Is dying Hollywood doomed to churn out slop?



The secret’s out on the first Hollywood studio to ink a deal with an automated content company. Lionsgate, familiar from the "John Wick" and "Hunger Games" franchises, is all in on an agreement with data mining and research firm Runway to train high-powered computer models on its library of intellectual property, the better to accelerate the production of more fully exploited spinoff material — ideally, of course, for cheap.

The corporate spin is no surprise. Cristóbal Valenzuela, Runway’s CEO, insisted in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter that “the history of art is the history of technology, and these new models are part of our continuous efforts to build transformative mediums for artistic and creative expression. The best stories are yet to be told.” Michael Burns, Lionsgate’s vice chair, said, “Filmmakers are already excited about its potential applications to their preproduction and postproduction process.”

Even with the very best of intentions and the most dialed-in technological augmentation, the most likely outcome of the automation of entertainment is its further consolidation in still fewer hands for the sake of flooding our lived environment with slop produced by bots.

On paper, the logic is attractive enough. Hollywood’s brutal experience in the COVID/BLM/MeToo buzzsaw left its talent pipelines in tatters — and then the tech industry’s large language models hit the scene. Now, computers can crank out a theoretically endless supply of audiovisual content that’s getting sharper, more realistic, and more competitive with big-budget CGI-laden blockbuster fare each day.

Not to worry; much of this material is best suited to dumb fantasy. That’s what audiences are best suited to, right?

More about that in a minute. First, consider the darker side of the deal. Cheap is a temptation, and it’s often one fueled by ulterior motives or structural necessities imposed by structures which themselves are not all that necessary.

In the case of Hollywood, the culprit is consolidation. On the surface, the fusion of so many disparate companies into a cartel-like handful of mega-mergers — one in keeping with what seem to be the rules of our economic and financial system — is a result of the harsh realities of capitalism and competition. Teched-up kids today gravitate away from films. International markets are where the big money is. It’s better for bottom lines to scrap finished films like "Batgirl" or "Coyote v. Acme" and write them off as a loss. Soulful cinema for mature adults (you know, fully functional grown-ups) doesn’t sell, doesn’t scale, and, worst of all, doesn’t spin off a waterfall of derivative IP — the licensing and brand deals that fill the world with action figures, backpacks, lunch boxes, phone games with in-app purchases, etc., etc., etc.

Like I said — on paper, it all makes sense. But why is it better for the ailing industry to consolidate so drastically in the first place? Here, the dirty secret is easy enough to divulge — it’s actually not better for the film and television industry, which includes, y’know, vast numbers of people in talent, crew, production, and subsidiary but essential components like trucking, props, warehouses, catering, craft services, audio and video equipment and servicing — the works. The consolidation we’ve seen in Hollywood over the past ten years simply favors the biggest firms in the industry.

And it favors the biggest firms in the industry because the whole entertainment sector has been relentlessly consolidating into the hands of a very few individuals. For an illuminating if dispiriting side quest, read up on the latest about legendary talent kingpin Irving “Poison Dwarf” Azoff and his circular empire of celebrity stars, tours, venues, and cartel-like corporations.

I won’t link to the latest about other key figures in the nexus of entertainment power consolidation, such as P. Diddy. Suffice it to say that the entertainment industry we ought to have is one free of corruption, self-dealing, and institutionalized, almost automated vice.

The solution there, some say, is to cut more of those pesky humans out of the process, just as, ostensibly, we ought to do in science, politics, and everything else. Human self-government was tried and found wanting! Or so we’re told. If all we want is cross-eyed escapism, why not climb into the pod, slip on the helmet, and go sail away with the bots?

And that brings us to the true heart of the problem. We all know already that, especially on the internet, routinized content production converges on what we might kindly call filler or, more honestly, spam. Even with the very best of intentions and the most dialed-in technological augmentation, the most likely outcome of the automation of entertainment is its further consolidation in still fewer hands for the sake of flooding our lived environment with slop produced by bots.

But oh, the rejoinder goes — such a high price may sting to pay, but how much greater the pleasure and payoff to reap as a result! We’re talking premium entertainment for a relative few beyond their wildest dreams. Entertainment that fully merges with “real life” to the degree that those few — in a class so coveted it’ll drive unimaginably productive competition just for a chance to enter — will experience an altogether new form of life as semi-immortal gods.

Yes, an overall scenario as depressing as the botslop era we’re facing requires the most overclocked and insane visions of pleasure to compensate.

Industry people who won’t go down without a fight are focused on legal counterattacks. A major suit against Runway is working its way up the chain right now. But for all the importance of preserving the rule of law, if you think copyright and trademark will save us from the botslop cartel, you’re not going to make it. Art begins with artists — disciplined visionaries devoted to forging real spiritual connections with their audiences for the sake of their souls.

Hollywood has earned its share of hate for making a money machine out of spiritual vampirism, but audiences know the work of the true artist is worth far more than a tub of popcorn, a vat of Baja Blast, and a pretzel the size of your head.

Can art made by machines ever be real art?



When is a work of art not a work of art? When it’s made by a machine, perhaps?

