We’re all watching a bus barreling towards the edge of a cliff. It’s drivers and passengers can see the cliff approaching, but they aren’t slowing down or changing course. Bystanders wave their arms and hold up signs as the bus blazes by, warning of the cliff, while off to the right, two clueless old men admonish them for ignoring the speed limit.
This is a storied bus. Careers have been made and ended on it, lives lived and and ended. The people on this bus built gates to access it, allowing only those they deemed worth their time onto it. Every now and then someone bypasses the gates on their own, but usually they become passengers, just like the rest. They hired mechanics and engineers to make this bus for them. It’s quite comfortable. You should feel the seat fabric. The passengers and the driver believe the bus will defy gravity as they leave the road and soar to the other side of the chasm- they believe there’s a dragon’s hoard-sized pile of gold to find there.
Unfortunately, the concerned bystanders on the side of the road are wasting their time. Not because the people on the bus are counting on the bus to fly. This is just a very posh bus only they’re allowed on to. They’re counting on being able rewrite the laws of gravity itself, if not ignore it completely.
This analogy, in case you can’t figure it out, is about large media companies, Artificial Intelligence and copyright laws. AI is the bus, and the copyright laws are the laws of gravity. I’m sure you can figure out who the passengers are.
Artificial Intelligence, and the programs and software that use it, has been dominated the global conversation over the last two years, but the creative industry is taking some of the harder hits. I have no problems with AI. I like AI. I can see and welcome the value it brings. It can help making things easier. Ultimately, it will replace people in jobs, possibly even mine. I do not believe it is good, or bad. I do, however, believe that what media companies wish to do with it is selfish, greedy, foolish, and especially, as you’ll hopefully see here; shortsighted.
The goal of the media companies here, as it is in reality, is to make the most money- they are corporations after all. They exist in a purely capitalist economy. This is the natural way of things. They are, for all intents and purposes, playing by the rules of the game they’re already winning. They wish to wield AI as a blunt instrument; not that studios over the last few decades have had a major grasp of nuance on anyway. “We can afford the risk of breaking it all anyway, then we’ll just rebuild in the rubble.” they think. And they do think this, I’ve had two conversations with studio producers that have taken a very unfortunate stance.
Studios plan to make the most money possible by making movies and series with as much AI as possible- scripts, actors, music, even backgrounds and sets. There are videos on YouTube and Instagram right now that show you how to completely render a computer-generated Science Fiction set that look so real, you’d swear you could visit it.
They’re looking to make films with only a handful people, so they only need to pay a handful of people.
How?
Well, it’s pretty simple and in case it’s not obvious, here’s the roadmap.
Step 1: Generate AI Script. Have humans tweak it until the tech is good enough to eliminate the need for the human hand. It’s a studio executive’s dream. No arguments about logic or reason with screenwriters in this process about what characters would and would not do, no agents to deal with. They can put all the giant mechanical spiders they want into whatever movie they want. This does mean, though, that studio executives would actually have to read the script.
Step 2: Cast roles with scanned actors, using their AI images. Meryl Streep will be all digital. (If you want to see an authentic Meryl performance, head to live theater). We will have digital stars- actually, we already do. (Hi, Mario. Hi, Zelda).
Step 3: Film it all in a digital set. The entire movie will be computer generated, and the tech so good, so lifelike, our eyes won’t be able to tell it’s not live action. Also, have you seen some of the Star Wars shows? We’re pretty much there right now.
Step 4: Redefine the “director” role. This may be one of the last human positions to go in their plan. It may be someone like Christopher Nolan sitting down with whatever human they hire who knows how to tell the computer to do things. Then, it would evolve into that same human taking the “director” title, if not the company itself taking it, and the system operator is just Floyd the intern, nephew of the CFO.
Step 5: Release it to the world, make tons of money, pay less than a dozen “crew” members who made the movie happen, avoid paying as many royalties as possible.
Step 6: Keep this up for as long as possible and become so wealthy that when the entire thing crashes and burns, they can take their money and go into another industry or retire on private island they believe will never sink into the sea.
That’s it. That’s the plan. The whole thing. That’s all there is to it. It’s not even a secret, you can see it in how they’re publicly handling negotiations in the WGA and SAG Strikes happening right now. It’s literally what they’re wanting in the contracts, it’s in writing. Fran Drescher, not Sarah Connor, “is trying to save us from the machines.” And you know what? I’m glad it’s Fran. She’s been putting skin in the game since day one and taking risks left and right. She’s welcome face, a comic talent and, if you’ve watched any of her interviews lately- patient and clever.
