Hollywood needs to pivot now, or AI will replace the studios, too

One of the many legitimate concerns held by the actors and writers on strike right now is that Hollywood will use AI to replace them. Studios have already proposed that they should be allowed to scan background extras’ faces, pay them only once, and use their likeness in future projects forever without additional compensation (currently extras make $100-200 per day).

The studios have also refused to negotiate with writers when it comes to using AI-generated scripts for film and television. This refusal to negotiate has led many of the people on strike to fear that Hollywood views AI as a cost-cutting tool (and cost-cutting is all the rage in the entertainment industry right now). Humans need to be paid; AI doesn’t.

But such a plan would be incredibly shortsighted and will ultimately doom the Hollywood studios themselves. Why? Because by the 2030s, AI will have likely made movie studios obsolete.

AI-generated bedtime stories

Remember when you were a child, and before you went to sleep you wanted to hear a bedtime story? Your parent or caregiver would then make one up—generate one—on the spot. That’s what the AI running on our devices will be able to do for us by the 2030s. But far from just a short audio-only bedtime tale, AI will be able to generate entire bespoke films. These films will feature a wide cast of characters, themes, story arcs, and moving musical scores—all AI-generated, but looking as if they were made in Hollywood.

But this AI-generated content will not need a movie studio behind it. AI doesn’t need Hollywood. It just needs itself. And AI will be able to offer audiences what Hollywood can’t: movies uniquely tailored to a single individual’s tastes. Maybe that individual has an eight-hour flight ahead, so they instruct the AI on their tablet to generate a spy thriller trilogy exactly eight hours long, set in, say, Tokyo, the city they are traveling to. Maybe the individual even wants to see themself starring in the lead role. The AI will be able to generate this as easily as a father generates a bedtime story about a child’s favorite stuffed animal having an adventure.

When anyone can generate the movie they want to see right on their smartphone or tablet or Apple TV, why would investors sink their money into films that people need to be convinced to pay to see? The studio could quickly become obsolete.

It’s worth noting that I’m not the only one who thinks this. The actor, writer, and director Justine Bateman posted an interesting thread on Twitter back in May with similar predictions. And she’s in a unique position to understand because not only is she a Hollywood veteran, she’s also a coder with a degree in computer science.

If you’re a Hollywood financier reading this, thinking it sounds far-fetched, you’re not paying close enough attention to the rate at which generative AI is evolving. Take a look at this tweet, embedded below, which shows the speed at which one generative AI platform, Midjourney, is progressing. In 15 months, Midjourney’s AI went from producing unrealistic images to images that are nearly indistinguishable from photographs.

Now look at how text-based generative AI, like ChatGPT, is improving. ChatGPT 3.5 was released in late November 2022. ChatGPT 4.0 was released just three and a half months later, in March 2023. When it comes to the complexity of the stories each could generate, the differences are astounding. ChatGPT 3.5 could generate rudimentary stories and scripts, but they paled in comparison to human-written stories. But as Search Engine Journal points out, not only can ChatGPT 4 compose text using regional dialects, but now the stories it generates feature more coherent plots, characters, and overarching narratives.

Now combine the two technologies, as researchers and companies already are, and you’ll soon have an AI system that can generate scripted motion pictures on demand. And these generative AI technologies will become exponentially better in the months ahead. Months. Just imagine where they’ll be in years.

“Still,” a Hollywood producer may say, “studios might be fine with AI replacing human writers and actors, but they’d never cannibalize themselves by creating generative AI technology that anyone can use to create Hollywood-level films.”

The problem for Hollywood is that studios don’t have to. The current crop of tech giants or some new startup will. I mean, if you think Amazon isn’t one day going to release a Fire TV with built-in bespoke content generation, you don’t know Amazon. What a killer Prime feature. Silicon Valley has never had a problem steamrolling over legacy industries, and it’s coming for Hollywood next.

It should be noted that novelists are just as vulnerable as the studios are. I know this because I am one. After going to film school in the late ’90s, I pivoted to journalism and novel writing to have more control over the storytelling process. About six years ago, I became interested in the burgeoning field of generative AI—mostly because of deepfakes, AI-made fake videos that could put Nicolas Cage into any movie, among other uses— and wrote a nonfiction book about the technology. My latest novel, Beautiful Shining People—to be released in October in the U.S.—explores the ways AI will change our society and our relationships with each other, for better and for worse, in the decades ahead.

After researching and writing these two books, I’ve grown certain that Kindles of the not-too-distant future will be able to generate novels for the user at will, tailored to an individual reader’s tastes, including story, setting, and page count.

Hollywood studios need to pivot, and fast

So, how can the Hollywood studios avert their obsolescence in an AI-driven culture? I don’t know if they can, completely, but if they have any hope of surviving the AI onslaught, they need to pivot, quickly.

First, they need to start by embracing writers’ and actors’ demands regarding the use of AI, and finding ways to ensure that AI tools won’t replace them. Then Hollywood needs to work with those writers and actors to do what it does best: create a new narrative. Hollywood needs to start, today, with a sustained and persistent campaign conveying to audiences that human stories—that is, stories created by human beings—are the only stories worth telling, and especially worth paying for.

This isn’t just a marketing message; this is something I, and every novelist, screenwriter, and director I know, wholeheartedly believes. Films and plays and novels are meant to explore the human condition. Only we humans know what it is like to be us, to live and love and suffer. By understanding this, we become more connected to one another and feel more understood. I mean, how great is it when you watch or read something that someone else has created that suddenly makes you sit up and realize, “Ah! The person who made this has the same thoughts I’ve had!” You don’t feel so alone anymore.

This kind of revelation is what creates the value that audiences are willing to pay for. AI-generated content could never resonate with us in such a way because we know it doesn’t actually share our thoughts or experiences or struggles, no matter the work it creates. Its output is just a mimicry, leaving viewers feeling the effects of a new uncanny valley, not of sight, but of soul. (Of course, this disconnect we feel might change when AI becomes sentient and has something of its own to say, but we’re likely half a century away from that, at least.)

All this being said, I must concede that this understanding may not feel as self-evidentiary to younger audiences in the future. I’m a 45-year-old who will have experienced art before AI. But I have a feeling our youngest generation, those just born in the past few years, may habituate to AI-generated stories. And they may fail to see the deeper, more meaningful differences between human-created stories and entirely AI-generated ones as they get older. For them, AI-generated content may be the norm. Then human-created films will have no more value for them than AI-generated content, so why shouldn’t they just have their tablet’s AI generate a custom-made movie instead of paying to see one made by a Hollywood studio?

Though the studios don’t seem to see it, the actors and writers aren’t just striking for their own future, but for that of the studios, too. This is why it’s imperative that studios reconcile with them now. If they don’t, AI is likely to give them a Hollywood ending, one that’s beyond their control.

The clock is ticking.