I'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities. I don't understand why he's being praised, I guess confidence impresses people.
It's also possible that because you're not in the industry, you don't understand the problem domain well enough.
Tech bros love to think they're just so much smarter than everyone in other industries, but it rarely ends up being true. We saw this with Blockchain; this distributed consensus protocol was supposed to solve all the problems with money transfers, settlements, and securities across the world and uh... did none of that. But tech bros sure did love to talk about how the blockchain doubters just didn't understand the technology, without considering that maybe they didn't understand the problem space.
Bezos wasn't in retail. He also wasn't in compute hardware.
Reed Hastings wasn't in entertainment and crushed it. Jeff Katzenberg was, and Quibi was a disaster.
Ken Griffin was a punk kid in harvard, never worked in finance. Jim Simmons was a math professor, didn't work in finance.
AirBnb guys weren't in real estate or tourism or whatever bucket you want that to be.
Larry & Sergey knew zero about advertising. Zuckerberg too.
The incumbents have been destroyed with some frequency by outsiders who take a different approach. It's almost impossible to tell in advance if understanding a domain is an asset or a liability.
But if you don't know the technology involved for each of the above, maybe stay out of a conversation involving technology.
Amazon, Netflix, Quibi (a disaster run by a non-technologist), AirBnB, Google, Facebook. These are websites and apps.
I don't think Griffin is particularly illustrative of anything except it's nice to ask your grammy for $100K when you're a teenager.
Feel free to listen to a NotebookLM podcast of a PG post, but if you think any AI is going to create an original thought that catches fire like the MCU, Call Her Daddy, Succession, cumtown, Hamilton, Rogan, Inside Out, Serial, or Wicked, maybe it's you that should stay out of the conversation when it comes to creativity.
The people closest to the thing which is about to be dominated by machines are often clueless about what is going on.
Second, show the company where the technologists made the same thing the old school was making, and better. Amazon retail disrupted but didn't destroy physical retail, and certainly didn't replace it, and certainly isn't better at it. Same with AirBnB => hotels, Google/FB => advertising (disrupted with a new type of product... a tech product... but have no presence in literally every other form of the industry).
The closest thing you can get to dominance is Netflix making movies and television, and there's no evidence that they make better movies and television than the old school. Technologies can use money to leverage their position against slow-moving industry players, but in this specific discussion, we've seen nothing to suggest that eventually AI could make a better film than human beings.
If you were actually in the industry you'd know that the top decisionmakers at Netflix have decreasing respect from the creative community, increasing reputation for being a cheap and difficult company to work with, and are generally regarded as a mill that creates a lot of mediocre to slightly-above-average content that gets swept aside every 3-6 months for the next wave of grist. Profitable certainly but nowhere close to being a leader in quality, for as much money as they've thrown at trying to win that Best Picture trophy (and spoiler: Emilia Perez isn't gonna do it this year either).
If you don't know anything about Hollywood, maybe you should stay out of a discussion about Hollywood.
Of course they don't do the exact same thing. Only someone in industry would think to do the exact same thing. The value proposition is the same in each case, that's what matters.
The people who don't know Hollywood are the ones taking over the entertainment business. Customers of the entertainment business don't care about the "creative community" or "hollywood".
Really? Who is that exactly? Or is Reed Hastings just a different money guy, which the entertainment business has always had?
Aside from money, where is the actual tech that Netflix is using to "dominate" the industry? And how does it manifest? I know one specific example that you probably have no idea about, and it has nothing to do with actually making a movie.
If this is the story hollywood insiders tell themselves (and I doubt the smart ones think this...), it's no wonder they are becoming irrelevant.
Even including Netflix's success, there is no segment of the movie and television business where technology is dominating the actual creation of the content. And this conversation started with a Ben Affleck video about how that creativity isn't going to be replaced anytime soon. An algorithm can tell Netflix to greenlight a show about "nonbinary police detectives investigating election fraud", but there's no computer touching the script, direction, or any decisions the department heads are taking. And studios are already hitting the diminishing returns of ingesting a bunch of screenplays to spit out mediocre scripts (at enormous and rising cost).
Feel free to offer counter-examples, just so we're still staying with arm's length of reality.
An example I had in mind was when Affleck was speaking of being able to generate the show but with their preferred cast from a different production. He really has no clue that people will be generating themselves and their friends as the main characters of these stories. Like this one, there are many other examples where I thought he was lacking creativity.
Kudos to him for spending time thinking about it but I'm surprised how well received his thoughts have been for just stringing a few ideas together.
In doing so, it will turn directing on its ear in a way that many talented directors will not be able to adapt to.
Directors will become proxy actors by having to micromanage AI acting skills. Or Perhaps they will be augmented with a team of “character operators” that do the proxy-acting. Either way, there will be little point in paying celebrity actors and their extravagant salaries for most roles. Instead, it might turn out that skilled and talented generic, no-name actors can play any role, then have the character model deepfaked onto them… which could actually create a large demand in lower paying jobs for character actors, possibly actually being a kind of boom in the acting business.
Lots of possibilities, but the director is going to take center stage in this new reality, while celebrity actors will have to swallow hard as they are priced out of their field.
It has no idea of the mind of the viewer or the reader. It’s literally generating the most probable next few words to tack on to the story.
LLMs are great for a lot of stuff, but they are by design not at all creative in any admirable sense of the term. They cannot produce a narrative that is simultaneously unique or genuinely surprising without it also being nonsensical.
Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a result of proper operation , just undesirable. The same thing that makes nonsensical“hallucinations “ if the “temperature” is set too high is what prevents llms from having any unique ideas if the temperature is set low enough to not hallucinate wildly.
LLMs are text prediction engines. Extremely useful and revolutionary in many ways, but not in creative work. Everything they do is by definition derivative and likely.
What graphics models do in images is no different, it’s not all that creative, and works much better when you -tell it- to be derivative. It’s just that the nature of graphic representation is mainly predictable and derivable… so it doesn’t bore us when it produces derivative, predictable work.