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

The technology is interesting as an element within the wider process of special effects, animation, and video games. The idea that you’re actually making a movie with the current products—and I’m a former indie filmmaker, I’d have a blast with this if it were real—is a fantasy.

Only Data looks and sounds fully 'natural' in this 10 minute clip of STTNG, but it nicely demonstrates the imminent plausibility of synthetic TV / film. And its affordability.

Feed it a handful of short stories and you can automate the creation of an entire TV series.

"yadda yadda, this is the worst it will ever be"

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzl7nUdEs4

I work in this industry. I've dealt with major studios and up-and-coming studios quite extensively. (I was a filmmaker before AI, which helps a lot.)

If your exposure to AI video is ComfyUI, that's the consumer / hobbyist segment and you're missing out on where all the action is actually concentrating.

There are five-ish segments:

- Large studios. They're going slow, but they've already started integrating the tech. They won't tell people they're using it. They outsource to production houses that use it. Some of the biggest studios are moving slowly and want fully air-gapped support that runs on their existing cloud contracts. There are companies moving more intentionally, though. Netflix acquired Affleck's company for broad AI video controllability patents, for instance.

- Up-and-coming new media studios. Check out Gossip Goblin [1], [2], [3]. These folks are getting backing right now and they're growing huge followings from very unique visions and perspectives that feel somewhat counter to Hollywood. Most of the people here are highly professional, understand film language, and do a great job with storytelling. They typically leverage human voice actors and put weeks to months into making single videos.

- Marketing, B2B: people are already using this in ads. See Coca-Cola

- Consumer, UGC, non-creatives: this is the Sora crowd that only knows how to remix popular IP. Some of them graduate into new media exploration, but this follows the 1% rule. This is where most "slop" comes from.

- Porn creators: I've interviewed several folks that are making mid-six figures on "fan" platforms. It's a full-time job and some of them are scaling up to teams.

[1] Pomegranate, one of the best AI films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZhC2TXgcs

[2] Theatrical release: https://variety.com/2026/film/news/gossip-goblin-ai-film-god...

[3] https://www.gossipgoblin.studio/

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.

except "AI" doesn't have any original thoughts of its own, everything is going to be originally from a human source

it might be a concept from some rare book they fed it and destroyed after, it might be a concept from thousands of "fan fic" they hoovered up all over the internet by scraping forums illegally

you say you won't watch it except human behavior already demonstrates there are millions of other people who will

it's an unfortunate future but an easily predictable one

all about making cheap content to insert ads, the ads are the point, not the content

like product placement in a $100 million action movie, except soon they will be able to make the movie for $100 instead of $100 million and most won't know the difference

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 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'.