🎬 AI Goes Hollywood

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👀 Today’s Thing: AI Goes Hollywood

🤖 Technology and the movies are hardly strangers, but Gen AI has taken things to a new level, and fast. Text-to-video apps are popping up like weeds. AI-generated commercials, and trailers from epic Hollywood collabs (that never happened) are entertaining us on social media. And now Hollywood writers are on strike. Not directly because of AI … but it’s more than just picket line fodder.

🎧 AI’s coming for sports broadcasts, too: Check out my podcast with WSC Sports, who uses AI to auto-edit highlight clips almost as fast as they happen.

📖 Backstory

☞ The Generative AI explosion is inspiring a new wave of budget filmmakers to make fake pizza commercials and nightmare fuel beer commercials that are equal parts bizarre, hilarious, and terrifyingly satirical takes on the real things.

☞ Another creator used AI to imagine The Galactic Menagerie: A Star Wars Story, a would-be new chapter in the galactic saga directed by Wes Anderson. The trailer brings together two fun online traditions: Using AI to imagine Wes Anderson directing Star Wars (last December it was stills only … six months later we have video 🤯) and imagining Wes Anderson directing all kinds of crazy stuff, like The Sopranos.

☞ Meanwhile, Hollywood writers went on strike. While the strike is primarily over better pay and conditions outside major studios, another narrative has emerged: AI is threatening writers’ livelihoods.

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 ChatGPT sparked a debate over the future of writing jobs for humans in the age of large language models (LLMs). At the same time, generative AI tools for creating still images, videos, voices, and music have also advanced rapidly in over the past 12-18 months.

🥈 The pizza ad’s auteur used a combination of AI tools to create their, ahem, masterpiece, including ChatGPT 4 for the script, Eleven Labs Prime Voice AI for the voiceover, Midjourney to generate source images, Runway Gen-2 to create video, and SoundRaw AI for music. Everything was then assembled (by hand) in Adobe After Effects.

🥉 The Writers Guild of America’s current proposal regarding AI: “Regulate use of artificial intelligence on minimum bargaining agreement (MBA)-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.”

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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