Sharknado Hits Hollywood

AI will upend how movies are made. Who will control how human-generated myths are made when AI-Mythos will be its own thing?

AI is the Sharknado bearing down on entire industries and Hollywood isn’t immune. Not that it hasn’t been through transitions before: from television to streaming, the Internet to virtual production.

It’s a ‘town’ with the powerhouse capacity to both create new myths, symbols, ideas and media…while simultaneously being a notoriously difficult ship to steer in a new direction.

I was reminded of Sharknado because the #Film3 Squad is taking a run at the Sharknado IP. If you don’t know the movies, the simple version: tornado filled with sharks. Enough said. You can picture the rest.

It’s a cult classic and surely a metaphor for our times (pop into their Discord to join the fun):

• Maybe Twitter is a giant LARPing of a Sharknado attack on media and culture, with Elon a great white.

• Maybe AI is a Sharknado attack on everything, something we need to take a chain saw to (or bomb, as proposed by one commentator who is quickly mastering his role as a globe-spanning concern troll).

Hollywood Jumps The Shark

OK, mixing cult classics here. But onward…

Hollywood remains a cultural taste-maker. Looking at the world through its lens is an interesting way to circle around a question that’s obsessing me:

• Where will the lines be drawn between human-constructed, AI-assisted, and purely AI-generated forms of creativity?

• When does something elevate from traditional concepts of myths and storytelling into what I call AI-Mythos?

• What happens when the distribution channels are, first, ‘corroded’ from within by AI, and then replaced entirely?

• What happens when the creator interface becomes a distribution channel, leading eventually to what Sequoia Capital calls personalized dreams (and that I propose is already here)?

It’s a strange new world, and while Hollywood is adept at creating dreamworlds, I’m not sure anyone is prepared for how dreamlike it will become.

From Performance to Performative

Rex Woodbury categorized three types of AI ‘superpowers’: personal assistants, knowledge amplifiers and creativity amplifiers.

I tend to simplify it even further, because it helps to focus on where I think AI will have a more profound (or maybe it’s a more visible?) cultural impact, especially as it plays out in storytelling, mythos-creation and sense-making:

• AI as performative tool - wherein it is used for optimizing, amplifying, replacing, augmenting, knowledge acquisition, processing, and procedure

• AI as creator - wherein AI both amplifies human creativity and is creative itself, even if it’s not yet a true intelligence

Yes, sometimes the lines might be blurry between the two. If I ask AI to give me ideas for increasing the reach for my newsletter, it is tapping into a civilization-scale knowledge bank but it’s also creating ideas.

Right now, its performance is like a super smart search, but it’s still a ‘creative output’ no matter how probabilistic the method.

Regardless, I think we’ll see patterns play out across industries:

Work will be restructured:

On the one hand, the massive efficiency gains will restructure work. Why write my own social media posts when the AI can take away the drudgery? In the process they might also elevate craft, especially in the hands of mindful creators. I personally find that AI gives me some efficiency around research and topic exploration. Things that used to take hours of research can often be accomplished in minutes, and it lets me ‘deep dive’ on the things that really matter.

An adjacent creative force will dislocate sense-making:

This is the harder one. Having another creator on the planet is already changing our sense of creative privilege, trust in what’s real, and is leading to the emergence of new, (albeit still micro-) hyperrealities. I believe that this will go further, and we’ll create new cultural myths. But where those myths intersect with outputs from AI, we’ll find what I call an AI-Mythos, a sort of pre-modern meta structure consisting of mythologies, rituals, tribes and vibes that is outside the full control or understanding of humans.

Both of these things will lead to cultural change at-scale, especially when combined with changes in the climate and attempts at climate resilience. I’ve proposed that economic and political systems may collapse. But at the very least, the world will become even more strange.

Hollywood And Media Generation

Let’s take a quick scan of how Hollywood is already tapping into the performative virtues of AI.

Variety magazine gives a snapshot of how AI is used in production, from creating the ‘rock’ scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once, to the South Park creators generating an entire video with a ‘deep fake’ Donald Trump.

