The Network Garden

There is a great observation in the book ‘The Speed of Sound’ (by Scott Eyman) about when the silent film gave way to the “talkie” in cinema:

“It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another…In four short years, the ‘talkie’ will completely subsume the silent movie.”

The observation was that the emergence of sound not changed not only how movies were MADE and how the business worked, but our very concept of what a movie can BE.

Enter AI’s increasing presence in the entertainment industry, where a recent study surveying 300 leaders estimated more than 200,000 jobs to be affected over three years across visual effects, sound mixing, editing, production and script writing.

Towards this end, NYU Professor Scott Galloway, one of my favorite writers/thinkers, has written a piece called, ‘The End of the Blockbuster,’ which ponders the industry’s reset moment, with lots of specific examples.

Where does the industry’s AI transformation land?

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, has predicted that AI could cut the cost of animated films by 90%.

As a devoted builder of Generative AI image and video collections, I see how fast it’s evolving. Every 4-6 months, the viable use cases grow and leapfrog to new levels.

We are well past the toy phase, and moving toward’s the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ phase.

Adds Galloway, “AI will create new roles and elevate the careers of those who learn to leverage it successfully, but jobs will vanish.”

This take is related to a larger observation, which seems right-ish, that AI is becoming the Ozempic of the corporate world.

Namely, suppressing the “appetite” to hire more, reducing companies’ cravings for the protein of human capital, and Hollywood is no different.