Will this plan work for the studios? Honestly- probably. For a little while, anyway, but not forever. It will crash harder than a bus full of heavy gold bars driving off a cliff. And why? Because the real cliff is a 15-year-old girl from Iowa. Or a 57-year-old botanist in Iceland. Or a group of friends in Beirut on a weekend. Or a bored househusband in Madagascar. And once you go over that cliff, there is no going back.
The Cliff Is a 15-Year-Old Girl from Iowa
Imagine you’re a studio executive and you’ve hired people to successfully create the dream tech, the ultimate goal that’s truly within reach. You can sit down at a computer and tell it to make you Star Wars 22. And it will. If you don’t like Scene 51, not a problem, you can tell the computer to change it to your whims, or to fill a set of parameters. You tell the computer “Make this scene more claustrophobic” or “Make the antagonist creepier here”. And it will. And if you still don’t like it, you can get more granular with any aspect of it. You can do ANYTHING.
But, here’s the problem- so can everyone else. So can Sonya.
Sonya is a 15-year-old girl who lives in smalltown Iowa. She averages B’s in math class, A’s in English and History and excels in gym class. She volunteers at her local animal shelter and serves ice cream as a summer job.
Sonya also has an afterschool hobby. She and her friends make Science Fiction movies on her computer. She doesn’t use a camera unless she really must. To date, she’s made two successful science fiction movies that look like they would have had budgets of tens of millions in the early 2000’s. She can make films like Independence Day while brushing her teeth. Her films have been watched over two and a half billion times. Sonya and her friends didn’t have millions of dollars though. They had Sonya’s mother, who bought her the program she uses to make these movies for her 13th birthday, and snacks. Lots of snacks. That’s all they had. That’s all they needed. The experience of making these films, is, to them, what we could equate today as the combination of community theater and late-night games of Mario Kart with friends. That’s the minimum effort required.
The program Sonya uses is DreamStudio 3 and it was originally created by the remnants of the staff of a failing movie studio about 25 years before. Movie studios, by this point, have become more like collectives of very wealthy people who own what’s left of whatever intellectual property they could get their hands on. They’re no bigger than Sonya’s group of friends. Their original audiences, who knew movies as spectacle only viewable on big screens in buildings built just for that purpose, now only exist in retirement communities. Sometimes the films that movie studios make have real actors, real sets and human-written scripts, but that’s premium content. The Lagavulin to your Johnny Walker. These films and shows make money by direct corporate sponsorships, patrons and, if the creator chooses, admission/viewing costs.
Sonya’s creations are hers. They’re owned by her and her alone. When the beta for what would later become DreamStudio 1 was released two decades previous, the copyright laws were finally rewritten after decades of turmoil and more lawsuits than the country had seen in its entire history. It was chaos.
The Final Days of Our Parent’s Studio System
The Studios were winning legal battle after legal battle concerning rights. They had created software and programs that claimed legal copyright over anything exposed to them, recorded with them and made with them. If you wanted to keep your copyright, you had to handwrite it on paper and mail it into the U.S. copyright office- creator paranoia was at max capacity and physical was the most secure way to go.
Then, the tide turned. After an overfilled justice system could no longer handle the volume of cases, lawmakers had no choice but to act. Concurrently, the studios were starting to see signs of losing in court.
Before Sonya was even born, a group of 2nd graders had put on an original play they wrote together as a class project, full of silly characters, giant animals and a talking truck that loved caramel. The school streamed the performance live so distant families could watch it remotely. A recording was put on YouTube for anyone that missed it. When the recording hit 300 million views, the company that owned the streaming platform, which was a subsidiary of a movie studio, decided that’s all the market research it needed to greenlight an AI movie version. The studio claimed ownership over the idea because the class used their platform to stream it and didn’t copyright the script the teacher wrote as the kids made it up. The studio could do this, it was in the fine print of the user agreement, after all, and they’ve been doing this for almost two decades.
The teacher of the 2nd grade class found out about this effort by the studio and organized the parents in a lawsuit, hoping to either sue for the rights back, or a share of the profits. While lawsuits like this were not uncommon in anyway, this is the first time a group of kids being exploited by a studio. And they did it in such a brazen, arrogant and meanspirited way. So, here comes a jury of humans to deal with it. Members of the jury, at this point in their lives, had heard news reports of copyright run amok for years. They ruled in favor of the 2nd grade class- the studio having to share 100 percent of its profits.
