I recently co-hosted a session of Near Future Laboratory General Seminar on “AI in Hollywood & The Futures of Storytelling”. After several hours of creative speculation with an interesting mix of movie industry insiders and experts from the futures crowd, I realized a number of reoccuring tropes I am going to share for future reference. Starting with the most pessimistic one: the Narrative Meat Grinder
The Streaming Wars increased demand for content
The “Streaming Wars” pulled all the big media players into cloud-first content production. The volume of narrative content being produced since then is bigger than ever and people working within the industry are busy to meet the demand for new content^[Budgets in the Movie Industry have increased 30% in the last 10 years, even 50% in the streaming sector @]. Looking back on the last years since the rise of netflix, the “golden age of streaming television” might be a proper historical label for this explosion of narrative storytelling. This sounds like great news for everybody interested in movies and television. But at the same time, many are worried about the future of the industry. Producer budgets have become tighter since interest rates increased in 2022 and stagnating subscriptions forced the industry from a focus on growth to a focus on margins.
Tools for creative cost-cutting
As the business becomes more difficult, many fear that new tools being introduced into the filmmaking industry for the sake of creativity will eventually be used to reduce labour cost. Creative processes that used to demand collaboration of skilled craftspeople could become generic tasks, executed by badly trained executioners and coordinated by a small number of super showrunners combining all the responsibilies that a whole number of people used to carry before. In an even more pessimist version of this world, entire roles would be replaced by AI^[see Ben Sahlmueller on Twitter]. The increased rate of content production would become a race to the bottom, the number of jobs would decrease^[Within the seminar, one insider estimated (maybe a bit overly pessimistic) that 75% of jobs in the filmmaking industry were to be replaced by AI soon] and new technologies like AI and Virtual Production would only speed up this “Cheap Content Meat Grinder”.
Streaming Fatigue
On the consumer side, this might lead to oversaturation, a “streaming fatigue” - high quality content would not be something rare and exciting, but something everybody had seen enough of - Cinema would eventually loose its glamour competely and “cinema-grade” content would become a daily nuisance lurking on every virtual corner. Combined with a decline of local cinemas, motion picture production might increasingly be geared towards private consumption alongside with reduced investment in the fascination for movie content^[”Last year, several media conglomerates, including Disney and WarnerMedia, decided to debut new releases in movie theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. That was a radical change, and theater chains protested it. “There used to be a whole run-up,” Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns.The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. "That's finished," he said.”
Barry Diller (Ex-CEO of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox) on the Future of Hollywood@]. Home Cinema is convenient but it would destroy the unifying qualities that “going to the movies” always offered - watching a movie at home in a private setting is a different experience, it provides a coziness that can be good for the individual soul on a short term, but it could also promote a different kinds of stories, the ones that resonate with individual not collective hopes and anxieties. As Cinema has been a medium to build collective narratives, Streaming might become a medium to nurture individualized views of the world.
Narrative Meat Grinders will not be the end of the story
Even though the future described here is probably the pessimistic baseline many industry insiders share intuitively, it is not for granted the future will take place like this:
- AI automation could turn out to be viable for replacing generic jobs only (Producers?^[“For example, AI algorithms could analyze audience data to predict which types of films or TV shows are likely to be successful, helping producers make more informed decisions about what projects to pursue. AI could also be used to analyze marketing data and make recommendations about how to reach and engage audiences more effectively. In reality, this kind of intelligence might completely eliminate producers. Who needs someone to make calls to package when a computer can send form emails to agents or use its metrics to decide which projects it should be greenlighting?”
how-will-artificial-intelligence-affect-hollywood]), leaving complicated jobs requiring lots of spontaneous interaction between discplines (like Scriptwriters, DoP’s, AC’s and Directors) untouched^[On replacing Scriptwriters with AI: “It’s going and meeting with the set decoration department that says, ‘Hey, we can’t actually build this prop that you’re envisioning, could you do this instead?’ and then you talk to them and go back and rewrite,” he said. “This is a human enterprise that involves working with other people, and that simply cannot be done by an AI.”
ai-replace-tv-writers-strike] - Small local Cinemas are struggling and need every support, but in general selling tickets still is a much better business for movie studios then producing content for the cloud^[Actually, Studios today are MORE dependent on box office sales then they used to be 20 years ago.]
- Bingewatching at home has lost quite a bit of it’s attractiveness since almost everybody was forced to do it for during the Covid pandemic. And the decline of the “Young Adult Dystopia” movie genre has proven that adressing individualist prepper fears is not a perfect recipe for success at the box office
In any case, the “Narrative Meat Grinder“-scenario provides good material for a number of ambivalent and interesting Design Fiction Archetypes. Think of: Union-trained AI models, Blockbuster Movie Holo Projectors and creator-financed Spaces for on-site content production beyond the limited vision of big studios.
This (rather pessimistic) outlook on the future of storytelling is just one perspective that was raised during the General Seminar Session. More to follow.
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Last updated: 2023-06-24