6 ms·

Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs

borzi 2mo ago
No they are not. They are helping rip off delusional investors who think this will amount to more than slop.
- pllbnk 2mo ago
  They are only talking about production, productivity, quantity, nothing else. The amount of produced content hasn't been in short supply. There is no talk about consumption. Who is going to consume all this content, _even_ if it somehow turns out good? If it's cheap and easily producible, then it's worthless as consumption item.
- BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
  But consumers eat up the slop?
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
- pydry 2mo ago
  Hollywood has managed to sell a lot of derivative, human made slop in the past. It might not reach the quality threshold where they can make money off it but would I be willing to bet that it can't? Probably not. If it turns out you can one day make a "big budget" Hollywood movie for $20k in tokens then I don't see the point in having film studios.
ck2 2mo ago
What I am curious to learn is how many episodes of a TV series made by real actors it will take for an "AI" to eventually make perfect extensions ie. feed it every episode of the original Star Trek series, at some point "AI" is going to be advanced enough to write a new episode and simulate all the characters perfectly anime and animation in theory will be even easier to do perfectly? the question is can it do it perfectly with just a dozen episodes? or does three dozen make it better? because once that happens, that's all the networks will pay for, after all they are only about the commercials they can insert into content regardless of source and yes viewers will eventually accept it the same way they won't quit X or meta, etc. regardless of how horrible they become or the sub-human behavior of the owners
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  Why wouldn't the users just generate it themselves?
  - mawadev 2mo ago
    This is exactly how I see it. Most companies participating in such games are digging their own grave long term, because of fear of someone else doing that
  - homarp 2mo ago
    on their own computer using open weight chinese models? More seriously 1) >users will generate their own some people write fanfic, most just watch/read instead. 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew explains how film maker will film, with whatever they have. AI will enable some people to make what is not financially feasible right now for a single person to do. 'Unique' movie/stories creation will continue. And like with the rest of things AI can do, the question is more 'who's going to pay for person-made vs "algorithmically optimized AI generated story'. Same question we have of 'AI generated code' vs 'this code was written by a person'.
    - ygxhbcxdg 2mo ago
      Sora was QUICKLY shut down due to the astronomical cost. On what basis do you claim that using language models to generate feature films would be cheap?
      - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
        Sora isn't cheap, but regular films regularly cost more than $100m to film. Spending $20k on tokens is relatively cheap.
        lotsofpulp 2mo ago
        I would be surprised if production costs for films regularly exceeds $100M. I assume the vast majority of 9 figure films have marketing as the 9 figure expense, including pay for high profile actors/directors/producers, which is also a form of marketing.
mistrial9 2mo ago
Southern California Edison utility district famously required their office staff to train offshored support staff, and then did replace those office staff with the newly trained offshore workers Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements - Computerworld 2015 -- The incident sparked legislative interest in California, with lawmakers proposing bills to restrict utilities from outsourcing critical infrastructure work and prompting at least 11 U.S. senators to request federal investigations into the use of H-1B visas in such outsourcing deals.
- teddyh 2mo ago
  Relevant: <https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-workforces https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-workforces>
  - stego-tech 2mo ago
    TPS hits the nail on the head beautifully, here. Look, the genie is out of the bottle: we are a global economy, and increasingly a global society. Everywhere on the planet is reachable via data link within seconds, and ~95% physically within a day - provided money is no object. Every single country is going to have to grapple with this immediately, not at some point in the future. On the one hand, businesses will always want to have the lowest possible costs. On the other, consumers frequently want local service and support, especially when things go wrong. Countries and Governments want to drive business growth to increase their tax revenue and improve the quality of life of their citizens, but offshoring jobs lowers tax receipts and increases the number of citizens on social services. AI throws gasoline onto this bonfire, demanding immediate action rather than continued can-kicking. The net result is immediate pain as every country struggles to find a path forward. The countries who succeed will be those who find a balance between increasing tax revenue to fund social welfare programs that their populace requires for necessities (housing, food, education, healthcare), while also promoting business growth in a global marketplace, but also ensuring labor is kept proportionate to the local customer market size. The US is trying to turn back a clock to a time of national markets, while China and the EU increasingly acknowledge the global reality and regulate or subsidize accordingly. Businesses clearly want the freedom to compete globally, but a regulation and governance scheme that’s not as fragmented as the present landscape. TL;DR: outsourcing to AI or offshoring is a last-century solution for National companies to increase margins. The name of the game going forward is distributing labor and supply chains relative to local market sizes to build a balanced global competitor.
