this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025

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Some thought Hollywood might use AI to replace human workers. It seems the opposite is happening, individuals using AI are about to replace much of Hollywood's output. (futurology.today)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This data is courtesy of Dan Shapiro.

As there are only so many people and hours in the day, the market for human attention is finite. Hollywood is spending more money to make TV and movies, but its market share is declining. People, especially younger people, are far more likely to watch videos on the internet made by small creators. Needless to say, the small content creators' costs are vastly cheaper. AI is rapidly making them cheaper still.

And it's not just that small creators using AI-generation will displace Hollywood's existing efforts; they are likely to create new artforms that will displace the old screen/broadcast formats of TV shows & movies too. AI-gen artforms, as yet uninvented, may be real-time rendered, personalized for individuals, hyper-niche, etc, etc

This is all part of a surprising trend with AI, its tendency towards decentralization. Some dommerist nightmares see all powerful corporations in the future, but as with open-source AI & robotics equalling the Big Tech efforts, the trend seems more for AI's power to be dispersed.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

This tendency towards decentralization you're seeing is an illusion. Open-source doesn't change the fact that you need compute and the compute isn't decentralized. It's highly centralized in extremely expensive (both in terms of resources and energy) server farms. Even if content is decentralizing out of Hollywood it's still physically centralized.

Also, this tendency towards content decentralization will not last. Right now the whole AI industry operates at a loss because they don't expect profits, so small creators can use these tools because they're artificially cheap. Every company wants to capture market share in the short term so they can profit at a later point. Eventually they're going to want to profit and costs for content creators will skyrocket... and they'll just stop using it. Then the whole thing will crash.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I mean, you could theoretically use decentralised computers for training. Even that aside, though, they only have to train these things once and then it just works on anything; the bell will not be unrung like that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

~~then the whole thing will crash~~ them only the super rich mega corps will be able to produce such content and we'll have lost entire generation(s) of people learning how to make art, photograph, film, etc. as they "had AI to do it growing up."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

A generation is 20 years. This bubble is not lasting that long.

Also by 2045 climate change will be actively destroying civilization so 🤷‍♀️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I mean, it already is causing some problems, looking at the dominant story right now, which for future people is LA burning.

Coincidentally, that's also the year the agreement to not settle Antarctica expires.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I know how long a generation is.

The hype train of AI will have passed to a degree, but photography, painting, cinema and many other visual and performing arts will be impacted for generations and permanently reduced by a degree not yet known.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That's alarmist. Painting? Really?

Also, kind of ignoring the climate elephant in the room. People entertaining each other in the ruins of civilization won't be using AI much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

We won't last that long.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Open source tools can be, and often are, run on consumed hardware though.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, but a consumer can't buy enough compute to run these LLMs. Let's not pretend that's the same as running Linux on your desktop.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I can't imagine believing this. I can run llama3.3 on my laptop, it's just as fast as chatgpt and while it's not quite as good, it is good enough for many things. This is rapidly becoming easier too as models get more efficient.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

A consumer can absolutely buy a RTX 3090 and run most of the biggest open weights models.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Run a pretrained model, which was trained on massive data sets. That's still absolutely centralized.

You aren't going to have enough data to train a model from scratch on your desktop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You're grasping so hard. If you have a model that you can run locally and do what you want with it, then it's not an issue that a single entity made it. What do you expect, a whole bunch of people huddled around a keyboard pushing all the keys together so that a single entity doesn't make it? Ai is here, it's improving rapidly, accept it and prepare, or be left far, far behind. There are enough people who are not blindly religiously anti-ai that they will be able to put their influence into the world while you scream your throat out at an empty wall.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 days ago

The issue isn't that a single entity made it, the issue is that the single entity that made it is operating at a loss. Training LLMs is a massive investment of energy, material, and finance capital. They can operate at a loss for now because they're being pumped with liquidity from investors eager to get in on the next hype wave. That won't last, investors will eventually expect profits and when these companies can't produce those profits investors will pull out. AI isn't here. These are chatbots.

You don't think they're actually intelligent, do you?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

By your definition, everything is centralized because no one is making the tools they use. You don't have the skills to build a photo editing software or a chainsaw either.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The photo editing software and chainsaw aren't made artificially cheap by companies operating at a loss by burning investor capital.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I'm not sure what that has to do with what I was saying; that it isn't centralized as you said.

Artificially cheap seems like a buzzword. I'm not sure what you mean but I can guarantee that a lot of chainsaws are cheaply made and Adobe definitely showcases "cheap" behavior. It has nothing to do with centralisation in any case.

In the same vein, a lot of ground breaking technologies started at a loss. I don't think all AI companies are running at a lost but some are doing it for our benefit, mainly the ones releasing free models with open minded licenses.

[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I reaaaaaaaaaaally want and hope you are right. We can't get rid of all this AI crap soon enough.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You're gunna have a very bad time until you quit hoping that ai goes away. Ai is a constantly developing field that is currently in a massive surge. It's more likely that the internet goes away than it is that ai goes away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

As with the 90s dot.com bust, there will be a handful of winners and a shitload of losers. Lemmy acts like they're so much smarter, "These idiots will lose!"

As you said, AI is not going to go away, only the losers will crash. The winners will profit handsomely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

We nearly all won with dot.com, everyones lives got better. Sure, some people won harder than others, but this was the case with steel, automobiles, agriculture and everything else. We simply can't all be the ones who do the best at using a new technology to profit off of.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

AI is in its infancy, and I'm pretty sure a lot of AI services are sold below cost right now. This situation could change drastically if the monetization model changes. On that note, AFAIK YouTube, which hosts much of the content that small creators produce, still isn't profitable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

In 2023, YouTube's advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion. (from wiki)

Pretty sure youtube is doing fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Revenue means nada. Show me profits. Oh, and YouTube lost billions and billions taking over the online video space, for a decade+.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Bro, we are talking about 50 thousand million here. Do you seriously think yourube comes even close to that in terms of running cost? The employees salaries and server costs would have to be more then it's revenue for it to be running at a lost.

They don't publish their running costs so we can't know but it's silly to think it's more then 50 billion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't understand people that think like this...

Do they think the prompt they type in will be so much better than what Hollywood types in that it negates the insane discrepancy in hardware and AI time?

It just makes zero sense to me, but people have been saying it for years now.

Like arguing the 2nd amendment means we can pull a Wolverines against an actual government.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

There's a lot more small people, so the odds are massively in their favor. Also, using AI tools to make content is not just writing a prompt. If you are going to make videos of any length and depth, then you are utilizing a number of various tools. Just think of all the view time that silly TikTok videos have taken from Hollywood, now imagine people putting in the same amount of effort and ending up with much more impressive results since they have AI to use as a tool.

Two years ago, making something like Unanswered Oddities would have taken many months and a lot of money, now it can be done in an afternoon by someone creative.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL14oiCokyIUUgHiNR-rPqavC9bPbm46U9&si=dR3dkeW4m5bmIjUw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Not to get too off topic, but you're thinking of the idiocy of an AR-15 vs. a helicopter. There are a shitload of people and systems that make it possible to fly that helicopter.

SOURCES:

Vietnam

Afghanistan

Syria

Etc.

And imagine how fascist these fascist would be if they knew they could knock down every door without fear.