Hollywood has always served up public relationships that are fraught with the potential to flame out quickly. Volatile personalities and outsized egos don't always make for the best life partners, after all.
The most contentious relationship in Hollywood these days doesn't involve just two actors, though — it is the love/hate relationship between the entire entertainment industry and rapidly advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). Actually, it would be more accurate to describe it as a hate/ambivalence relationship, with Hollywood on the hate side and AI looking at it with its heartless assassin eyes, ready to use and or ruin the industry. Like almost everyone else, actors and screenwriters are worried that AI is going to take their jobs.
Concerns about AI running roughshod through the entertainment industry are quite valid. One of the biggest issues in the 2023 SAG/AFTRA strike was the threat artificial intelligence posed, which was probably what contributed to it being the longest strike for actors in Hollywood history. Because AI is still relatively new, the law hasn't caught up with it yet. And, because it advances so rapidly, it may not catch up anytime soon.
The Walt Disney Company is still one of the heaviest-hitters in the entertainment industry, despite some of its recent travails. After OpenAI (the ChatGPT company) launched its video generation platform Sora, Disney decided to broker an agreement with the potential conquerors through a massive investment. That was last December. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
The old Silicon Valley cliché, coined by Mark Zuckerberg, is that you move fast and break things. OpenAI sure did that with Sora. In six short months, Sora 2 broke the internet with its startling virality. It broke copyright protections. And now, the app is just broken after Sam Altman’s tech titan dramatically beat a retreat from generative video.
Along the way, OpenAI did try to fix at least one thing: Its relationship with Hollywood. The company signed a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney, which smoothed out content theft disputes by allowing Sora access to the Mouse House’s iconic characters, including those from Frozen and Beauty and the Beast. But now even that’s broken.
Disney is backing out of the deal now that OpenAI has decided to abandon Sora. The Deadline article explores the "vulnerability" of Hollywood to the whims of Big Tech. There will have to be a lot of changes in the entertainment industry to mitigate that vulnerability even a little bit.
While there has been adaptation over the years, the old guard players in the movie and television industries are practically fossils compared to any new movers and shakers in Hollywood. Just look at the recent freakout when it looked as if Netflix might acquire Warner Bros. Actors, writers, and producers were all sackcloth and ashes, proclaiming the end of days in entertainment. Netflix has been a legitimate force in entertainment for a while now, but to the legacy studio people it's still a new kid whose energy really freaks them out.
While the moribund entertainment industry is stuck in the mud and forever looking backwards for another reboot to do, the AI companies are always looking for the next thing, and trying to get there in a hurry. That's why OpenAI could casually chuck Sora aside a mere 25 months after its launch. If the big studio types don't want to be wholly consumed by streaming and AI, the industry will have to fundamentally change from its present form. As my good friend and partner in thought crime Stephen Green wrote in a recent column, "We still love going to the movies, but Hollywood only sometimes remembers anymore how to get us to go."
Bingo. If the entertainment industry wants to have a fighting chance while facing rapidly-changing Big Tech and streaming forces, it needs to figure out how to be entertaining again. Give us a product that is demonstrably more fun to watch than AI, and the public will help you stay relevant.
Reboot Spiderman for the 1500th time and Hollywood will become the new Vaudeville.
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