The Cost of Good Movies
soaringtwenties.substack.com
The Cost of Good Movies
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Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#2Excellent long-form article. A very thoughtful look on studio/streaming economics, the vanishing long tail, and the writers strikes and AI, short-films and bandcamp and discoverability … a lot to unpack.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#3I can’t help but feel that fighting for residuals for digital extras is a losing cause. Regardless of what you negotiate, the studios will probably eliminate the “scanning actual humans” step sooner rather than later and replace the entire thing with something like Unreal’s Metahumans.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#4> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the parameters of the user’s prompts.
The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.
The threat is the even further enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of culture by corporate interests who actively seek to destroy common culture by preventing the very people whose participation in a now privatized "culture" enables corporate profits, from ever earning a cent because they do not "own" the "IP" to the characters that they love and that are only common because they are a shared element of a common culture. It is absurd. If media corporations had to compensate whenever someone mentioned a trade marked character because it counted as advertising then let them keep their "culture" private. Until then, they are the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of stolen advertising and stolen culture.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#5I can’t help but feel that fighting for residuals for digital extras is a losing cause. Regardless of what you negotiate, the studios will probably eliminate the “scanning actual humans” step sooner rather than later and replace the entire thing with something like Unreal’s Metahumans.
To the best of my knowledge, all metahumans are (at the moment) based on scans of real humans, with approaches like this - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/how-to-use-realityca...
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#6It is going to be weird in the future, when people realize how much use these companies get out of things like the $200 scan and perpetual license to somebody’s likeness, and as a result stop using them. All art will be presumably based on remixing a set of scans from between like 2020 and 2025.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#7> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the…
To expound on your point, corporations will be able to use AI - giant conglomerates such as Disney, that own enough media to train AI models on only works they own copyright on (and own enough senators to make sure those copyrights last), will happily use AI.
But you, peasant, can only train it on century+ old works. Because "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", nothing post-WWII may become public domain, or artists will starve and culture wither.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#8> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the…
> The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.
I disagree. As a cinephile and bibliophile, I'm often astounded by the creativity of writers. I don't know where they get their inspiration. Sadly, I don't possess such creative inspiration myself, despite having read "the classical western canon". Much of the great work is actually autobiographical, taken from the writer's own life rather than derivative from previous work.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#9I didn't like the article. Very long, and very shallow. It seems to take as an axiom that the status-quo of "residuals"-based payments is worth defending at all costs.
Re: The Cost of Good Movies
#10I didn't like the article. Very long, and very shallow. It seems to take as an axiom that the status-quo of "residuals"-based payments is worth defending at all costs.
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