"The AI Takeover of All Media Is Coming"

If you think the laptop class is crabby now, just wait.

From Project Syndicate, January 16:

Not only is AI already upending the filmmaking industry, but Hollywood is just one example of how the technology will cause enormous social and economic pain unless managed humanely and carefully. Fiction writing, commercial photography, radio, music, and – most ominously – journalism and legacy news outlets face a similar reckoning.

SAN FRANCISCO – AI is coming for “content,” meaning everything from advertising and novels to movies and journalism. The result, starting very soon, is likely to be simultaneously horrific, wonderful, depressing, and exciting. There will be not only creative destruction, but also lots of plain old destruction.

Having spent most of my adult life producing research, journalism, and documentaries, as well as consuming many escapist novels and movies, I have great sympathy for creators. But for the past three years, I have been an investor and venture capitalist in AI, and this experience has shaped the message I would offer to everyone in journalism, publishing, music, advertising, and Hollywood: you ignore the potential of this technology at your peril.

Towering Inferno
First, consider the prospects for Hollywood. The film and television industry has already been contracting for years, owing to the new forms of media delivery (like streaming services) enabled by the internet, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. The decline of cable TV and DVDs reflects a variety of factors, including video streaming, the rise of user-generated content, the democratization of creation through inexpensive cameras and software, and the resulting competition for eyeballs from YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

Yet throughout this decade of painful contraction, the fundamental techniques of video production didn’t change much. You still used real cameras to film real people and things.

Soon, though, all these real-world inputs will be obsolete, replaced by AI. The pioneers of this new world will be, without exception, startups, some of them less than a year old. Not a single legacy studio, producer, or distributor is at the forefront of AI filmmaking or distribution. The first such startup, Runway, was founded eight years ago, and it has since been joined by Arcana, Flick, Koyal, Zingroll, and others.

I have spoken with founders and senior executives at each of these companies in recent months, and asked them all the same question: How long will it take before a non-technical person can make a complete feature-length AI film with characters and production values as good as a typical Hollywood product? Their answers fall within a tight range: one to three years, averaging around two. For simpler short films and commercials, we are already there.

HOLYWATER, a Ukrainian startup founded in 2020, enables anyone to make “vertical” (specifically for phones) short films by using AI to create huge numbers of text stories whose popularity then guides film production. HOLYWATER’s revenues already exceed $100 million, and are more than doubling annually. Similarly, Wide Worlds, founded in 2024, enables fans to make short films by drawing from their favorite fan-fictional universe.

The $600 billion digital advertising industry is next. The leading startup in AI commercials, Higgsfield, was founded only in 2023, but its business has exploded, with revenues doubling every month, on track to exceed $1 billion this year.

For longer, more complex series and films, the technology isn’t there yet. But it is advancing rapidly. Within a decade, human actors will become historical artifacts, as will cinematographers, stunt performers, art directors, costume designers, line producers, and location scouts. While a few studios are quietly using a lot of AI (Lionsgate is often mentioned), most of Hollywood is preparing for this impending tsunami by doing … virtually nothing. Studios, producers, distributors, and agencies are dreaming (or pretending) that AI will be just one more technological wave to ride, like cable TV, CGI, DVDs, and streaming.

By contrast, the unions representing actors, writers, art directors, and other industry professions are terrified – and have responded by blindly opposing all uses of AI, which is futile at best. Still, they are right to worry. The technology is advancing so fast that the transition from physical to AI video production will probably be brutal and brief, destroying thousands of careers and companies virtually overnight. I have already seen friends leave the industry.

Hollywood is just one example of how the AI revolution will cause enormous social pain unless managed humanely and carefully (and there’s little sign of that happening). Similar statements can be made about fiction writing, commercial photography, radio, and, above all, music, where multiple, rapidly growing AI startups (including Udio, Suno, and Mozart) are enabling non-musicians to create music.

To be sure, Udio and Suno engaged in massive IP theft, were sued, and recently reached settlements with the major music labels. But none of the legacy music companies are at the forefront of AI, except in filing lawsuits.

The Day After Tomorrow
So, the AI revolution is coming to the arts, and the carnage in legacy industries will be awful. What the day after will look like, however, is a far more complicated question.

Personally, as a once and future filmmaker, I am excited about AI filmmaking. I would love to be able to write treatments and screenplays, feed them to my AI “studio,” get back a good rough cut, and then hone and hone with AI until I have exactly the film I want to make, with every character, setting, movement, line of dialogue, and camera angle perfect. There will be no need to beg for financing, employ a producer’s girlfriend, indulge an egomaniacal movie star, or worry about whether someone on set loaded a gun with live ammunition.

There is, however, an urgent need for new laws, systems, and institutions to protect intellectual property and its creators. The most discussed issue is the very real need to compensate traditional creators whose prior work is being used to train AI models. But there is also a need to protect AI creators and creations.

The idea that AI-generated art can’t or shouldn’t be protected is misguided. When human artists – writers, photographers, film directors – use AI to create new work, they deserve protection just as much as human artists using conventional tools.

In fact, I expect AI to create the conditions for major new genres and artists of genius. For a glimpse of what I mean, check out the Runway AI Film Festival, especially the superb grand prize winner, Total Pixel Space. Such work shows why I welcome the AI era in artistic creation, even while recognizing that the AI arts revolution will also have major downsides. Many good people – hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions – will be unemployed with little warning, often late in their careers. There will also be oceans of AI slop – literally millions of new novels, songs, and films every year – making it difficult for gifted new artists to stand out. And, of course, there will be more AI girlfriends and AI pornography, as well as gruesome creations ranging from resurrected Nazis to depictions of child abuse.

The Life of an Illusion
Far more frightening to me, however, is what is happening to the world of nonfiction – news, information sources, and reference services. Here, we are already witnessing the blurring of the boundaries – to the point of indistinguishability – between fact and fabrication. While the AI era of art excites me more than it worries me, the balance is different in the realm of truth and reality. As much as there is to celebrate, I am terrified by what AI might bring.

Journalism, like Hollywood, has already contracted. The internet forced daily newspapers, weekly magazines, radio, and television news all into the same market; it destroyed the classified advertising revenues that newspapers depended on; and it spawned thousands of low-quality new entrants. The news sources upon which most people previously relied – magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and network television news – were decimated as social media, YouTube, and aggregators took over, offering summaries that were barely short of copyright infringement – when they were true. Junk and falsehoods proliferated, and the quality of news consumed by the general population plunged.....

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Also at Project Syndicate, January 22:

Why AI Is Unlike Previous Tech Booms

The rise of AI follows a fundamentally different competitive logic than earlier technological revolutions. With massive capital requirements, high operating expenses, low switching costs, and intensifying regulatory scrutiny, success will depend less on scale and more on financial resilience and political influence....