The AI Movies Are Here, And What They Mean Is Something Unexpected
The democratization of movies will bring back old fashioned story telling without the woke sermons!
From Jeff Childers: Yesterday’s social media churn delivered viral chatter about some new AI video clips making the rounds. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, released a new version of Seedance, which can produce longer videos with consistent characters, background music, sound effects, and dialog. We knew this day was coming soon, and it’s almost here. People just thought it would take longer.
It’s not perfect yet. The AI still can’t keep it together for a full feature length movie. But the examples making the rounds yesterday —this Dor Brothers clip being only one of several— herald the end of Hollywood’s overlong Studio Age.
The ubiquitous online debate revolves around whether fake video can ever replace real human actors, whether only seasoned directors have “the eye” for effective storytelling, whether the vines of intellectual property ownership will strangle video production, and so on. Those are all fair questions, and I say let the fur of debate fly. (Just keep it out of your boots.)
But consider this. There is a vast library of terrific media that is long out of copyright. Take one of your favorite oldies. Take Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No copyright issues there. Soon, nothing will stop intrepid young AI pioneers from making that beloved book into an AI feature film that is true to the source material.
If today’s Hollywood made Huckleberry Finn, it would be updated for “modern audiences” and revolve around the lead character coming out as gay and leading a slave rebellion. Soon, very soon, Hollywood’s massive studios and onsite teams will be forced to compete with garage producers in Akron, Ohio, who only have six Mac Minis, twelve monitors, and a green screen tacked to the wall next to their Manga pinup calendar.
Imagine just the possibilities of people remaking classic literature into modern films without wokeness. How about all the Old Testament stories? Or, for that matter, the New Testament stories? And that’s just from existing source material. They’ll be coming up with all sorts of ideas for media that would make Hollywood throw up its multigrain heirloom tomato sandwiches.
To me, the real story about the frantic pace of AI video development isn’t disruption. It’s opportunity. What will happen when the gatekeepers of wokeness are shoved aside and filmmaking becomes a wide-open field inviting all comers? It could be really great. It could be a whole new age of new media.
(Editor’s Note: this is exactly the subject matter covered in RVIVR publisher Scott McKay’s latest novel Blockbusters, available at Amazon; with AI video, it’s the same cost to produce an alien apocalypse as two women talking in a coffee shop, and when the revolution fully hits the only thing that will matter won’t be star power or special effects; it will be the quality of the story being told).
