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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> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
The primary issue is that the digital economy is attention supply locked now that services expansion has hit a wall. And so the only way to extract infinite growth money going forward, which dealing with commoditisation and erosion of talent and technology moats in any form, is to lay off people.
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
>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].
> In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"?
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
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
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.
Offshoring of manufacturing to China is the analogy that springs to mind for me.
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.
Rhythm and Hues (Oscar award winner for “Life of Pi”) was killed because it was cheaper to move that work offshore.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
> 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.
FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
Efficiency could mean creating more with the same labour, not creating the same amount with less labour.
look all the commenters here... this is a lot of words with way too much intellectualizing.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
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.
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/