Everyone keeps ignoring supply and demand when talking about the impacts of AI. Let's just assume it really gets so good you can do this and it doesn't suck.
Yes the costs will get so low that there will be almost no barrier to making content but if there is no barrier to making content, the ROI will be massive, and so everyone will be doing it, you can more or less have the exact movie you want in your head on demand, and even if you want a bespoke movie from an artist with great taste and a point of view there will be 10,000 of them every year.
Totally agree.
This is what Instagram and YouTube did and we got MrBeast and Kylie Jenner making billions of dollars. The cost of creating content is tapping record on your phone and the traditional "quality" as defined by visuals doesn't matter (see Quibi). Viral videos are selfies recorded in the bedroom.
When you lower the barrier to entry things get more heterogeneous, not less. So you have bigger outcomes, not smaller, because the playing field expands. TikTok's inside was built on surfacing the 1 good video from a pool of 10s of millions. The platforms that surface the best content will be even more important.
It's a little disheartening, I think, for people to think that the only reason they can't be creative is money, time, or technical skill, but in reality, it's just that they aren't that creative.
So yes, everyone can create content in a world of AI, but not everyone is a good content creator/director/artist (or has the vision), same as it is now.
I don't think Mr Beast is particularly creative. He makes common denominator crap that appeals to kids. I expect the same of Kylie Jenner
Meanwhile the cost of his videos is insanely high. The "insane" price money is the smallest part of it. He has insane sets he uses for only one or a small number of videos, he has a giant staff, high quality gear and many of his videos include either challenges going on over very long timespans or involving a high number of participants, making the logistics, recording and editing of those videos challenging and time intensive. Most TV shows could only dream of doing what he does.
He started out simple, pointing a phone camera at himself counting really high, but his current channel is not a great example of a low barrier to entry. He explicitly sets himself apart by doing what other youtube creators or TV shows simply can't do
You may not like them, as another poster said, it's all subjective.
That doesn't mean they aren't incredibly good at what they do and that millions (billions) of people have tried to do what they have and failed.
One of the reasons it's "common denominator crap" is because the blob of the internet has 100s of millions of videos copying MrBeast and the Jenner/Kardasians created an entire generation of people that wanted to be influencers. Most of the copies are Slop.
Once they are intrenched they can continue to produce "crap" as you call it because they have distribution, the copies don't work because they aren't novel, which makes people feel like it doesn't take talent and is the algorithms fault, until the next person to be "creative" gets distribution and the cycle repeats.
There is just a lot less creativity than people imagine. It's not a right that we all have as humans; it's rare. 8.2 billion people on earth, 365 days in a year, 3 trillion shots on goal, and only a few hundred novel discoveries, art creations, companies, and ideas come from it.
Will the AI itself never be a good content creator/director/artist?
People are always out there tying to convince others that AI is better than humans at X. How close is it to being better than humans at being a content creator itself? Or how long before that threshold is crossed?
It will always be subjective. There will always be holdouts who will denounce any AI work as "bad" simply because it was created by AI.
Even when AI is objectively better and dominates in blind ratings tests, there will still be a strong market for "authentic" media.
For instance we already have factories that churn out wares that are cheaper, stronger, better looking, and longer lasting than "hand made", yet people still seek out malformed $60 coffee mugs from the local artistan section in country shops.
I think the other angle is a deeper question of why are you reading/viewing/listening to any particular piece?
For some content, say summer blockbusters the answer may just be that it is moderately entertaining way to spend some time. I expect AI may well be able to do reasonably well in this category, although what we find entertaining may well shift if the supply/demand curve shifts drastically enough. In other words, people may still pay to see a new action film even if it hasn't anything particularly new to say.
Then there is the more cerebral kind of art. Where there is an actual message that someone is trying to communicate to us. It's a form of argument, but not purely logical, but also aesthetical. I'm completely unconvinced that present day AI architectures will ever have something to say, purely because they lack agency, and so there isn't anyone there saying it to us.
Finally, there is the art that is entirely spiritual or internal. The whole point of that kind is the author baring their soul to us. Why on earth would anyone want a soulless machine barring their non-existent soul?
No single piece of content grossed 100m though. It just allowed for more low investment content at a higher rate, while the popularity of the site pushed them to celebrity status.
And one of those 10,000 will have a multimillion marketing budget and people are talking about it online and remixing it into memes and it will make a lot more money than the second-most popular movie, even though there's no discernable quality difference.
It will basically be like the rise of indie games. Every now and again you get something like Among Us which is low quality but good enough to be enjoyable and with the right combination of luck and timing it becomes insanely popular.
Not just Among Us. You also get Minecraft!
A good parallel is writing books. Books can cost little to write and publish, but their success is Pareto distributed, not Normally distributed.
Writing book is really expensive. You have to think and put words on paper that engages the read. It is really hard.
Unless something radically changes, we're quite far from creating movies on demand. Most AI video generators cost ~$1-10 per minute. And generally it takes many attempts to generate a few seconds of anything that's not completely trash.
Another issue is quality. Most of these AI generators output quite blurry 720p. If you want proper 4K output, we're at least a couple of doublings away.
I think we will have some decent AI-generated animations next year, because 2D cartoons are relatively easy to upscale.
there's a blender mcp addon available for folks who already have a clue how to make use of that..
A lot of people can't actually say what kind of movie they want, until they see it. And even if there are 100,000 releases every year in every genre, virality will probably still exist where even if random, one of those movies is going to get more popular than the rest and then everyone will "need" to see it.
This. Having a super highly grossing movie makes no sense (maybe first one will just because people wanna see it for the novelty of it). The potential would be niche content that might even end up with movies tailored just to one person.
That was the story with CGI too, that there would be overwhelming supply that drives prices and value toward zero.
And yet Marvel exists.
Turns out in a world of infinite supply, value comes from story, character, branding, marketing and celebrity. Those factors in combination have very limited supply and people still pay up.
I don't see any reason why AI-gen video is any different.
It's still quite difficult and extremely time consuming to create a visual effect. And the technique to film actors and blend them is additionally quite difficult. If you get to the point one person can make a movie, yes you will be limited by your own creativity, but the number of people who can do that is still a lot greater than the number of people who can do that, and manage a 200 million dollar budget production and get an end product that meets their vision.
To quote Nikita Bier, never underestimate how many people just want to watch Netflix and die.
Am I the only one who can't stand Netflix's deluge of content? They occasionally had something good, but it's like once every two years.
You just need to drastically recalibrate your definition of good.
It's an AI slop factory, and it's not going to get any better.
AI will level the playing field for creation but not for distribution. The AI movie created by someone who's already Hollywood or social media famous will get more attention than a nobody.
Most of us have no idea what movies we want. The most delightful films are a total surprise (other than the drones who watch every Marvel film of course).
It will be like YouTube. Distribution will be hard and most of it will be slop but every now and then you’ll discover something so good and so creative and it couldn’t have possibly existed before that it makes the whole experience worth it. The best creative works are led by one person and I’m excited to see what people can come up with.