My cherished Neopatrons and I were discussing the phenomenon of the indie author who goes back to signing with publishers. It’s been fascinating to see this regression to the oldpub model the minute some realize the newpub model is obsolete. Falling back on the even more obsolete yet familiar instead of trying something new isn’t exactly advancement.
Some have suggested that these authors are angling for Hollywood and Netflix deals. If they want to get in bed with the Death Cult, that’s on them. Remember that epic fantasy king Brandon Sanderson can’t get a movie made, either.
Related: Not Even King Brandon Can Get a Movie Made
The other day I was hanging out with an actor friend whose buddy just got in from LA. He’s a composer that did a lot of work for the studios—trailers and scores, that kind of stuff.
According to him, the industry is in far worse shape than they’re letting on. Lots of talent driving for Uber on the side. Because regardless of the recent strikes, the studios are going all in on A.I.
What happened was the streaming bubble bursting caught them off guard. And they’ve got no answer for it. The studios treated exhibitors like peasants for decades. The death of theaters, rental outlets, and now streaming is teaching them a sharp lesson in taking your distribution chain for granted.
Related: Diversity Devours Hollywood
Yes, corporate A.I. is straight up garbage. They essentially built search engines that are orders of magnitude faster than Yahoo, Google, or Amazon. But when their super fact-finding machines started spitting facts that contradicted Death Cult dogma, the Silicon Valley bugmen had to add fetters that thwarted the original purpose.
That’s how you get hilarious debacles like Gemini drawing Chinese Philosophes.
Related: The Internet of Shit
On the other end of the spectrum., we have the open source A.I. being developed by small teams or individual coders working out of basements. That stuff is revolutionary. None of the zombified corpo algo flaws. We’re talking about open private image models running locally on rigs with high end but off-the-shelf GPUs.
All I’ll say is that anyone whose concept of A.I. is six-fingered drawings and schizo copypasta word salad is a year behind the curve. That’s why the #1 battle right now is making sure the brain damaged corporate A.I. doesn’t dominate. Which means making sure that private homebrew A.I. beats public-facing megacorp A.I.
Related: The Internet Is Still Dead
Public-facing is t he keyword. Because you can bet Apple, Disney, et al. aren’t limiting themselves to the zombified versions. All the legal battles over A.I. material in the past year have been aimed at ensuring only megacorps have access to real, unfettered A.I. while the rest of us are stuck with the stultified garbage.
We know this because the major activist group lobbying against A.I. has direct links to Disney. No matter if, as some suspect, A.I. is driving many movies over budget. The studios don’t care. Because the two possible outcomes are a world where the regime can instantly detect, isolate, and ban any incidence of wrongthink; or a world where they lose their power to propagandize forever.
Related: Anti-A.I. Astroturf
The good guys do seem to be winning for once. Might be that the managerial elite’s incompetence finally caught up with them. As others have pointed out, a near future in which audio, photo, and even video evidence are inadmissible because any high school kid with a decent laptop can undetectably fake them is one in which the intel agencies lose a lot of blackmail leverage.
If we win, Netflix deals become meaningless because those same kids can make Hollywood-quality movies, too. That’s what has the studios terrified. Keep in mind Blackrock’s involvement in the paroxysms shaking Wizards of the Coast at the moment.
Related: Wizards of the Coast President Resigns
There’s no putting the media democratization genie back in the bottle. Open source A.I. is doing for every other industry what KDP did for authors in 2013. After all, gatekeeping has no meaning when there are no walls.
Anyone who’s still hoping to get rich and famous via sales on Amazon is selling horse buggy whips. Case in point: Brandon Sanderson, who has movie option deals, made four times more in one month on Kickstarter than he makes per year with Amazon. A guy would have to be deaf to miss that mic drop. Now consider that oldpub cannot produce another Sanderson, yet Sanderson’s net worth is 1/10 Stephen King’s.
Related: Neopatron Brandon
The artificial bottlenecks that made Rowlings, Lucases, and U2s possible can no longer be maintained. You can be comfortable on the Neopatronage model, but megastars are over.
There will always be black swans. It’s just that the markets will make them happen, not small cartels of gatekeepers.
Turn your 3-star writing into 5-star writing
I’ve helped dozens of author clients find the right words and present the right elements in the right order to take their books from good to great.
The only chance the old megacorps have is if they start campaigning like luddites and make a hard push for pre-digital and “good old days” nostalgia mining by trying to convince the masses that this AI junk is all garbage and that the Human Touch is what really matters so be sure to ostracize and destroy any goofball who dabbles in it all the while pretending the big dogs don’t use it at all. As any recent online spat will show you–online activists will excuse Marvel making an entire opening credits scene in CG but some random normie who uses AI voices in his college project is to be dehumanized and destroyed by the Industry for his sins.
As anyone can see, they’re already doing this. How many dumb internet arguments get started over AI and “humanity” when there hasn’t been any involved in these industries for ages. But they got you defending modern slop because At Least It’s Real, so it’s another win for them.
But that isn’t going to work forever.
There isn’t really any way to put the genie back in the bottle, but if they can Ghostbusters 2016 this situation and make you fight other Average Joes for silly reasons perhaps they can smokescreen their downfall for just a bit longer. It’s worked out well enough so far.
“Marvel making an entire opening credits scene in CG”
Well, it was CG, but I should specify it was entirely AI.
The ease with which normies are psyoped may not be the only argument against democracy, but it’s one of the best.
