by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve now heard two different respected podcasts broach some variation of a future that I’ve been ranting about for some time now — the idea that soon there won’t be any art but AI generated art. So, 30 years from now, there won’t be any “mass media” anymore in the sense that we’ll all be watching very, very specific entertainment generated not just for us specifically, but a specific mood.
So, rather than paying $15 a month for a streaming service, we’ll pay a similar amount for access to the bodyscans of our favorite Hollywood stars. Hollywood will soon enough be in an “eternal now” populated with undead stars who may not even exist at all, depending on how sentimental you might be for some star you saw before the AI generated art revolution took over.
I still think that there is a least possibility that in the future the goal of actors will be not to make it in Hollywood, but rather make it on the stage so they can then turn around, get a full body scan and make all their money passively off of the licensing of those scans. It’s at least possible there will be a huge Broadway revival for macro economic and technological reasons.
And, what’s more, all of this could happen very, very fast and very very soon. It could be — especially with a Hollywood writers’ strike looming — that we’ll wake up in 18 months and ChatGPT 8 is spitting out all of the content that we consume. The streaming wars will seem very, very quaint.
Of course, all of this may have to wait for the “Fourth Turning” to sort itself out and it could be that much of the world will be rebuilding itself after several limited nuclear wars because the United States was too busy imploding to keep the world order.
That got kind of dark pretty quick.
Anyway, if I had any money at the moment — which I don’t — I would short Hollywood and long AI.