Despite the loss, the studio’s lawyer was clever, he’d been taking on cases like this since he passed the bar. He started with the standard user agreement argument, and when he got a sense that he was losing the Jury, which was certainly a surprise to him, he tried, in comic desperation, to play the Fan Fiction clause, which was updated years before.
The Fan Fiction Clause evolved from the fair use clause and allowed for people to write fan fiction and create fan art, based on existing IP without restriction, so long as it remained exclusively on free platforms. Any profit from it, or any ideas and concepts that resulted from it, would belong to the IP owners, which in most instances, was either the studios or a major corporation. Studios also had free reign to take ownership of any Fan Fiction. The lawyer argued that the studios were such huge fans of the original play, that they created “fan fiction”, an alternate, more developed version of the play, and because they owned the original play recording, they shouldn’t have to share any profits. It was a weak, circular argument that fell apart as quickly as it was put together. The lawyer knew he lost the case before the Jury did.
Just after the court case resolved, the Leak happened. Everyone knew this was an eventuality, even the studios, though they had their legal arguments ready, or, so they thought.
Before this point, DreamStudio’s predecessors, a smattering of exclusive programs with names like Zip and FilmMagic, existed exclusively within the studios. They existed in closed loop, unhackable system unconnected to the internet. Their precious golden system could never be touched by unapproved hands. Critics would joke that the Pentagon was easier to break into. There were some decent imitations available, and the studios themselves released a very limited version for home use, to satiate the unkillable desire for people to create with it. Of course, the studios would own everything created with the free version. They owned the code, they owned the operating system, they owned everything- except the people who made the software.
Most likely due to a bitter parting of ways with the studios, some of the software’s original engineers created and released their own version of one of the studios’ programs. It did exactly what the original, protected software did, only better, and with code that was slightly different. And it was released for free. Everyone who wanted to have it, could. To quote The Incredibles villain, Syndrome, “When everyone is super, no one will be.” When everyone can do what the studios can do, what use have we for studios anymore?
Challenging this in court, following the 2nd Graders case, did not go in the studios favor. Restrictions were lifted in the courts, but regulations were not put into place by Congress. “Unofficial sequels and reboots” of popular movies and shows started popping up by the dozens, and soon hundreds. Streamers began to collapse, only able to truly rely on the rights they had to content that existed before this mess. Some surpassed the viewership of the originals, and when the studios tried to sue, there was nothing to sue for as many of these creators were not making revenue or profit from them. Some creators were making them for free just to hurt the studios.
And it worked. The studios began to tank alongside the streamers. Streamers were already on the path of rebuilding themselves to operate in the new creator economy, but, no one was going to money on something that was free. The other major blow that hit the studios came from the original creators of the IP itself, with many leaving their deals and choosing not to stay. A few did stay with the studios, but not many.
Studios were hoping that the original writers of the comics and books the movies were based on would stay with them, so that the “official story canon” would remain, keeping the true fans. But, if studios learned nothing, and they didn’t, they could not keep the creators anymore when all the creators needed was a free program able to do for themselves what studios once claimed exclusivity to for so long. Alan Moore could make his own Swamp Thing movies, and Kevin Smith could make as many official sequels as he wanted. Movies, Shows, even Game Shows, everything went digital… for a while.
Eventually, the non-corporate lawsuits started. Creator suing creator. One creator’s original character showing up in another creator’s film without permission. The lawsuits overwhelmed the court system and congress finally had no choice but to act. There just were not enough resources to hear, try and even litigate all these cases. They simplified the copyright laws and assigned IP solely to its creators and assignees throughout their lifetimes, reverting to an heir for a period of no more than 10 years after the creator’s passing before entering the public domain. They also expanded it, revoking the notion that creating content on a platform gave the platform the right to that content. “You don’t buy a canvas, paint on it, and all of a sudden Michael’s Craft Store owns your art.” Hard to believe the laws needed this clarification, but they did.
In these new regulations, for example, AI could create a script, and the studios could own that, but if it was based on anything pre-existing, the creators would take their profit share. For the first time in history, the artists had real control. If a production rendered a background and the likeness of a lamp from an Etsy shop appeared in it, the lamp’s designer would be entitled to a share of the profits. This was above and beyond original laws regarding live action production, but, in the new age of instant digital reproduction, greater protections were needed. The potential nightmarish future this presented could be seen by everyone.
This is where DreamStudio came in. The software could do what every other filmmaking software could do- generate high quality content at the push of a button, but, where it really shined, was rights assignment. DreamStudio applied AI in the most uncreative way possible- economics. It could pull that Etsy Shop Lamp into a set render, for example, would recognize it, find it’s SKU number and assign it’s value to the final project’s “original budget”. It would price out every prop, costume, and set dressing item. The lamps maker would be able to give permission to use it without a fee, accept the determined market fee, or, ask the program not to use it altogether.
