This is starting to get very nasty.
For more than a year I have covered the demise of Hollywood. Ultimately, technology is moving at such a pace that it simply cannot compete.
There are many who feel that, since we are dealing with established companies, they will adapt and continue to reign supreme. As stated on numerous occasions, Hollywood is dead.
The industry did not adapt to the last disruption, which was the breakdown of the monopoly they had on content distribution. now, we have the next wave which is AI.
When this is brought up, the typical response is how important the people are. Many seem to believe we need people to have entertainment at a level that will interest us.
We will see how this evolves but we are seeing some of the first waves of innovation that will destroy these traditional companies.
Image generated by Ideogram
Create Your Own Show
Before getting into this, I will admit that I have not tried the service. In fact, according to the article I saw, it mentioned South Park, a show I am not a viewer of.
That said, if this is even remotely successful, we will see the start of an entirely new brand of entertainment. To be honest, this is not a novel concept in the technology world. Many have discussed the idea of "personalized entertainment" where shows or films are designed for each viewer.
Here is how the article starts:
Have you dreamed of being able to make your own TV show? Do you have an idea for a great drama or anime? Now with Fable, a new AI-powered streaming service, you can create that show.
This is very interesting. Evidently the software was used to create unique episodes of South Park.
With Fable’s new streaming service Showrunner you can answer a collection of questions and its AI will create a TV show.
So this AI will generate shows for you? This is something that is radical to think about.
They are pushing this as the Netflix of AI, allowing you to have unlimited amount of content at your fingertips.
Source
Consider that last point: an unlimited amount of content. That is exactly what we are seeing. The only limitation is bandwidth. Whatever is desired can be created.
How are the traditional entities going to compete with this long term? The answer is they will not. Certainly, they might embrace it which would be a smart move. However, this means a complete restructuring of the entire industry.
Here is the kicker: whatever the technology is like today, this is the worst it will ever be.
If it has a degree of validity in its ability to deliver what is promised, that means it will only improve with time.
For example, the service is only available for animation at this point. In the future, it is likely that will change.
Personalized Entertainment
Remember those online services which allowed you to select from a variety of choices for the outcomes of books or stories. They were rather archaic in form but did lay the groundwork for personalized entertainment.
As stated, this is something that AI enthusiasts discussed for years. Of course, the ability to bring it to reality was missing. Even those early book services were really nothing more than multiple choice options.
That said, the idea is now spreading.
Whether the service mentioned above is the answer or not remains to be seen. To me, the important factor is there is already experimentation with this. history shows us this will only get better with time. The pace of AI development in all these areas is rapid.
Therefore, we might be looking a year or two down the road before anything legitimate is available. The models could require a great deal more processing or data to train upon. Of course, there is also the fact that we see the models, over time, being available on smaller systems as compute increases.
For this reason, I think we are dealing with something that is part of our future. Will this be 100% of the entertainment world at some point? Most likely not. We will still see "normal" films which everyone gets the same storyline.
What we are looking at is an adjunct to what we are accustomed to seeing.
Have you ever had the situation where you went through the list of a streaming service and "couldn't find anything to watch"? I think we all encountered that a time or two.
That situation is resolved. With a service like this, in the future, you might be able to prompt a couple hundred words, and have a series designed for you. It is hard to tell how the technology will evolve but this seems to be an overall trend with these LLMs.