’s article came out, I was chatting with Chris Williams, founder/CEO of pocket.watch (a big entertainment company that you’ll know if you have young kids), who is fired up about a different potential that comes with Gen AI—democratization and empowering human artists:
What happens to the Creator economy when a kid in his garage can make Avatar? That’s exciting. But that makes a lot of people in my backyard here in LA nervous, as they should be. These companies have to be careful about how they approach AI; they’re bound by union agreements. AI is a big wave, and it’s coming whether they like it or not. You know who’s riding that wave with their surfboards? Creators.
Today, a Pixar movie costs $2.2 million a minute. In the future, to make that level of animation, it’s going to be five dollars. Not 5,000 not 50,000 not 500,000. Five.
What does that world look like? Spielberg famously said, “If a pen cost $100 million, we’d have no William Shakespeare.” The cost of making video content is getting closer to the cost of the pen.
One thing I respect about the ways both Shelly and Chris represent their future-casting is that neither think they know what that future is going to look like in detail. They know that things will change, they know why, but they can’t anticipate how. That’s consistent with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a “paradigm shift,” where you can only see that your thinking has changed in the rear-view mirror.
I disagree with Shelly for two reasons.
1. Personalization isn’t great.
I don’t think the most likely big change with Gen AI and storytelling is around personalization.
When it comes to advertising, personalization is powerful. I’m enjoying Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI, Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman’s new book about this topic. But there’s a lot of daylight between the experience of, on one hand, a banner ad, email offer, or a 30-second commercial about a product and, on the other hand, entertainment that we spend between 22 minutes and two hours with.
Who can you talk with about a hyper-personalized narrative that you watch alone? We are a social species. We’re also a lonely one according to former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (and many others). Entertainment is precious because it’s typically a safe topic in a polarized world.
My friend Grant McCracken, an anthropologist and shrewd cultural critic, introduced me to the notion of “phatic communication,” where the point of connection is to establish that connection rather than transmit information: I’m OK. You’re OK. We’re OK. We talk a lot about what we’re watching, reading, and listening to—how the football game went, that final episode of a beloved series—because it’s phatically important. Book clubs are only partially about reading books: they are also about connecting people, often over wine.
The popular but long-since defunct image of video gamers is solitary, masturbatory, hoodie-wearing, ungroomed young men in mom and dad’s basement. There is solo gaming. But there’s also social gaming: a bunch of people playing a first-person shooter like COD from many different basements at once, a room full of people playing Smash in a living room, or even people sharing daily Wordle scores. I would have drifted away from playing Wordle a while ago if it weren’t for the daily, “you got it in 2???”-type connections across separate threads with my wife and kids, my beer buddies, my mom, and the best man at my wedding.
2. Creativity is a team sport.
A caveat: this may be a question of nuance between Shelly’s perspective and mine. He emphasizes Gen AI’s position as an independent creator:
What new storytelling formats can AI create? What happens when narratives are driven by AI agents, capable of reasoning, adapting, and responding in real-time? What does an AI-generated “show” look like when it is built for infinite variation rather than a static script?
AI technology may one day become sufficiently self-aware to be creative, but we’re a long way from that moment. Even if the AI does become creative, I predict creative AIs will work alongside humans (Clive Thompson calls this human-plus-AI a centaur model) because creativity is inherently collaborative.
Although we still cling to the Romantic notion of the artist working in a solitary garret, emerging later with a masterpiece, that’s not how it works. Even single-author writers of brilliant books have acknowledgment pages that list dozens of people without whom…
Different minds working together make art better—even if one of the minds is AI.
Collaboration is what jazz improvisation is all about, and it’s also true of longer, more narrative works.
One tiny example is a famous exchange in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo is about to be frozen in carbonite. Princess Leia cries out, “I love you!” Solo replies, “I know.”
Harrison Ford improvised Solo’s “I know” on set because he didn’t think “I love you, too” was true to the character. Who knows Han Solo best? George Lucas who created the character, Harrison Ford who played him, or Irvin Kershner who directed Empire? It’s a trick question.
The relationship between writers and actors is dynamic, not unidirectional. For another example, Babs Olusanmokun, the actor who plays Dr. Joseph M’Benga on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, is also a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and champion. The ST:SNW writers incorporated Olusanmokun’s martial arts prowess into the M’Benga character, most notably in Season 2, Episode 8: “Under the Cloak of War.”
This isn’t just true of movies and TV. Shakespeare created characters for specific actors in his company, and as the actors shifted so did the characters. The most famous example is how the comic relief changed from slapstick physical comedy for Will Kemp, the company’s first clown, to cerebral wordplay with Robert Armin, Kemp’s successor. In Shakespeare & Co., Stanley Wells has pieced together a surprising amount of insight about how embedded Shakespeare was within his company and industry. Far from a lonely artist writing in a quiet room, Shakespeare was a businessman, as I’ve argued many times.
How would this sort of dynamic exist in art that Generative AI creates by itself? I don’t think it would.
A dialogue takes place between an artist and her or his medium and tools, which Richard Sennett explores powerfully in The Craftsman. I think this dialogue extends, albeit differently, to digital tools like Gen AI.
In sum, Gen AI will transform storytelling in ways that we cannot predict, and there will be AI-driven personalized entertainment. However, the best entertainment will be co-created by humans and algorithms because collaboration is how creativity works.
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* Image Prompt: “Create a photorealistic image of a female human artist sitting at a table talking with a smart speaker that has the words “AI Moviemaker” visible on it. They are talking about a creative project that the two are making together. Above the human and the smart speaker is a wide television screen where an exciting scene of an action movie set during WWI takes place. In the scene, two Neiuport 10 airplanes are flying parallel to each other. A woman dressed in military gear is leaping from the wing of one Nieuport 10 airplane to the other Nieuport 10 airplane.” After ChatGPT created an initial image, it suggested a couple of refinements that I accepted, which resulted in the image above. One surprising thing about the image is that ChatGPT spelled “AI Moviemaker” correctly.
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