“(There are) countless examples of organizations adopting it. “The Late Show…” uses AI almost on a daily basis. “They’re using it almost for on a daily basis to translate hours of work. The team is able to iterate their ideas faster, and it’s helping them augment their creative workflow.” He adds, “I’m calling it Hollywood 2.0 where everyone is gonna be able to make the films and the blockbusters that only a handful of people were able to before.”

[On a side note, 18 months ago I wrote a post and proposed that, soon, someone would be able to create the next Star Wars in their basement. The push-back I had was as strong as anything I’ve had in a decade].

AI is used to de-age actors. As outlined in Fortune (read the full article to get a sense of how many areas in Hollywood will be affected by AI), being able to de-age an actor is considered a performative gain, and “cheaper to produce than VFX (visual effects) or CGI (computer-generated images) and also more realistic.”

But it quickly goes from performative, to all-consuming:

“Graham says A.I. is at the beginning stage but could eventually consume “everything.” Entertainment, gaming, basically any content that is on the internet could be driven by generative A.I. models that are trained on data from the real world.”

And so Hollywood is using the efficiency gains from the same company that projects that their entire industry might be consumed - I think the perfect expression of the tensions in this moment.

Keanu Reeves doesn’t like deep fakes:

“What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency. When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view.”

The Guardian explores how disturbing AI is for Hollywood:

“Taken to its logical conclusion, a film industry that depended solely on AI, rendering actors extinct, would wipe out the circus of gossip columns, late night TV interviews, red carpet film premieres and the Oscars. That is not a Hollywood that Glick wants to live in.”

You can listen to an interview with Glick here. He calls out benefits, such as being able to create ‘digital veils’ in a documentary about LGBTQ+ people in Southern Russia.

But he also holds out hope that how we relate to the human creative process itself is part of what makes a media product alluring:

“What it means to follow a project as it’s unfolding, not just to watch a finished film or stream a TV show, is important. Our knowledge of the creative labour and these human dimensions of it are part of the enjoyment that spectators derive from the films and part of what makes the film and television industry distinct. It needs to do its business in public.”

I would argue, however, that AI itself will be made to be alluring. This will create, at the least, an adjunct to the ‘build in public’ concept that Glick proposes.

You can already get a sense of this with Character.AI, which recently raised $150M, with no revenue, at a $1B valuation.

Beyond Amplification

AI is not just performative, even at this early stage. Its powers will be magnified as we continue to ‘bolt on’ applications, automation, training, data sets and new interfaces.

I believe that AI itself is a new form of media and one with a strange quality: because it’s the first media that will both circle back and transform the media that came before, and be a new media itself.

The ‘tools of television’ didn’t change radio, but the tools of AI will change TV and movies, books and social media. It will then emerge as the largest distribution platform for media-centric experiences, growing at a speed that dwarfs previous media explosions.

I also think that we’re missing something if we ignore the idea that AI will start to be a perpetual motion machine, generating new stories and worlds, books and blogs, with an increasing power to do it well, and at a scale and speed that can’t be matched.

But even deeper, AI is not a human creator. This may be both good (because authentic human creativity, especially at the highest levels, may be ultimately impossible to duplicate…although I personally doubt this thesis) and, if not bad, at the very least dislocating.

Adjacent AI creations, which will emerge from a swirling, unknowable, global-scale interrelationship between machines and human interactions, will help to expand our understanding of the scope of creative endeavours, challenge our assumptions, and help us to question whether we’ve been creatively sleep-walking through the past age.

In the end, it’s a Sharknado.

What it leaves unscathed may stand like a lonely sentinel in a bizarre new landscape, or we might emerge toughened, wiser, and ready for the sequel.

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The image is via Midjourney based on the prompt: “Norman Rockwell illustration of children running from a giant shark in 1940s Hollywood”.

I let ChatGPT sleep during the writing of this post. You’re welcome, Google.

I love getting email and starting a conversation, and it’s more interesting when it’s with a real person than a chat box. Feel free to comment on the Substack app, email me at doug@bureauofbrightideas.com or message me on Twitter.

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