Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace AI

Precedent, Increasing Creative Control, and Hollywood’s Woes

Click here to read the full post on my Substack, The Mediator.

Source: Midjourney.

GenAI obviously has the potential to be extremely disruptive to media businesses in general and Hollywood in particular, but the speed and extent of this disruption hinge on a few critical unknowns. These include how far the technology will evolve and to what degree consumers will accept AI-enabled content, both of which I discussed in my last post (How Far Will AI Video Go?). Another is how and when the murky legal questions around GenAI will be resolved.

In this post I address another key unknown: whether talent will embrace it. That’s critical. Amid all the cool AI video demos, shorts, experiments, and fake movie trailers, it has remained very clear that AI video will only affect culture and the media business if people use it to produce compelling stories. Otherwise it’s just a parlor trick. But which people?

Talented people outside of Hollywood will unquestionably embrace it. There are probably tens or hundreds of thousands of “lost Einsteins” globally: creative and driven people who have an urge to create but either failed to make it in Hollywood or, more likely, never tried. I also think that there are thousands of people working in below-the-line jobs and around the periphery of Hollywood1 — development, production management, talent representation, marketing, etc. — who got into the entertainment business to tell stories, but for whatever reason found themselves in adjacent roles. (Interestingly, so far, many of the creatives at the forefront of AI have come from creative agencies — storytellers who do brand work but have long itched to tell stories of their own.)

But what about established talent within Hollywood? Attracting talented, successful storytellers would accelerate the disruption and enable GenAI to reach its full potential. People often talk about “Hollywood” as some monolithic thing, but of course it’s not. The studios and talent have long been in an uneasy codependent relationship, a combination of aligned and misaligned interests. Each desperately needs the other, but they share a mutual distrust and often clash over creative control, credit, and, of course, money. That tension boiled over during the strikes in 2023 and a lot of ill will remains.

In Hollywood, there has been a lot of vocal antipathy toward AI. But the ice is starting to thaw. Over the next year, I believe that many more Hollywood creatives will embrace it — including household name directors, writers, and producers — for three reasons: precedent, the continued progression of creative control in AI, and, most important, the problems in Hollywood will push them that way.

Tl;dr:

• Many in Hollywood have spoken out against AI, but some high-profile writers, directors, and producers are publicly endorsing it, with many more privately experimenting. Over the next year, I expect many more to emerge.
• There is a long history of creatives first rejecting new technologies as somehow undermining or bastardizing art, but then embracing them. In Hollywood, prior villains have included talkies, the DVD, and CGI.
• The deep learning models that power GenAI are massive, opaque, and hard to control. But commercial AI video and tool providers and the open source community are working hard to give professionals the fine-grained control they need. A non-exhaustive list of these efforts includes: training models with a richer understanding of visual terminology for more precise prompting; enabling conditioning of video models with both images and video; post-generation editing tools; ControlNets; fine-tuning; node-based editors; keyframe interpolation; and integration into existing edit suites/API support, among others.
• Perhaps most important, the challenges in Hollywood are inadvertently pushing creatives toward AI. With 2024 in the rearview mirror, it’s now clear that peak TV is truly over. Neither production activity nor spend bounced back from strike-depressed levels in 2023. From here, overall video content spend is unlikely to grow faster than video revenue — which is to say, not much. At the same time, rising sports rights and a mix shift toward acquireds will put even more pressure on original content. Tack on studios’ growing risk aversion and the path toward telling original stories in Hollywood is narrowing.
• Many talk about AI as a democratizing technology, but for some established talent it may be a liberating technology too.
• For a lot of people in Hollywood, AI still feels like a distant concern. As more talent embraces it, it will take on more urgency.

Click here to continue reading the full post on my Substack, The Mediator.