Last Friday saw the birth of Chatgpt the browserWho already promises to visualize your data, coach your workouts and shop your layers; We now have to fight with Velvet Sundown; And before the summer is out we expect the quantum leap Chatgpt-5. It felt like a good time for In development to offer any optimism to all worried AI Can soon take over all that is good in Hollywood. (For those of you who are ready to embrace our new AI superiors, this is a future column.)
I am sure that AI transforms the entertainment industry for better and worse. I have zero faith in Hollywood’s ability (or slope) to “check” it, if possible. AI can radically increase production and reduce costs (and: jobs), and of course the industry will follow that way until it hits a wall.
So where is the optimism? I think I found a wall.
The insight is not just mine. Credit goes to Ethan Helvering at the audience’s intelligence company pulses and Milo Chao on 100% human, with a cry to Diana Williams of kinetic energy entertainment for pointing me on its way. The essential idea: Our connection to creativity is rooted in humanity. Without a backstory, stories fall flat. And AI has no backstory game.
Don’t believe me? Studies spend billions to make sure you know everything that is to know about what was going to make their movies and TV shows. Market costs often match production budgets, even when they go to hundreds of millions. Directors, stars, producers, writers, crew – they provide thousands of interviews over all possible platforms around the world.
Sometimes they are thought -provoking and reflective; Sometimes they play with puppies. (Sometimes they talk about What no one tells you.) But in the end, every panel, article, video and TV place are in service for a single, powerful message: “This is who I am and why I did this, and that’s why you should see it.”
Can you mount an Oscar or an Emmy campaign without a Backstory? (My husband is still teasing me about our coverage of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning “Income“:” You know, I read that it Where a really hard Film to do.“) Creative stories are the engine for award campaigns, so important that strategists launch counter -stories: that’s not how I heard it.
It doesn’t even get into the back stories in the back stories. Creative differences! ! Write about! The stars are in love! They won’t talk to each other! Studios rarely wants to reinforce these stories (at least not open), but there is no better magnet for human attention than “what really happened?”
Ok. Let’s now assume that there is nothing about, only when: the first feature length film Made entirely by AI, from scripts to final frame. The production scale is massive; The budget is not.
Now imagine being the studio that has to sell it. Even better, imagine being the studio that has to sell the second AI movie-the first-mover advantage.
Film and television publicists have hard jobs even under the best circumstances of crisis control, travel logistics and handholder that accompany endless debris and press performances. But if all this disappears, how do you market a movie that only has a creator and a team of software engineers behind it?
Technology is available to reduce friction, whether it is to rent a house, call a car, buy a washing machine or create a blockbuster explosion. AI promises to level everything that is messy with filmmaking: costs, egos, creative clashes.
Fantastic – just without conflict, there is no story.
Reduce turbulence and you also lose the frustrating, expensive and chaotic cooperation. And without it, you lose one thing that AI cannot do: Create the story worth telling about the story.
Yet. I haven’t seen chatgpt-5.
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dana@indiewire.com; (323) 435-7690.
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