Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools.
I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.
In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.
I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket.
I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster.
Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".
Turns out there is more to it than that.
But do also consider that when cameras became cheap, *painting* is what became somewhat less valuable, and cinema became possible in the first place.
And consider that when cinema got sound, live musicians in theatres went away:
The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
If the AI could write… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough; if the AI could make coherent videos… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough.
"If". It's a matter of degree, but functionally the answer *today* is "no", because today when some humans make a video with AI, they need to put in a lot of effort to throw out the rubbish attempts by the AI.
When it stops being "no", and not before, is when Hollywood is screwed.
I'm sorry, you're asking "why would Hollywood be screwed?" with regards to a tech that lets you write a short prompt and get an artefact out?
One where it already does this for stock photography, short scripts, and short clips?
Where random people already do this for fun because it's so cheap?
Where I'm talking specifically about a hypothetical which cost-anchors this for the price of a cinema ticket, i.e. $10 in creates a movie tailored to whatever the person prompting it happens to ask for?
You can't see how this has the same impact on Hollywood that sound recordings had on live music performances during cinema?
You can't see how anyone who wants a new film for some specific mood can just ask for that in this future, and skip the entirety of Hollywood?
I'm not using fiction as evidence here, so don't misunderstand it as such, but consider how the Holodeck is written in Star Trek: you talk to the computer and it gives you what you want, and if you don't like it half way through you pause and tell what to change. For a variety of obvious reasons, Trek's script writers and practical effects people didn't put in all the glitches we see in current GenAI models, but I'm asking you to imagine a future where GenAI models also don't make such mistakes.
> Movies with sound put theatre musicians and some actors with unfortunate voices out of a job, but Hollywood thrived.
"but Hollywood thrived." is Texan sharpshooter, it's picking the winner after the fact.
I specifically gave live theatre musicians as an example of the opposite, those who were screwed by the new tech.
Addendum: eg https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-07-22-ca-7511-s... in California.
They want to watch movies other people watch with actors they know.
Even if it's 1% of the population, this would be enough to end Hollywood and similar agglomerations when an entire film costs $10 to generate. Given what we already see, I think it is rather a lot more than 1%.
Even if it weren't done by end users (and I am confident it will be done by end users even without requiring much creativity, for the same reason Google now has generative answers and not just search results), at this price* any advertiser wanting a product placements would consider it a no-brainer to make a whole range of films for their brand in much the same way (but different details) as we're now drowning in AI slop blog posts because the cost of generating even just one custom blog post is now lower than the ad revenue shown on it.
i.e. soap operas all over again. Except now there's one for all tastes, in such quantity and diversity the new drowns out the old.
> They want to watch movies other people watch with actors they know.
What is today is not the same as what comes when the tech sucks less. But what we see already with this limited tech is that the group size for "other people watch" can easily just be "your personal friends", and the "actors they know" can be people in their lives rather than their adverts, both as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake_pornography though one may hope the future version of this is less that and more https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/deepfake-2
* and yes, hypothetical on the future quality being better
Why? Hollywood would still have 99% percent of the population as audience.
I also expect that of the 39.2% of the population, the cancer is diagnosed much later in life than it was for the 91 movie crew members, I doubt 41% of the crew was over 50 in 1956.
>...There was no excess risk of cancer mortality in southwestern Utah, for single or grouped sites, with the single exception of leukemia which showed statistically significant odds ratios of 1.45 based on 62 deaths at all ages, and 2.84 based on nine deaths at ages 0-14. The finding for childhood leukemia was based on different time periods and geographic comparisons from those of two earlier studies in which no such excess was found. Mortality from all cancer sites combined was significantly lower in southwestern Utah than in the remainder of the state, even after adjustment for the higher proportion of (lower risk) Mormons in southwestern Utah.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/
Trying to figure out when this strange idea about The Conqueror first appeared, I saw references to a 1980 article in People magazine. People magazine is not actually a peer reviewed journal.