The DreamStudio Creator Suite would pull in performer likenesses, which could be generated from the performers for a set cost, or it could provide performers with the script and allow them to give their “authentic performance” to it, recording their actual performs and insert it into the project, which had its own value. The same could be done with scripts. Each film was labeled “AI Created”, “AI Assisted” or “Authentically Human”- for when no AI was used, which did still happen.
DreamStudio took the barebones essential elements of a film; the script, the actors and the visuals, and streamlined it directly with market value. DreamStudio’s creators themselves could not modify the value of any film’s element; it could only factor in the outside costs.
The budget costs only needed to be paid if the creator of the film choose to monetize it with all its granted permissions and contributions, and only half of the creators made that choice. The others chose to release their content for free. Scripts, however, could not be monetized unless they were provably written by humans. This could only happen within DreamStudio’s script writing software, so it could verify a human’s interaction.
The days of big budget studio movies, and mega-million dollar studio executive & actor pay days were coming to an end. The architects of their own destruction, but, isn’t that just classic Human?
What really started to soar in DreamStudio’s early days, however, were historical documentaries. Documentaries remained relatively safe from this mess the entire time, but historical recreations in tandem with live-action talking head expert interviews and location explorations, were skyrocketing. Historical Documentaries began to see a rise in popularity even more than before as subjects the studio system deemed “too niche” proved to be extremely popular within their own communities, and the word-of-mouth crossover effect continued to be the best form of promotion.
Sonya
Sonya made over fifty feature length films with DreamStudio 3 before she was comfortable enough releasing one to the public… and before she was even 14. Whole universes of Sonya’s original characters, and some of her fan fiction, were born, lived and died, exclusively in front of her own eyes. Billions of dollars’ worth of content made by Sonya over the course of a year fueled by Hot Pockets and the Iowa power grid were basically “workshops” for her. Trial and error on a cosmic scale. Finally, six months after her mother bought her DreamStudio 3, she felt comfortable enough releasing a small movie she made about a deep-sea explorer who found a long lost shipwreck, only to learn it was part of a sinister plot involving kings and queens of ancient Greece.
Normally this may have been an average film, but Sonya chose to cast the likeness and performance of the late Jane Russell, as the lead. Sonya connected with Russell’s keen awareness of her surroundings, and snark, in the film Gentleman Prefer Blondes. She also chose to cast a younger version of her unique-looking uncle, who always made Sonya laugh, as Russell’s character’s intern with an decent AI performance. Together, AI Russell and AI Unique-Looking Uncle had fun chemistry and the film performed well with over 20 million views. People wanted to see Sonya’s next project, and so her first science fiction film came to be with some help from her friends.
The movie, titled “Duchess of The Sand” starred her best friends’ likenesses with AI performances. Their likenesses soon became famous- digital celebrity was in full swing by this point and their likenesses were licensed from them on a per-project basis, with their parent’s permission of course.
Unlicensed works would be shut down from the primary internet. Yes, you could still find works containing them if you knew where to look- never any place good, but they did exist. This was the new balance, and it required universal tracking, live, market value pricing shifts, and acceptance of the economic system needed to keep god-like reality creating powers for entertainment purposes in check.
So…
I realize this story is speculation. But all of this, or a version of this, is, logically, inevitable. I refer you all to the series “Dollhouse”, where powerful, world changing tech was released into the world where everyone had access to it. Chaos is coming. It is unavoidable. And we primarily pass laws now as reactions, rather than preventions.
Connotation and Denotation will be at odds with each other until then, and copyright enforcement will become a mess. Hard choices will have to be made and definite lines will need to be drawn. I believe, that despite the oncoming storm, and oh boy, it IS coming, we will emerge better, and wiser.
Live action productions will always exist, though if Studios can avoid their high costs, they will. I think we might be looking at the industry of the 1970’s. Not exactly, but in spirit. A lot of experimentation, a lot of dice rolling and the discovery of new, unique talent that goes against the grain. Combine that with the current Creator Community and we’ll get something totally unique. But one thing is for certain, the way we do things is about to change forever.
I also encourage you all to never shy away from live performances- AI will never be able to replicate that… until Holodecks… which… oof, soon. But then, hopefully, we’ll know what’s real and what’s not. The ONLY way is through. Together. Off the cliff. See you all in the quagmire.