America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
329 points - yesterday at 11:11 PM
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To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
When a job is no longer required, it means we (humanity) managed to do something clever to get it done with less labour - a great achievement!
This frees up those involved in that job to pursue other work, increases supply, and drives down prices - i.e. society overall experiences an increase in standards of living.
The only negatives are on the individual who's laid off through 1. frictional unemployment (the hardship someone goes through when switching jobs), and 2. potential salary reduction as they go from a lucrative job to being a newbie in their new career. But like any career, they can build that up again.
The best mindset is not to take any job/salary for granted in the first place, as it's not someone else's responsibility to employ us.
I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).
I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.
I think we could stop all content creation today and everyone would still have enough to last through their grandchildren's lifetimes.
And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media of all forms is just worth less now due to oversupply.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
you have to be very careful quoting those sources that are based on incorrect data. One might have three jobs and make 5 times less than it used to be. It's a rabbit hole that needs its own thorough research.
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
Don't even get me started on shows. There are a ton of great ones but now they have 2-4, sometimes even 5 year gaps! The "increased" quality doesn't warrant it! I know people say "well now they're movie-grade" but I really could not care less. I don't need every episode of every show to be blockbuster quality. Just make it not suck! I would love to go to the movies and buy all the subscription services but it's simply not worth it! /rant
- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?
- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common. Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations. Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.
- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.
The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
Maybe what that means is this: it's not illegal to lie about something being copyrighted (to discourage copying) if you don't actually take it as far as taking someone to court over it.
International media is much better than it used to be.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
the media landscape has changed. youtube, tiktok, reels are the dominant media. the money the creators make there dwarfs this 200k loss of jobs.
The issue is, its global, creators aren't limited to desk jobs in america.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
yeah, worthless analysis of side effects without taking into account any causation variable to anchor anything to anything.
Art is gatekept by distribution. You only pay artist because otherwise they will go independent or use the other studio/record-label/etc. It's the only reason artists got paid handsomely in the past.
Today, money only come from spotify, netflix, and soon one or two movie studios. News and Newspaper is already gone, it's past the point of monopoly and into billionaire personal toy.
This also answers why live performance is the only thing going up. It is the only thing that still require any choice from the artist. Everything else is give-me-or-media-or-else.