Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements - Computerworld 2015 -- The incident sparked legislative interest in California, with lawmakers proposing bills to restrict utilities from outsourcing critical infrastructure work and prompting at least 11 U.S. senators to request federal investigations into the use of H-1B visas in such outsourcing deals.
Look, the genie is out of the bottle: we are a global economy, and increasingly a global society. Everywhere on the planet is reachable via data link within seconds, and ~95% physically within a day - provided money is no object. Every single country is going to have to grapple with this immediately, not at some point in the future.
On the one hand, businesses will always want to have the lowest possible costs. On the other, consumers frequently want local service and support, especially when things go wrong. Countries and Governments want to drive business growth to increase their tax revenue and improve the quality of life of their citizens, but offshoring jobs lowers tax receipts and increases the number of citizens on social services. AI throws gasoline onto this bonfire, demanding immediate action rather than continued can-kicking. The net result is immediate pain as every country struggles to find a path forward.
The countries who succeed will be those who find a balance between increasing tax revenue to fund social welfare programs that their populace requires for necessities (housing, food, education, healthcare), while also promoting business growth in a global marketplace, but also ensuring labor is kept proportionate to the local customer market size. The US is trying to turn back a clock to a time of national markets, while China and the EU increasingly acknowledge the global reality and regulate or subsidize accordingly. Businesses clearly want the freedom to compete globally, but a regulation and governance scheme that’s not as fragmented as the present landscape.
TL;DR: outsourcing to AI or offshoring is a last-century solution for National companies to increase margins. The name of the game going forward is distributing labor and supply chains relative to local market sizes to build a balanced global competitor.
All those silent film era jobs were lost to the "talkies".
Hollywood not only survived, it expanded.
It is a truism in Hollywood that people always see good movies in any economy. If the industry is contracting maybe they're making bad movies no one wants to see.
AI won't change that at all.
Teamsters were horse carriage drivers and then drove trucks. The horse driver job was "destroyed by technology"? Or was it changed?
Jobs are not static entities to be defended or lost. They are dynamic opportunities shaped by technology.
Every technology creates different opportunities.
No one cries for silent movie era job losses or horse driver jobs. If AI transforms jobs that's what technology has always done.
How it will actually play out is unknown and unknowable. That its just negative is sheer science fiction.
I don't think that's a fair claim to make, either. AI music, AI art and even AI television is all fairly proliferate right now: https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-open...
We're not seeing a radical reconsideration of how art is made, nor a rising watermark in content quality. The chart-topping AI songs are transient and forgettable, the finest AI artwork is low-cost and generally effortless. AI television and video content is mostly just a self-loathing piss-take, the stuff that takes itself seriously ends up embarrassing itself. The only people using this tech unironically is the White House, at this point.
And that is rare. Novel changes produce nearly impossible to predict reactions because they are unprecedented.
The future is unknown and unknowable. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you a $30k upgrade on a self driving car.
It's almost like art has inherent social qualities that get watered-down when you reduce the human effort that goes into it. You can't innovate your way out of that.
Cult worship of AI CEOs and sublimating one's own hatred of self onto his fellow workers.
I have no doubt in my mind that right now, in August of 2026, given a couple of weeks, an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits, given a good amount of exploration/tinkering to fill the gaps that GenAI cannot currently do, (which is storyboarding, screenwriting, characters, and all the actual creative stuff), can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts.
The reason why this isn't happening en masse right now is that most creatives are probably not focused on generating feature films, but rather content that's more digestible by social media users.
I would expect to start seeing a LOT of development in the upcoming months as some form of commodification where generated content can be both high quality and tailored to the user.
Then why are there no examples of this? There aren't even examples of steps towards it--the half hour film that's nearly production quality, etc.
The technology is interesting as an element within the wider process of special effects, animation, and video games. The idea that you’re actually making a movie with the current products—and I’m a former indie filmmaker, I’d have a blast with this if it were real—is a fantasy.
"yadda yadda, this is the worst it will ever be"
You should watch how Corridor Crew uses and evangelizes the tech, as it's far more honest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ploi723hg4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFlOynaUyk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY
(These are all fascinating.)
Or an AI video tech reviewer like Theoretically Tim who covers the space as it evolves:
There are hundreds of other companies to choose from: Runway, Magnific, OpenArt, ArtCraft, Krea, Martini, Flora ...
In startups, there are "mercenaries and missionaries". Higgsfield isn't either of these - they're a psychotic warlord. They're growth at all costs. They lie, cheat, steal, and even disparage artists and racial groups to get attention. And they use the worst dark patterns to get people to subscribe under confusing and dishonest terms.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/02/11/rac...
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/higgsfields-latest-ai-too...
https://ade3.substack.com/p/this-isnt-how-i-expected-ai-to-s...
https://x.com/nickfloats/status/2018772595991015760
https://x.com/dustinhollywood/status/2019452051260874793
https://www.caimera.ai/blogs/higgsfield-ai-twitter-ban-case-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/generativeAI/comments/1rvaj50/my_ho...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zj10P0Sa1k
Don't deal with Higgsfield.
I work in this industry. I've dealt with major studios and up-and-coming studios quite extensively. (I was a filmmaker before AI, which helps a lot.)
If your exposure to AI video is ComfyUI, that's the consumer / hobbyist segment and you're missing out on where all the action is actually concentrating.
There are five-ish segments:
- Large studios. They're going slow, but they've already started integrating the tech. They won't tell people they're using it. They outsource to production houses that use it. Some of the biggest studios are moving slowly and want fully air-gapped support that runs on their existing cloud contracts. There are companies moving more intentionally, though. Netflix acquired Affleck's company for broad AI video controllability patents, for instance.
