Three signals of a chaotic near-future for creatives

Everyone is trying to get their work done before they’re off for the holidays, and that means there is a ton of news in the media and technology space. Three of those announcements over the past week are previews into what we’ll be seeing over the next 3 years.

First - the Netflix, Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery saga. Entertainment media has been buzzing about the Netflix deal to acquire Warner Brothers since it was announced last week. It is figuratively and literally a big deal. I won’t rehash the details and immediate fallout from the deal here, but looking ahead to the future, it’s clear that Hollywood as we know it will no longer exist.

I’m not talking about the movies or shows that get made - I’m talking about the town. There is an ecosystem around entertainment here in LA and for the filmmaking part of it, the increasing consolidation and contraction means that people and business will continue to fall out of that ecosystem. We are already seeing the effects of that with restaurants shutting down and people moving away from LA and the movie business.

I know more about the independent film scene than about the studio system. The effects trickle down. Having less work available on sets that pay the bills means less people will be around that have the time to take on indie gigs. Beyond that, how movies get made is going to change very quickly with AI opening up new possibilities. For all the talk about the merger, I haven’t seen much discussion in the media on how AI plays into what Netflix hopes to get from the acquisition. Hopefully they are thinking about it at a deeper level than Disney.

Disney announced this week that it has inked a deal with OpenAI to allow Sora 2 users to generate videos that include Disney characters. I do not believe this is a wise long term strategic move on the part of Disney. Disney is notorious for how far the company will go to protect its brand and IP. The idea that they would sanction having users publish AI videos with whatever Disney characters they wish seems like a headache waiting to happen.

Earlier this year, I wrote that Sora 2 is underwhelming because it adds to the across the board slop content we’ve been getting in our media diet for years. Disney has decided to add to the pile. Think about what will happen with Disney characters in Sora - people will treat the capability like a subversion machine. People will draw attention to the videos they generate by subverting people’s expectations of who the iconic characters are. In the coming years, it’ll simply dilute the brand integrity of Disney’s IP.

One commenter on the tech site The Verge made a very interesting point regarding the Disney deal. Looking back to the early Pixar days, Disney didn’t acquire Pixar to have them recreate The Lion King with CGI. They treated it as new avenue to introduce new characters and new stories. It’s how we were introduced to iconic new characters like Nemo and Woody and Remy.

Imagine if Disney approached AI with that same innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. The company wouldn’t be getting criticized for throwing beloved characters into the slop machine. Iger would be praised for leading the charge, positioning Disney as storytelling pioneers that are advancing the craft with AI technology.

New advancements with world models show that AI technology is advancing rapidly and if media companies like Disney don’t find their entrepreneurial spirit quickly, it won’t be long until they are also subsumed by a tech company that can innovate faster. Just look at how Netflix’s innovation in streaming distribution led them to becoming big enough to acquire a major studio.

Innovation opportunities are overflowing in the AI media space. From where I am standing, the most innovative developments in the coming years will be from world models. Rather than generating a single image or video, world models generate a “world” in real time. I haven’t yet wrapped my head around how it works but it’s clear that this will be the next turn that will change how media gets created with implications that reach much further out.

This week, Runway ML announced their first world model, GWM-1. The model allows generating video in realtime, while responding to realtime input.

This is huge.

I’ve followed experiments with world models for some time now. It’s something I had in mind a few weeks ago when I wrote that speed is the key to unlocking creative innovation. In that piece, I summarized:

There is untapped potential for narrative storytelling that can realize the dynamism that can come from creating in real-time and piping that creativity through an outlet that can present it in real-time, creating a live feedback loop between story and story consumer. This speed induced innovation will come for narrative with the synthesis of accelerated creation and accelerated distribution.

That time is already at hand. RunwayML exposes its world model through three flavors: World, Robotics, and Avatars. The Robotics flavor is designed to train robots using simulations. This will be instrumental in getting robotic systems the training data it needs to learn how to complete real world tasks.

The World flavor allows users to generate realtime environments that can persist with consistency over time. Sort of like a 3D environment in a video game that you can explore, except that it’s all generated in real time instead of the 3D world being pre-created.

The last flavor and the one I find most compelling is Avatars. This can generate characters that can speak, listen, and emote with human-like reasoning in realtime. If the examples in the announcement video are accurate, this is a monumental development that will change the way we interact with any digital media.

What’s coming around the corner is immense. It feels bigger than the smartphone era and it’s coming faster than anyone has been able to predict. The announcements this week represent the floor shifting beneath our feet as we run towards an uncertain future. It is uncertain but it is also exciting. It’s a great time as creatives to find our footing by building the future that these developments are opening up.