“The only chance the old megacorps have is if they start campaigning like luddites and make a hard push for pre-digital and “good old days” nostalgia mining by trying to convince the masses that this AI junk is all garbage”
They’ve already been doing something similar to that with CGI for a few years now. There’s a great series of videos by VFX artist Jonas Ussing in which he demonstrates how studios have been using deceptive marketing tactics to fool audiences into thinking that CGI-heavy movies have all-practical effects in order to cash in on popular anti-CGI sentiments and make money from people who are tired of CGI. In some cases, they have even gone so far as to doctor behind-the-scenes footage to remove evidence of greenscreen and CGI use.
Here are the three videos in the series that he has released so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdMAEtLrPSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGPHy3yWE08
The whole AI debate is a mixed bag. I’m in the camp that I don’t like it overall because you have a bunch of grifters passing off AI created works like they had the skill to make it. Much of the grief people give Hollywood is over idiotic writing, but there’s still enough visual technical skill in the industry to hold water. You can take that for what it is.
I see the hardest heart of the matter is giving up the notion the “super star” is dead. Lots of people want to make it big using their artistic skills. Killing that expectation is hard.
Democratizing creativity using a robot is making the field (besides the industry) less impressive. AI is free, more efficient, and in the long run will be able to do anything you want it to do with zero skill, so why learn the arts anyway? I see this underlying attitude no more than neocons who worship the god of efficiency and ‘might makes right’ because it’s so efficient and powerful. In the short term, it may be a victory against the bug men who have ruined the arts, but long term, what is it we are giving up? Humanity? Genuineness? Another way to put it, we are seeing the arts be reduced from skilled labor to a hobby.
Though if the neopatronage model does what we expect it to do for enough people to be the general standard, then nothing I say matters because people will pay me to make human art and not run words through a prompt and have a robot spit it out.
AI aside, it is human nature that we chose a familiar hell because its familiar. That’s why so many people are looking for the mainstream solutions. It’s still perceived the power and money are there.
I understand. But by way of analogy, one may not like digipaint, the internet, or gravity. The world is gonna do what it’s gonna do.
Here’s where us creatives are at: Those who embrace A.I. as a productivity-boosting tool will thrive. Those who reject it out of hand will be left behind.
Agreed, it’s change progressing and people adapting (or not). While I don’t plan to adopt AI in the near future, I’m sure I might out of necessity to help me with smaller tasks that I don’t want to do like rendering.
While I can’t control petty frauds who want to have software make fake art for them, I can at least sleep soundly knowing I have the skills to back up my work.
“The good guys do seem to be winning for once. Might be that the managerial elite’s incompetence finally caught up with them.”
God allows what He allows. And then He stops, apparently letting complex systems die under their own weight. The last 150 years or so have been rough (and oddly easy at the same time) on humanity.
“As others have pointed out, a near future in which audio, photo, and even video evidence are inadmissible because any high school kid with a decent laptop can undetectably fake them is one in which the intel agencies lose a lot of blackmail leverage.”
I’m not sure. As much as I like a lot of the advances in AI for the usefulness they could provide to me and others, I’ve had the uneasy feeling for a few years now that the reason why deepfakes and similar technology burst onto the scene when they did may have been part of a sinister plan by elites.
There are some very guilty rich and powerful people who fear evidence of their crimes (such as Jeffrey Epstein’s tapes) becoming public. What better way to save their skins than by making it impossible for the public to tell what video and audio evidence is real, so they can plausibly deny any evidence that ever does come out?
Also, if they can create and control some sort of AI-detection software, group of experts, or even government agency, they can decide what is and isn’t real as far as the mainstream media and the courts are concerned. They could have the experts in their pocket (or an AI-detection algorithm with a hidden backdoor accessible to them) detect real evidence of their own crimes as fake, while simultaneously framing innocent people with AI technology and declaring that the evidence has been confirmed as 100% real by experts/software/authorities. This could be used both to railroad innocent people in court and to blackmail them with threats of doing so. It would be like a magic license to exonerate any guilty person and frame or blackmail any innocent person.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that they will be able to pull this off, and I certainly hope they don’t succeed in doing so, but I think the possibility that they will attempt to do so (and may have even strategically accelerated AI research for this express purpose) should be strongly considered, and any attempts on anyone’s part to do something along such lines should be opposed to the maximum degree.
I have held some of the same suspicions regarding the use of deep fakes as an excuse for not trusting any evidence.
Not to go off-topic, but for an example of how to do AI art right to supplement a story, a YouTuber channel named Prism has done some incredible work in producing a “fan film” sequel trilogy, and he’s currently producing his own Kenobi series. The first episode just dropped this past weekend.
It’s just pictures, voice overs, sound effects and music, but there’s passion and great storytelling. There are some details off with a few of the illustrations, but the storytelling carries you through. It’s almost like a visual novel, or hearkening back to shadow puppet theater where the audience is happy to use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
Just go to YouTube and search: “Prism,” and “What if Star Wars was awesome.”
He’s even got a Discord where he gives “courses” on how to make and incorporate AI in your own stories. It’s worth checking out. There are stumbling blocks of course. For instance the AI uses established images, so generating an image of, say, Luke Skywalker fighting an original villain can be tough, but there’s some valuable stuff to learn.
Watching the fan films (and I’ve been frequently rewatching them) I’m thinking if your Soul Cycle books are ever going to be adapted into any kind of “movie,” this would be the way to do it.
On a side note regarding AI art: another grudge against Disney Star Wars: They cast an actor not at all suited to the part of the aquiline, aristocratic and athletic Grand Admiral Thrawn, so now any attempt to make an AI-assisted fan film of the Heir to the Empire trilogy have the additional stumbling block of generating images of the Elon Musk-looking Thrawn.