Revisiting The Potential Future Of Hollywood & AI-Generated ‘Immersive Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.

It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.

We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.

So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.

There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.

Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.

And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.

The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.

I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.

I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.

Streaming, AI & The Return Of Live Theatre

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s possible that the issue of the entertainment business shifting into streaming could be looked back upon as rather quaint. The issue is — some spunky start-up is going to come out with an AI generated movie within 18 months and, well, there you go.

When that happens, it’s just a quick jaunt to AI digital assistants churning out personalized movies and TV shows out of whole cloth without any humans being involved in the process. This is probably going to happen REALLY FAST to the point that virtually overnight all the hand wringing over the transition to streaming will just fade away.

But for the moment, I’m at a loss as to what to do about streaming. It’s such a structural shift in how entertainment is distributed that….I dunno. There definitely seems to be a chance that number of movie theatres may grow smaller and smaller.

And, yet, as I mentioned, if AI takes over, there is likely going to be a real demand for live theatre again. So, maybe some number of movie theatres will be turned into live theatre venues? That certainly would be a strange future. But I suppose I’m something of an optimist when it comes to “human generated art.”

At some point, people are going to grow tired of an endless array of AI generated TV shows and movies and they’re going to want something created by humans — and that will lead to the potential return of live theatre being the center of the artistic world.

Maybe. It’s possible. I man can dream, can’t he?