- Up-and-coming new media studios. Check out Gossip Goblin [1], [2], [3]. These folks are getting backing right now and they're growing huge followings from very unique visions and perspectives that feel somewhat counter to Hollywood. Most of the people here are highly professional, understand film language, and do a great job with storytelling. They typically leverage human voice actors and put weeks to months into making single videos.
- Marketing, B2B: people are already using this in ads. See Coca-Cola
- Consumer, UGC, non-creatives: this is the Sora crowd that only knows how to remix popular IP. Some of them graduate into new media exploration, but this follows the 1% rule. This is where most "slop" comes from.
- Porn creators: I've interviewed several folks that are making mid-six figures on "fan" platforms. It's a full-time job and some of them are scaling up to teams.
[1] Pomegranate, one of the best AI films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZhC2TXgcs
[2] Theatrical release: https://variety.com/2026/film/news/gossip-goblin-ai-film-god...
Editing appears very bad. Do Model have a problem with creating clips with precise cuts?
A typical "scene" might cost thousands of dollars in generation expenses depending on shot complexity. Directors will shoot the same shot dozens of times if they're not getting what they want, which in a way is not unlike physical production. That's not counting the experimental first passes.
I sat through 10 minutes of this and it is some of the most mind-numbing garbage I've ever witnessed in my life. The technology is undoubtedly cool and it's pretty insane the progress we've made, but my god was it a slog to actually watch. Utterly soulless, incoherent, godawful pacing, grating dialogue. I could feel my brain actively rejecting this garbage a few minutes in, but I guess I'm just not the target audience.
Only Data looks and sounds fully 'natural' in this 10 minute clip of STTNG, but it nicely demonstrates the imminent plausibility of synthetic TV / film. And its affordability.
Feed it a handful of short stories and you can automate the creation of an entire TV series.
We all live in our personal info bubbles and sometimes it's hard to find information if you don't actively seek it out. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The counterargument today is that we can pivot much faster. I’m typing this on a $2,000 Mac that can run Blender, render scenes, write code, edit video, and access tools that would have required a studio or a room full of specialized hardware not that long ago.
GenAI is empowering people to do things they simply could not do before. It’s here. The interesting question is: what are you going to do with it?
I think movie production may be approaching its YouTube moment. If the barriers to making something collapse, then make something worth watching. I’d rather see a small team with an actual idea than another $300 million spider man multiverse hot garbage sequel or guardians of the slop 600 assembled by committee, approved by a board after a slide deck, and polished into expensive slop.
But if you've used meshy, sora and enough coding models you see the mediocrity is laughable - nobody will consume it.
Any media that is worth watching still has a human with plenty of irreplaceable talent.
Working in tech has taught me to stay vigilant. I've seen the cycles and seen people survive each one. Perhaps that's why I feel better prepared for this. Anyone whose job primarily consists of manipulating bits should probably assume that significant parts of it are going to be automated.
Where I disagree is the assumption that we're approaching some kind of escape velocity where automation eliminates useful human labor faster than people can adapt. People need to eat, firms want to make money, and both create enormous pressure to find the next place where human effort has value.
That doesn't mean the transition will be painless, or that everyone displaced will successfully pivot. But there's a very large leap between "AI destroys a lot of existing jobs" and "human labor no longer has economic value." I don't think we've demonstrated the latter.
Probably some wunderkind, well financed by his capital rich parents, can "make it".
For the people tightening nuts and bolts and wiping floors, life will be lacklustre.
A few months ago, Coca Cola couldn’t even make a good 1 minute commercial with millions of dollars and a whole team of video producers and editors. It ended up just being a montage of 5 second clips of animals smiling at Coca Cola trucks.
ie. feed it every episode of the original Star Trek series, at some point "AI" is going to be advanced enough to write a new episode and simulate all the characters perfectly
anime and animation in theory will be even easier to do perfectly?
the question is can it do it perfectly with just a dozen episodes? or does three dozen make it better?
because once that happens, that's all the networks will pay for, after all they are only about the commercials they can insert into content regardless of source
and yes viewers will eventually accept it the same way they won't quit X or meta, etc. regardless of how horrible they become or the sub-human behavior of the owners
More seriously
1) >users will generate their own
some people write fanfic, most just watch/read instead.
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew explains how film maker will film, with whatever they have. AI will enable some people to make what is not financially feasible right now for a single person to do.
'Unique' movie/stories creation will continue.
And like with the rest of things AI can do, the question is more 'who's going to pay for person-made vs "algorithmically optimized AI generated story'.
Same question we have of 'AI generated code' vs 'this code was written by a person'.
I assume the vast majority of 9 figure films have marketing as the 9 figure expense, including pay for high profile actors/directors/producers, which is also a form of marketing.
I assume a not evenly distributed future
If there's infinite star trek episodes, I don't care to watch it. I'd rather spin a fidget spinner instead.
except "AI" doesn't have any original thoughts of its own, everything is going to be originally from a human source
it might be a concept from some rare book they fed it and destroyed after, it might be a concept from thousands of "fan fic" they hoovered up all over the internet by scraping forums illegally
you say you won't watch it except human behavior already demonstrates there are millions of other people who will
it's an unfortunate future but an easily predictable one
all about making cheap content to insert ads, the ads are the point, not the content
like product placement in a $100 million action movie, except soon they will be able to make the movie for $100 instead of $100 million and most won't know the difference
> there are millions of other people who will
yeah millions of people like all kinds of dreck. sure, you probably liked The Big Bang Theory but some of us have taste
First, prove it in porn. Then let us talk.
It might not reach the quality threshold where they can make money off it but would I be willing to bet that it can't? Probably not.
If it turns out you can one day make a "big budget" Hollywood movie for $20k in tokens then I don't see the point in having film studios.