I understand how AI works, and have built and trained and used many over the years, and it could be useful, kind of. I would imagine the issue is that a machine would do pretty much exactly what an executive would do. It can aggregate and analyze data, predict trends, but ultimately I would imagine it having the same problem that we have with the current decision makers. Basically, the major flaw in entertainment funding is the tendency to try and repeat successes of the past. We call it "Sequelitus" and a few other names, but this is the major failure of Hollywood businessmen. It just boils down to a lack of imagination, an issue current gen AI certainly shares.
The issue is that popular art follows a different ruleset than basically every other type of business. The single strongest positive factor an artwork can have is novelty, but you can't do math or train AI models on events that haven't happened yet. I could be wrong, I don't know exactly how this system works, but I think unless the AI can recognize which ideas are "fresh", we are just talking about replacing the network robots with literal network robots. There are aspects it probably can predict pretty well, like what is the marketability of a picture combining star x and star y. There are still a lot of questions, like can the AI differentiate between how much audiences want to see a Tom Holland and Zendaya romcom, vs a sci fi film starring the two. I don't mean cross indexing data about the popularity of romcoms this year with the popularity of Zendaya this year, I mean the much harder to pin down question of what types of roles audiences would be excited to see them play.
Perhaps you guys have really done something amazing here, I'm just skeptical, because in example the last AI business that came through here was just a dumb cash grab, soliciting huge investment from easily deceived investors who still think AI is a type of magic. People have been showing a tendency to just slap on any AI functionality, hype investors with buzzwords, collect millions up front, and then provide placebo grade information in return. In the case I'm referring to, money was raised to create an AI script writing platform, but instead of actually building that, they just slaved a GPT3 clone to manufacture random text and parrot formatting, which is a super dumb and useless function, the main purpose of which was to enable fundraisers to say they had a script bot, and raise millions, before anyone realized that they had just sold something utterly useless for millions of dollars of up front cash.
Here's my test question for you. Would your AI recommend that Schindler's list be funded, if given a choice between that and Gigli? One is a long and depressing film about innocent children being murdered, mostly in black and white, the other is about two popular celebrities, one with current hits on the billboard 100. Which film would your AI pick to be financed? Sorry if any of this sounds confrontational, that's not my intent, it's just that I have some pretty serious questions about how genuinely beneficial some of these AI systems will be, even if they work exactly as intended.
My biggest concern would be enslaving all creators to an algorithm, where the goal shifted from being creative or pleasing the audience, to pleasing the algorithm. If you don't understand what has happened in these situations, you might find this video of interest. To all my fellow content creators, here is who is beating you into poverty, and how, and it's all based around pleasing a robot. Who is the indie filmmaker that makes 250k a week now that the algorithm decides what we watch? It's the dumbest, least talented, sex fetish hawking, child pandering, cover song playing people in the world, with a robot sending them more money than Stravinsky or Kubrick ever made. Anyway, be careful with your robots, because there's significant evidence that reducing creativity to an automated state produces absolutely terrible results. This video is really more terrifying than educational. Someone wrote a symphony this week, and youtube's robot basically told them cleanup in isle 3, and then sent millions of dollars to people stepping on balloons barefoot until they pop. Now we have a teenager playing a bad cover of "Achy Breaky heart" and the bot gave them enough money to build a skyscraper, and somewhere, there's a person smart enough to build a skyscraper, and the bot sent them enough money to do a cover of "Achy Breaky Heart" Pretty stupid, and that's the best funded algorithm on the planet.