lxe 2mo ago
If you haven't been following the current explosion of video gen models, including all the content you see on social media, you should pay attention. I have no doubt in my mind that right now, in August of 2026, given a couple of weeks, an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits, given a good amount of exploration/tinkering to fill the gaps that GenAI cannot currently do, (which is storyboarding, screenwriting, characters, and all the actual creative stuff), can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts. The reason why this isn't happening en masse right now is that most creatives are probably not focused on generating feature films, but rather content that's more digestible by social media users. I would expect to start seeing a LOT of development in the upcoming months as some form of commodification where generated content can be both high quality and tailored to the user.
- unixhero 2mo ago
  All I want is Seinfeld Forever
  - jafo1989 2mo ago
    Cool. When it finally shows up, and someone says "No one asked for this..." I'll refer them to you.
- bri3d 2mo ago
  There’s a technology fundamental driving the short form aspect too, current video models are all trained on <500 frame sequences and struggle to generate long shots. There are a lot of attempts in the literature to improve cross-generation coherence but there needs to be an architectural breakthrough or significant scaling improvement before longer continuous shots are practical. So you’d be making a really ADD feature film at the moment.
- Planktonne 2mo ago
  > I have no doubt in my mind that right now [...] an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits [...] can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts. Then why are there no examples of this? There aren't even examples of steps towards it--the half hour film that's nearly production quality, etc.
nottorp 2mo ago
Hollywood movies have become indistinguishable from each other before "AI" so I doubt anyone will notice.
- beej71 2mo ago
  Seriously. The median number of new movies I watch each year has fallen to zero. And if I want to watch one, I just make some popcorn and watch the preview. Big time-saver.
miltonlost 2mo ago
This is how my job in tech is right now. Execs asking us to build systems and agents and subagents so they can just input figma designs and their flawed requirements and get rid of all labor. How does a person not hate themselves doing this work that's effectively existential suicide? Every word into claude is another word of my career's death note.
- dan_ggggg 2mo ago
  > How does a person not hate themselves doing this work that's effectively existential suicide? Cult worship of AI CEOs and sublimating one's own hatred of self onto his fellow workers.
- unified101 2mo ago
  we have to move up the stack.
newsomix9xl 2mo ago
The movie "Singing in the rain" was about the job Apocalypse of sound technology that threw silent film actors and workers into the street, unemployed and hungry. All those silent film era jobs were lost to the "talkies". Hollywood not only survived, it expanded. It is a truism in Hollywood that people always see good movies in any economy. If the industry is contracting maybe they're making bad movies no one wants to see. AI won't change that at all.
- esafak 2mo ago
  I think you are saying people whose jobs AI can do are the silent film actors... Who are the "talkie" actors in this analogy; the people whose jobs AI won't take over?
  - newsomix9xl 2mo ago
    I'm saying the "tech = job loss" scenario is somewhat false. Teamsters were horse carriage drivers and then drove trucks. The horse driver job was "destroyed by technology"? Or was it changed? Jobs are not static entities to be defended or lost. They are dynamic opportunities shaped by technology. Every technology creates different opportunities. No one cries for silent movie era job losses or horse driver jobs. If AI transforms jobs that's what technology has always done. How it will actually play out is unknown and unknowable. That its just negative is sheer science fiction.
    - bigyabai 2mo ago
      > How it will actually play out is unknown and unknowable. I don't think that's a fair claim to make, either. AI music, AI art and even AI television is all fairly proliferate right now: https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-opening-credits/ https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-open... We're not seeing a radical reconsideration of how art is made, nor a rising watermark in content quality. The chart-topping AI songs are transient and forgettable, the finest AI artwork is low-cost and generally effortless. AI television and video content is mostly just a self-loathing piss-take, the stuff that takes itself seriously ends up embarrassing itself. The only people using this tech unironically is the White House, at this point.
yomismoaqui 2mo ago
Hollywood creative is an oxymoron.

