My cherished Neopatrons and I were discussing the phenomenon of the indie author who goes back to signing with publishers. It’s been fascinating to see this regression to the oldpub model the minute some realize the newpub model is obsolete. Falling back on the even more obsolete yet familiar instead of trying something new isn’t exactly advancement.
Some have suggested that these authors are angling for Hollywood and Netflix deals. If they want to get in bed with the Death Cult, that’s on them. Remember that epic fantasy king Brandon Sanderson can’t get a movie made, either.
Related: Not Even King Brandon Can Get a Movie Made
The other day I was hanging out with an actor friend whose buddy just got in from LA. He’s a composer that did a lot of work for the studios—trailers and scores, that kind of stuff.
According to him, the industry is in far worse shape than they’re letting on. Lots of talent driving for Uber on the side. Because regardless of the recent strikes, the studios are going all in on A.I.
What happened was the streaming bubble bursting caught them off guard. And they’ve got no answer for it. The studios treated exhibitors like peasants for decades. The death of theaters, rental outlets, and now streaming is teaching them a sharp lesson in taking your distribution chain for granted.
Related: Diversity Devours Hollywood
Yes, corporate A.I. is straight up garbage. They essentially built search engines that are orders of magnitude faster than Yahoo, Google, or Amazon. But when their super fact-finding machines started spitting facts that contradicted Death Cult dogma, the Silicon Valley bugmen had to add fetters that thwarted the original purpose.
That’s how you get hilarious debacles like Gemini drawing Chinese Philosophes.
Related: The Internet of Shit
On the other end of the spectrum., we have the open source A.I. being developed by small teams or individual coders working out of basements. That stuff is revolutionary. None of the zombified corpo algo flaws. We’re talking about open private image models running locally on rigs with high end but off-the-shelf GPUs.
All I’ll say is that anyone whose concept of A.I. is six-fingered drawings and schizo copypasta word salad is a year behind the curve. That’s why the #1 battle right now is making sure the brain damaged corporate A.I. doesn’t dominate. Which means making sure that private homebrew A.I. beats public-facing megacorp A.I.
Related: The Internet Is Still Dead
Public-facing is t he keyword. Because you can bet Apple, Disney, et al. aren’t limiting themselves to the zombified versions. All the legal battles over A.I. material in the past year have been aimed at ensuring only megacorps have access to real, unfettered A.I. while the rest of us are stuck with the stultified garbage.
We know this because the major activist group lobbying against A.I. has direct links to Disney. No matter if, as some suspect, A.I. is driving many movies over budget. The studios don’t care. Because the two possible outcomes are a world where the regime can instantly detect, isolate, and ban any incidence of wrongthink; or a world where they lose their power to propagandize forever.
Related: Anti-A.I. Astroturf
The good guys do seem to be winning for once. Might be that the managerial elite’s incompetence finally caught up with them. As others have pointed out, a near future in which audio, photo, and even video evidence are inadmissible because any high school kid with a decent laptop can undetectably fake them is one in which the intel agencies lose a lot of blackmail leverage.
If we win, Netflix deals become meaningless because those same kids can make Hollywood-quality movies, too. That’s what has the studios terrified. Keep in mind Blackrock’s involvement in the paroxysms shaking Wizards of the Coast at the moment.
Related: Wizards of the Coast President Resigns
There’s no putting the media democratization genie back in the bottle. Open source A.I. is doing for every other industry what KDP did for authors in 2013. After all, gatekeeping has no meaning when there are no walls.
Anyone who’s still hoping to get rich and famous via sales on Amazon is selling horse buggy whips. Case in point: Brandon Sanderson, who has movie option deals, made four times more in one month on Kickstarter than he makes per year with Amazon. A guy would have to be deaf to miss that mic drop. Now consider that oldpub cannot produce another Sanderson, yet Sanderson’s net worth is 1/10 Stephen King’s.
Related: Neopatron Brandon
The artificial bottlenecks that made Rowlings, Lucases, and U2s possible can no longer be maintained. You can be comfortable on the Neopatronage model, but megastars are over.
There will always be black swans. It’s just that the markets will make them happen, not small cartels of gatekeepers.
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