This is cool and I refuse to pretend it’s not.

‘Oh but they used commercial movies to train it,’ like I give two shits about copyright. ‘Well it’s gonna put cartoonists out of work,’ like they weren’t already getting the shaft. ‘The quality of typical shows will get formulaic and lazy,’ like streaming and reality television are highbrow. ‘Nobody will bother making real art,’ like any new medium has ever killed an old medium.

Well-meaning luddites and greedy tech bros are both missing the big picture.

This is a refrigerator.

Hollywood sells ice.

These suits think they’re gonna sell a lot more ice, now that anyone can make it locally, without a whole harvesting-shipping-distribution ordeal. But if anyone can make it locally… nobody needs them.

If this technology is as simple and shallow as your worst fears, why would you buy someone else’s push-button output? Why bother going online to sort through endless samey crap when you can generate exactly the crap you want in the privacy of your own home?

If this technology isn’t that simple - if it still takes creativity and effort to make something worth watching - artists won’t need these shitty companies to employ them. They become their own studio.

Yeah, right now it takes a mainframe to churn this out. But the technology is barely a year old. And there’s already a whole free-for-all community trading filters and models. Even if big-iron approaches remain the best option, local approaches will remain possible, and they’ll only get better and better - especially if that’s where the bulk of fascinated ultranerds spend their time.

And none of it will ever prevent you from pointing a camera at real people.