borzi 2mo ago

No they are not. They are helping rip off delusional investors who think this will amount to more than slop.

pllbnk 2mo ago
They are only talking about production, productivity, quantity, nothing else. The amount of produced content hasn't been in short supply. There is no talk about consumption. Who is going to consume all this content, _even_ if it somehow turns out good? If it's cheap and easily producible, then it's worthless as consumption item.
BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
But consumers eat up the slop?
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
pydry 2mo ago
Hollywood has managed to sell a lot of derivative, human made slop in the past. It might not reach the quality threshold where they can make money off it but would I be willing to bet that it can't? Probably not. If it turns out you can one day make a "big budget" Hollywood movie for $20k in tokens then I don't see the point in having film studios.

ck2 2mo ago

What I am curious to learn is how many episodes of a TV series made by real actors it will take for an "AI" to eventually make perfect extensions ie. feed it every episode of the original Star Trek series, at some point "AI" is going to be advanced enough to write a new episode and simulate all the characters perfectly anime and animation in theory will be even easier to do perfectly? the question is can it do it perfectly with just a dozen episodes? or does three dozen make it better? because once that happens, that's all the networks will pay for, after all they are only about the commercials they can insert into content regardless of source and yes viewers will eventually accept it the same way they won't quit X or meta, etc. regardless of how horrible they become or the sub-human behavior of the owners

WarmWash 2mo ago
Why wouldn't the users just generate it themselves?
- mawadev 2mo ago
  This is exactly how I see it. Most companies participating in such games are digging their own grave long term, because of fear of someone else doing that
- homarp 2mo ago
  on their own computer using open weight chinese models? More seriously 1) >users will generate their own some people write fanfic, most just watch/read instead. 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew explains how film maker will film, with whatever they have. AI will enable some people to make what is not financially feasible right now for a single person to do. 'Unique' movie/stories creation will continue. And like with the rest of things AI can do, the question is more 'who's going to pay for person-made vs "algorithmically optimized AI generated story'. Same question we have of 'AI generated code' vs 'this code was written by a person'.
  - ygxhbcxdg 2mo ago
    Sora was QUICKLY shut down due to the astronomical cost. On what basis do you claim that using language models to generate feature films would be cheap?
    - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
      Sora isn't cheap, but regular films regularly cost more than $100m to film. Spending $20k on tokens is relatively cheap.
      - lotsofpulp 2mo ago
        I would be surprised if production costs for films regularly exceeds $100M. I assume the vast majority of 9 figure films have marketing as the 9 figure expense, including pay for high profile actors/directors/producers, which is also a form of marketing.

mistrial9 2mo ago

Southern California Edison utility district famously required their office staff to train offshored support staff, and then did replace those office staff with the newly trained offshore workers Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements - Computerworld 2015 -- The incident sparked legislative interest in California, with lawmakers proposing bills to restrict utilities from outsourcing critical infrastructure work and prompting at least 11 U.S. senators to request federal investigations into the use of H-1B visas in such outsourcing deals.

teddyh 2mo ago
Relevant: <https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-workforces https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-workforces>
- stego-tech 2mo ago
  TPS hits the nail on the head beautifully, here. Look, the genie is out of the bottle: we are a global economy, and increasingly a global society. Everywhere on the planet is reachable via data link within seconds, and ~95% physically within a day - provided money is no object. Every single country is going to have to grapple with this immediately, not at some point in the future. On the one hand, businesses will always want to have the lowest possible costs. On the other, consumers frequently want local service and support, especially when things go wrong. Countries and Governments want to drive business growth to increase their tax revenue and improve the quality of life of their citizens, but offshoring jobs lowers tax receipts and increases the number of citizens on social services. AI throws gasoline onto this bonfire, demanding immediate action rather than continued can-kicking. The net result is immediate pain as every country struggles to find a path forward. The countries who succeed will be those who find a balance between increasing tax revenue to fund social welfare programs that their populace requires for necessities (housing, food, education, healthcare), while also promoting business growth in a global marketplace, but also ensuring labor is kept proportionate to the local customer market size. The US is trying to turn back a clock to a time of national markets, while China and the EU increasingly acknowledge the global reality and regulate or subsidize accordingly. Businesses clearly want the freedom to compete globally, but a regulation and governance scheme that’s not as fragmented as the present landscape. TL;DR: outsourcing to AI or offshoring is a last-century solution for National companies to increase margins. The name of the game going forward is distributing labor and supply chains relative to local market sizes to build a balanced global competitor.

