It’s 2033. You’re a concept artist in London, building a video game with a team of people scattered across the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The game looks mind-blowing. It’s powered by Unreal Engine 12<\/a>, a hybrid art and AI platform capable of generating photorealistic graphics in real-time on the PlayStation 9 (teleport yours today)<\/a>. The physics are near-perfect, and the non-player characters can hold emotion-driven, open-ended conversations, while still gently guiding players back to the main quest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ten years ago, you would have needed a team of 5,000 people to build this game. You\u2019re doing it with 100. But this new efficiency hasn\u2019t meant less work for people like you. It\u2019s meant more games \u2014 a lot more. Instead of releasing 10 to 20 AAA titles a year like it used to, the industry now ships over a thousand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Welcome to the age of industrialized imagination. To understand how we got here, we have to roll back the clock to the turbulent 2020s, when AI first entered the creative world and fear dominated the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The entertainment industry is broken, with the biggest players groaning under the weight of their own success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hollywood hit a cost ceiling so high it now scrapes the stratosphere. A tentpole film routinely gulps $200-$300 million<\/a> in production costs before marketing budgets even come into play. Most of these flicks have to earn $500 million<\/a> or more just to break even.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s even worse in the gaming industry. Production budgets for top-tier video games can soar past even those eye-watering film numbers. Sony\u2019s \u201cSpider-Man 2\u201d tipped the scales at roughly $315 million<\/a>, while a single \u201cCall of Duty\u201d entry can chew through $700 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The creative pipeline has a bottleneck so tight that artists are suffocating.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n When you’re gambling with that much money, you don’t take risks. You can’t afford to \u2014 the price of failure is corporate beheading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, if you\u2019re an entertainment industry exec who wants to keep their job, you\u2019re not going to gamble on the strange or the sublime. Risk is the enemy. Instead, you\u2019re going to clone what already works. You greenlight \u201cJohn Wick,\u201d but with a chick<\/a>. You order up \u201cFast and Furious 14: The Search for More Money.\u201d You remake a classic<\/a>, hoping nostalgia will cover for a lack of new ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even prestige TV bows to the accountant\u2019s whip. Amazon finally found its stride with its adaptation of \u201cThe Wheel of Time\u201d in a muscular third season, but swung the axe anyway<\/a> because it didn\u2019t want very good \u2014 it wanted a global phenomenon, with once-in-a-generation storytelling, like \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Streaming has contributed to entertainment\u2019s downfall<\/a> in many ways. People used to buy physical copies of the flicks they loved best. Streaming is better for consumers because we get access to a lot more content for a lot less money, but producers got a second financial wind from DVD and VHS sales, and that revenue helped offset production costs \u2014 essentially, every film had two major release dates, and now it doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a healthy creative ecosystem. The pipeline has a bottleneck so tight that artists are suffocating. The entertainment industry has become a gilded cage, one that produces ever-more-expensive retreads of existing stories for an audience hungry for something \u2014 anything \u2014 new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Into this stagnation comes a wrecking ball: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s now an AI tool for seemingly every step of the creative process in entertainment. ChatGPT can write screenplays and code video games. DALL-E can generate storyboards and concept art. Veo 3<\/a> and Runway<\/a> can turn those assets into videos.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cue the screaming headlines about the end of art and mass unemployment among creatives. Artists are panicking. Writers, musicians, and digital effects artists are worried that they are on the verge of being automated into oblivion. In 2023, the major actors unions went on strike<\/a> \u2014 the potential use of generative AI<\/a> to replicate human performers was a core point of dispute during contract negotiations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overhyped AI demo reels are only fueling their fears. Every time a new AI-generated video makes the rounds on social media, the comments from pundits light up the airways: “This is insane! Hollywood is cooked! Everyone will make movies for nothing!”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n But look closer at those “Hollywood is cooked” videos, like the below minute-long clip<\/a> created by AI startup founder Dave Clark using Google Flow. The interior space is physically wrong. The people shift around inside the car like they’ve got a football field of breathing room. The rifle shooting scenes are abysmal. The characters are shooting at nothing or shooting each other. The faces are deep in the uncanny valley. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe broken lens<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Art vs. the algorithm<\/h3>\n\n\n\n