Age of Creative Abundance
No more GOT Season 8 endings.
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Now to today’s piece 🤝
If you haven’t heard already, OpenAI dropped a new text-to-video model called Sora that’s absolutely wrecking my Twitter/X timeline; it’s capable of generating up to 60 seconds of hyperrealistic video without audio (for now).
And what followed was an outpouring of delight and cries of anger; some insisted that this would lead to a mass overcrowding of AI-generated content & replace artists. Others insisted that this was the next natural step forward in technology & would accelerate art holistically.
The dichotomies make sense; compared to where we were less than a year ago, this is a massive leap forward.
But before we can figure out how impactful Sora is, we’ve got to know where are we now.
Let’s jump in.
Within the art & entertainment industry, major studios like Disney, Pixar, Netflix, & Paramount dominate and subsequently the hallmarks of mainstream culture are largely shaped by them. Impactful movies that formed my childhood like the Lion King took 600+ people to create; everything from character design, sound effects, animators and artists, was done largely by hand. The 1994 budget was $45 million ($93.6 million in 2024 dollars) and brought in close to $1 billion at the box office.
Any technology that challenges this is seriously disruptive and worth considering the effect of. The work these companies do provides employment for hundreds of thousands of people in the space of art, design and videography & blindly accepting accelerationism without consideration of people’s concern is a recipe for disaster & tech backlash.
It can be and is scary.
But what I see is rather than a replacement of jobs, it’s a shifting of the same jobs. Sora & accompanying tools will augment the average artist/designer/videographer the same way that higher level programming languages like Python did not replace C programmers but provided developers with a broader range of tools.
You can use Python to abstract away the broad strokes & when you need that fine touch, open up the giant C toolbox, deal with the complexity and tweak things however you like. Similarly so, artists will have the option of leveraging AI for the bulk of media geneartion (“the broad strokes”) and for those finer touches, throwing things into a design studio software and animating it themselves.
Also, in the midst of the criticism of AI, it can be easy to forget; the status quo is not great for artists. Productions like the Lion King or Game of Thrones cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars & therefore, most small time creators are left to create via a low-cost style (such as vlogs) & upload to platforms like Youtube, where the vast majority make very little.1 In exchange for studios’ labor & capital, artists are forced to hand over creative direction.
Studios want reassurance that their investments will net a healthy return and this manifests in what I call the Game of Thrones effect (GOT effect).
The GOT effect
In 2011, the GOT creators focused on rich, potent worldbuilding & storytelling scenes that captured the imaginations of early fans and kickstarted a cult folllowing.
This is turn led to fans sharing with their concentric social circles & viewership+culture grew. Forums opened up online and people began watching with their friends.
Numbers ticked up & HBO boosted funding to the creators. Bigger budgets meant more attention to detail to bring the universe to life. Subsequent seasons played well with audiences, more people chatted and more viewers hopped on the GOT train.
Once GOT viewership began picking up steam, HBO realized that there was a great opportunity to cash in on their investment and, to appeal to wider audiences, what made GOT great was slowly diluted.2
Characters who stuck to their values in previous seasons were acting odd, complex dialogue was reduced to black & white monologues, storylines that teased mystique with real calculated decisions and loss were met with moviesque endings.
You can take the above example, substitute many different shows (Demon Slayer, Marvel franchise series, etc) and get the same outcome.
The net result?
Art is the path of the wealthly & the privlieged. It’s not feasible for an artist to create a blockbluster TV show on their own but a single person can launch a piece of code that’s worth $800 billion.
What OpenAI has done is empowered the average artist to control their IP & leverage their tools to fulfill their vision without needing the labor & capital of massive studios.4
And that’s the fundamental premise of technology; it enables people greater control over their lives. You just need a $20/mth OpenAI subscription and a few other services to begin shooting your own show.
The freedom to bring our own ideas to life has just 1000x.
And in this 1000x of artistic creation, it’s important that we encourage those in existing art spaces to adopt these tools; they are arguably even more potent in the hands of those who know what it’s like to painstakingly animate frame by frame & have cultivated distinct tastes than in the hands of beginners.
Artists will own their art. No more season-8-game-of-thrones-endings.
Get in loser, we’re heading to the age of creative abundance.
- Kiran
High-overhead, animated content YT channels such as Kurgezsagt, Wendover Productions or Coldfusion tend to be the exception rather than the norm & some are even building their own platform to better monetize their content.
It may be that timeline restrictions of actors’ contracts + the need to writing quickly were factors but it strikes me that the need to keep pace with viewership demands was the driving factor.
Ratings for GOT (w/ exception to the last season) remain strong so some might feel HBO gave the people what they want! But as a someone who’d been following the show for a while, I felt the magic was in decline before season 8 & season 8 was the tail-end of a series of decisions. Great example was the Red Wedding; how many more of those holy-shit moments did we get?!
Hopefully more companies will arise in this space to help people own & monetize their creative work!
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
"I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day... And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.” World traveler Chris Arnade captures US cities quite well.
Nadia & bayeslord capture the past 10 years of ethos in American tech and call for a new age in Pirate Wires’s latest piece.
“but I do find the concept of a nuclear family—two parents on their own raising a few kids in a suburban house—a little depressing, when contrasted with a bustling extended family, many of them living together in the same building, hosting boisterous family dinners and monthly trips to a cottage. How do you build that as an adult, when your actual extended family is on a different continent?” Kasra covers what an alternative to the nuclear family could look like.