lxe 2mo ago

If you haven't been following the current explosion of video gen models, including all the content you see on social media, you should pay attention. I have no doubt in my mind that right now, in August of 2026, given a couple of weeks, an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits, given a good amount of exploration/tinkering to fill the gaps that GenAI cannot currently do, (which is storyboarding, screenwriting, characters, and all the actual creative stuff), can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts. The reason why this isn't happening en masse right now is that most creatives are probably not focused on generating feature films, but rather content that's more digestible by social media users. I would expect to start seeing a LOT of development in the upcoming months as some form of commodification where generated content can be both high quality and tailored to the user.

unixhero 2mo ago
All I want is Seinfeld Forever
- jafo1989 2mo ago
  Cool. When it finally shows up, and someone says "No one asked for this..." I'll refer them to you.
bri3d 2mo ago
There’s a technology fundamental driving the short form aspect too, current video models are all trained on <500 frame sequences and struggle to generate long shots. There are a lot of attempts in the literature to improve cross-generation coherence but there needs to be an architectural breakthrough or significant scaling improvement before longer continuous shots are practical. So you’d be making a really ADD feature film at the moment.
Planktonne 2mo ago
> I have no doubt in my mind that right now [...] an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits [...] can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts. Then why are there no examples of this? There aren't even examples of steps towards it--the half hour film that's nearly production quality, etc.

nottorp 2mo ago

Hollywood movies have become indistinguishable from each other before "AI" so I doubt anyone will notice.

beej71 2mo ago
Seriously. The median number of new movies I watch each year has fallen to zero. And if I want to watch one, I just make some popcorn and watch the preview. Big time-saver.

miltonlost 2mo ago

This is how my job in tech is right now. Execs asking us to build systems and agents and subagents so they can just input figma designs and their flawed requirements and get rid of all labor. How does a person not hate themselves doing this work that's effectively existential suicide? Every word into claude is another word of my career's death note.

dan_ggggg 2mo ago
> How does a person not hate themselves doing this work that's effectively existential suicide? Cult worship of AI CEOs and sublimating one's own hatred of self onto his fellow workers.
unified101 2mo ago
we have to move up the stack.

newsomix9xl 2mo ago

The movie "Singing in the rain" was about the job Apocalypse of sound technology that threw silent film actors and workers into the street, unemployed and hungry. All those silent film era jobs were lost to the "talkies". Hollywood not only survived, it expanded. It is a truism in Hollywood that people always see good movies in any economy. If the industry is contracting maybe they're making bad movies no one wants to see. AI won't change that at all.

esafak 2mo ago
I think you are saying people whose jobs AI can do are the silent film actors... Who are the "talkie" actors in this analogy; the people whose jobs AI won't take over?
- newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  I'm saying the "tech = job loss" scenario is somewhat false. Teamsters were horse carriage drivers and then drove trucks. The horse driver job was "destroyed by technology"? Or was it changed? Jobs are not static entities to be defended or lost. They are dynamic opportunities shaped by technology. Every technology creates different opportunities. No one cries for silent movie era job losses or horse driver jobs. If AI transforms jobs that's what technology has always done. How it will actually play out is unknown and unknowable. That its just negative is sheer science fiction.
  - bigyabai 2mo ago
    > How it will actually play out is unknown and unknowable. I don't think that's a fair claim to make, either. AI music, AI art and even AI television is all fairly proliferate right now: https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-opening-credits/ https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-open... We're not seeing a radical reconsideration of how art is made, nor a rising watermark in content quality. The chart-topping AI songs are transient and forgettable, the finest AI artwork is low-cost and generally effortless. AI television and video content is mostly just a self-loathing piss-take, the stuff that takes itself seriously ends up embarrassing itself. The only people using this tech unironically is the White House, at this point.

yomismoaqui 2mo ago

Hollywood creative is an oxymoron.