Posted by gnabgib 10 hours ago
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
What percentage of the earnings of influencers flows back into the economy as part of production costs instead of small percentage as spending or sitting as wealth in banks.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
"Let me tell you why!"
"Is not X, it's Y!"
and so on. It's so tiresome. I can't stand AI scripts. It makes the entire video feel like a waste of my time.
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
Provide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
The consumer behavior, or opportunity as you put it, that supported those billion dollar blockbusters has changed largely due to competing media. Film and TV are not the only show in town anymore.
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...