AI in entertainment: Questions for Marc Andreessen
The apostle of AI himself, Marc Andreessen has a question on Elon Musk’s X about AI/entertainment, & I feel capable of answering the latter part, being professionally concerned. So here are ten thoughts in three parts I’ve been working on this year:
How does the business work?
1. Are there way too many actors & are most going to disappear?
2. There are no more stars, only people who play a popular character for a while & no one goes to see their other films. Can AI replace stars by giving people the popular characters directly?
3. Does AI mean artists who don't want to follow the suicidal Hollywood conformism on everything from COVID to woke get a chance?
4. Does AI mean artistic types need a new best friend who can code / reason about everything from Midjourney to whatever's next for LLMs?
Is it possible for computers, the specific power of men in the late 20th c., to make its mark on entertainment in the 21st c.?
5. Computer games so far have either been artistic & with a very small audience (men, the second-class citizens of America, relegated to consoles) or smartphone games that are very popular but very stupid. Does AI mean digital tech entertainment can become popular? Does it mean young men can create art with a wide audience beyond their own interests? Does AI mean there's now a TV-game bridge, semi-interactive or at least game-like, but at TV length, complexity?
6. Impressive works of literature have hitherto been impossible to adapt in a popular way that preserves their vastness—you cannot cram Homer's Iliad into a silly movie like Troy. Does AI allow for a new kind of entertainment in which the oral experience can be transformed into something visual?
The question, what is Enlightenment?
7. Does AI in entertainment offer any opportunity for making entertainment more intelligent in form or content, as opposed to the constant dumbing down that's made a mockery of artists &c.?
8. Does the similarity between games & coding mean AI could make for educational games that achieve educational goals while entertaining, a desideratum at least going back to educational TV, like Frank Capra's attempts three generations back?
9. Can AI entertainment make for a kind of fun repetitiveness, & encourage entertainment that improves memory as opposed to the obsession most obvious now in Disney with “imagineering,” & thus marginally encourage knowledge & rationalism against the ongoing craziness?
10. Can AI entertainment use visual means to teach structures in every scientific or engineering dimension, for example architecture, by attaching the emotions typical of entertainment to the artificial constructs? Can it form a better taste?