Until recently, this was an all but academic question. Society was not gripped with fear at the prospect of photography destroying the art of painting. Film theorists observed calmly that the motion picture camera was its own agent in the moviemaking process, recording and “noticing” things that no one person involved, even the director or cinematographer, might have picked up at the time of shooting. But because the camera didn’t do its own scripting, acting, editing, color correction, and whatnot, nobody worried that mechanical films would compete with or surpass the normal, human-produced kind.

The agonized debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals what, consciously or otherwise, it tries to conceal: a great personal and social agony over the consequences of our individual and collective retreat from making art spiritually, as beings created by God with souls and bodies who must be prepared both for earthly death and, God willing, life eternal.

Now, with Hollywood crews historically idle and studios and talent scrambling to survive the streaming revolution, we seem to be in a much different place. The ground truth of the problem — the accelerating substitution of people in arts and entertainment with digital machinery — has trickled all the way up to the New Yorker, which late last month ran a searching, near-viral essay on the topic by sci-fi author Ted Chiang.

The thrust of Chiang’s case for “why AI isn’t going to make art” is that each of us is singular — and so our human singularity, when applied to the demands of making the many choices required by artistic undertakings, produces a freshness and novelty unattainable by any machine-induced singularity.

“What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable,” he concludes. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Hard to argue! And yet, something about Chiang’s logic is a bit too evasive to hold up under the increasing pressure of the theoretically infinite imagery our gargantuan computers can produce.

First, the good stuff: Chiang is right to underscore the centrality of the relationship between artist and audience in defining the meaning and purpose of art. He’s spot-on in insisting that, to take one of his key examples, “the significance of a child’s fan letter — both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it — comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.”

And, crucially, he intuits that our ease with language makes us “fall prey to mimicry” by computational models trained on our words at scale — giving in to the diabolical temptation of the so-called “Turing test” to think that superintelligence is defined by the ability to seem superintelligent. It’s some "Princess Bride"-tier foolishness to say a computer is truly smart if it tricks us into thinking it’s truly smart.

But today we live under the cultural and spiritual sway of people who really think that it’s better to have the simulation of a thing than to lack the thing itself — an idea that swiftly leads on to believing the simulation is “even better than the real thing,” to quote the old U2 hit, because real is hard, real is costly, real is vulnerable, real is fleeting, real starts fights, real limits us and makes demands, and simulations might not do or be any of those things, or be them a lot less. Just think of the way virtual or artificial sex is presented socially as a great leap forward from the real thing. More and more of our shared human world is being hived off and sold for parts in this fashion, trading away the real for the virtual, simulated, or out-and-out fake. The virtual has become the height of virtue.

Chiang’s defense of human art falters in the face of virtualization, collapsing back on a kind of solipsistic sentimentalism. He wants to insist that human beings are intrinsically good, but the evidence he musters is slippery, appealing to our sense of sympathy, cuteness, pity, or even our selfish desire to feel meaningful. This is where, in spite of itself, the evasiveness appears.

Listen to the directness with which the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky answers the question of art and its justification. “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act.” How similar, on the surface, to what Chiang is trying to say. But how much deeper!

And why? Because Tarkovsky understood that even purely human art, with no robots, algorithms, or code involved whatsoever, will still be fruitless — pointless — in the absence of religion. “An artist who has no faith,” he wrote, “is like a painter who was born blind. … Only faith interlocks the system of images” that makes up the “system of life” itself. “The meaning of religious truth is hope.” To Tarkovsky, art is an ordeal of suffering and joy, one through which the artist and the audience co-create the particulars of hope in one another’s lives. Here is where our singularity and unity are to be found, not in the fact that this or that collection of events, to this degree a jumble, to that degree a narrative, unfolded in this or that human life and not any other.

The agonized debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals what, consciously or otherwise, it tries to conceal: a great personal and social agony over the consequences of our individual and collective retreat from making art spiritually, as beings created by God with souls and bodies who must be prepared both for earthly death and, God willing, life eternal. This retreat leaves a heart-shaped hole into which an infinity of artifice and simulation may rush, but which an infinity can never fill. The pressing issue is not whether a machine might one day artfully trick us by simulating a soul but whether we will, today, put our real souls to work, without which real art will forever elude us.

MUST READ: How you survive the impending AI takeover (you’ve never heard this one before)



One thing most people agree on is that an artificial intelligence takeover is inevitable. Whether or not that will be beneficial for society, however, continues to be divisive.

Author, professor, and activist Jon Askonas joins James Poulos to discuss the harrowing implications of artificial intelligence when it comes to our future and what we must do when the takeover arrives.

Skeptics are highly suspicious of AI and immediately write it off as inherently evil, while proponents believe that it will solve all our problems and essentially save us.

But Jon and James do not fall into either camp.

They rather believe that thriving in a world dominated by AI will require a unique approach that neither entirely rejects nor submits to technology.

They also agree that people, especially Christians, must accept that AI is not just a super-science; it’s also a deeply spiritual matter.

“It's a powerful technology that will be used in spiritual warfare for good and for evil … but it’s still part of creation and so, like any part of creation, has to be grasped for its good uses,” Jon explains.

James agrees, adding, “One of the things that really sort of bums me out the most about this whole experience we’re going through is people who look at technology … as an evil god.”

The best way to survive the impending AI takeover is to “pray and pay attention to the world that surrounds you … cultivate [technology] and curate it intentionally as a site of spiritual warfare,” adds Jon.

To hear more of their fascinating conversation, watch the full episode below.


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