alt Hacker NewsI liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
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Modern technology makes distribution free, so then you need to compete on brand and quality.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
Why? AI is taking jobs. getty images just filed bankruptcy, stackoverflow went from heavy use to almost no use. AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out because first we talk about 200k jobs, then we will next talk about 2 million and then 20million
> I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
To use your example of the movie industry, everyone gets the benefits of the effiency gains.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.
Offshoring of manufacturing to China is the analogy that springs to mind for me.
Efficiency could mean creating more with the same labour, not creating the same amount with less labour.
>Regular people do not have more more money or time
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/les1252881600Q
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/avhwpeusa065nrug