A combination of millions of people with production skills in California, and a huge domestic market able to spend billions has fuelled one of America’s biggest exports - TV & Movies. They’re not the biggest exports in dollar amounts, petroleum brings in almost 50 times more, but they give America something else apart from money - soft power via an outsized place in global cultural consciousness.
What happens when that sharply recedes? Soft power isn’t as easily counted as the size of aircraft carriers or the number of missiles, but its effects are real.
I don’t know how you figure an independent studio or individual will be able to keep pace with the likes of Hollywood or HBO. The premise is ridiculous. There’s more to it than good cameras, good microphones, and some minimal computer processing. There’s the story writing, script and dialogue, sound and sound engineering, sometimes CGI, the location and set that is immersive and complementary, and a slew of other stuff covered in the credits to contend with. Unless you think everyone on the planet is going to prefer blair witch style movies your future isn’t close by, it’s literally never coming.
Now you might say that AI can solve this problem, but unless you’ve got lots of people with the vision and ability to write unreasonably explicit prompts, that future is also way, way, WAY off and still improbable: consider how many pictures of people with hands and teeth there are and see how bad AI generations are. You can’t give 30 Marvel movies as training data and expect the next Ironman to emerge from your fanfic write up.
If you look at Sora now, it seems obvious within a couple of years it will be able to produce TV and movies, indistinguishable from today’s human produced ones, entirely with AI. I’m sure good human storytelling will still command attention. However shows like “Game of Thrones” that HBO spent over a billion to make, will be able to be produced by AI alone.
I haven’t looked at sora but I hear good things. Even still though, as someone who works in AI, the outcome you get is only as good as the data you put in for training and there just isn’t enough yet. Even if there were, people are super sensitive to plot holes and inconsistencies. Though, you might be able to get Michael Bay to retire ;).
I wish. They seem to be everywhere