Is Creativity Cooked?
Credit: ChatGPT
You know, I’ve always been a big fan of filmmaking. When COVID hit and everything shut down, I decided to learn more about the technical stuff of making movies. Maybe I could find a footing, carve out a niche, and one day break into the business. But guess what? Five years later, things are still pretty tough.
Box office receipts are down, creativity in Hollywood has stalled, and streaming services have made going to the movies feel like an afterthought. It’s like the industry needs a miracle to turn things around. A shot in the arm. A metaphorical Gandalf leading a charge over the Hollywood hills in a halo of light to turn the tide.
What it got instead was Veo 3.
Veo 3 is a new video AI suite from Google that’s caused a veritable shitstorm within the creative world.
Back when motion capture and photorealistic CGI were becoming the norm in big-budget films, the question “how long are we going to actually NEED actors anymore” had the industry in a tizzy. They thought actors could just license their likeness to create hyper-real CGI versions of themselves, and then be used forever within the computer without requiring the actors’ physical presence and talent.
Well, Veo 3 takes that idea a step further. Now the question has morphed to “is anyone in the creative process really needed to make a movie?”
Veo 3 is available for a pretty affordable $249.99 per month. Compared to the cost of the standard tools used in the industry, not to mention the expertise required to use them, it’s a steal.
But here’s the thing: if an entire creative team of talented artists can be replaced by a suite of tools available for less than some single crew member’s day rates, it raises some serious questions.
On the one hand, it’s great that Veo 3 is making filmmaking more accessible. But on the other hand, it’s a bit scary to think about what it means for the future of the industry.
If creatives are no longer needed in the creative process, where do we go from here? The artistry and talent that we see in Hollywood blockbusters can now be boiled down to a handful of carefully worded prompts. Is that the end of the line for the entire industry?
Hollywood movies have always been criticized for studio interference, with out-of-touch executives demanding changes that they think are safe and sure to make money, and now it seems like the executives won’t have to worry about negotiating with the creatives and making exactly what they want - a product that generates revenue.
Are we doomed to have all entertainment become lifeless, AI-driven garbage that exists only to make a profit? The absolute worst parts of modern movies taken to their extreme?
As with other industries, is AI even the bad guy here? It’s just a tool, and like all tools, it was created to make the job easier for the user. But the primary focus of AI seems to be to extract the talent of the individual while removing the cost to obtain that talent - in other words, why pay someone for their work when we can get almost the same results for a mere fraction of the cost?
Will people stop going to studio films, or will they be willing to pay more for non-AI-generated content? The fact that so many people are waiting for movies to come out on streaming services and skip the theater altogether suggests no.
If COVID was the death of the movie theater experience, is Veo 3 the death of the creative process itself?
I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m keeping a close eye on Veo 3. It’s definitely a game-changer, and I’m curious to see where it takes us.
For better or worse, most of the visuals from Veo 3 look better than the CGI in some of the biggest-budget Hollywood flops in recent memory…could that be a silver lining?