You gotta see the humor in this. While the Hollywood unions are over there screaming at Martin Scorsese for his use of AI for storyboarding, over here, Netflix has already utilized AI in some 300 programs this year.
Picture it this way … Someone is vacuuming while their house is on fire.
“We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher-quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods,” Netflix told shareholders in its quarterly report. “In some cases, productions would have had to leave out key shots and sequences in the absence of GenAI technology.”
That’s not true. These productions could have paid millions to create those shots using CGI. Using AI was a choice, a prudent choice, and the correct choice.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos explained that AI offers “creatives better tools to bring their visions to life.” Specifically, he said that “17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage” in The American Experiment expanded the scope of the series that just wouldn’t have been feasible before. He added that AI worked “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”
Then he said what will soon be the conventional wisdom around AI … “We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that. Movies are being made by people who make movies. AI provides them with better tools to make them even better.”
To which I can only say once again to the hysterics … duh.
Yeah, as is the case with all progress, people are about to lose their jobs: set designers, location scouts, CGI artists, storyboarders, etc. And as is always the case with progress, new jobs will be created. Someone has to dust and mop those massive data centers.
I keed. I keed.
Look at all the people making a living already producing content for Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
AI will create even more jobs, a countless number for creative, everyday people.
And that’s just in the world of entertainment.
What AI will do in other industries is as incomprehensible to us as those trying to figure out how drastically the world would change in the early days of electricity.
In medicine, science, architecture, city planning … We are at the cusp of a revolution that will bring about change unlike anything we’ve seen since the launch of the internet 30 years ago. And, as is the case with the internet, there will be a downside, but there will be a lot more upside.
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