WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.031 --> 00:00:06.136 Hi, and welcome to Technically Creative's Week in Review, brought to you by Kubrick Labs, the AI and IT partner for creative companies. 2 00:00:06.777 --> 00:00:12.362 Every week, I spend about 20 minutes walking you through the most important news from the increasingly tangled worlds of tech and creativity. 3 00:00:12.562 --> 00:00:15.384 And happy Halloween, because this week was properly spooky. 4 00:00:15.585 --> 00:00:19.368 Google admitted its shiny new AI search makes less money than the old one. 5 00:00:19.548 --> 00:00:24.450 The five biggest tech companies spent more than they earned for the first time since, well, the dot-com crash. 6 00:00:24.990 --> 00:00:29.592 Spotify wants to charge you an extra $5 a month to turn a folk song into a dance track. 7 00:00:30.133 --> 00:00:35.655 Roblox's AI agent accidentally downloaded 145 gigabytes of somebody else's 3D models. 8 00:00:35.775 --> 00:00:41.079 Elon Musk, who promised a feature-length AI odyssey, finally put it out, and it's only seven minutes long. 9 00:00:41.219 --> 00:00:46.503 And our deep dive is that a music video was put out with shots in it the director and the production company had never seen. 10 00:00:46.563 --> 00:00:49.926 So yeah, things were scary, and that's before anyone even put on a costume. 11 00:00:50.286 --> 00:00:51.487 So let's start with the news. 12 00:00:51.927 --> 00:01:05.977 On Tuesday, Widen and Kennedy, the first agency to ever give me a job, and one of the greatest ad agencies in the world, and I'm not just saying that because they gave me a job, but they're the people who wrote Just Do It for Nike and then did everything awesome with that slogan over the last 45 years. 13 00:01:06.497 --> 00:01:11.961 Well, they launched Widen and Kennedy Entertainment, a division that develops, finances, and produces film and television. 14 00:01:12.061 --> 00:01:15.804 One part of the division is original entertainment with nothing to do with advertising. 15 00:01:15.964 --> 00:01:22.090 The other helps Wyden and Kennedy's clients get into film and TV in ways that go well beyond branded content and product placement. 16 00:01:22.290 --> 00:01:27.615 And we've seen agencies do this before, but usually the first project is a cautious little branded doc. 17 00:01:27.875 --> 00:01:29.217 Wyden is swinging for the fences. 18 00:01:29.257 --> 00:01:38.285 They're starting with Puerto Rico, an independent historical drama starring Bad Bunny, Viggo Mortensen, and Edward Norton, about the American takeover of Puerto Rico in 1898. 19 00:01:38.385 --> 00:01:40.948 It's filming right now in the Dominican Republic. 20 00:01:41.468 --> 00:01:44.810 Now, agencies have tried this before, and it usually goes the same way. 21 00:01:44.910 --> 00:01:49.472 A few ad people who have always wanted to make film get a budget, a logo, and a launch party. 22 00:01:49.832 --> 00:01:53.894 And two years later, everybody quietly goes back to making ads because it didn't really work. 23 00:01:54.254 --> 00:01:59.156 What feels different here is who's running it, and Wyden has probably invested in the person to make it work. 24 00:01:59.256 --> 00:02:02.977 They're putting Nick Satonsky in charge, who's Wieden & Kennedy's global head of production. 25 00:02:03.377 --> 00:02:07.878 But there's also Lakshmi Iyengar, who comes from the actual film business. 26 00:02:08.278 --> 00:02:13.600 Sony Pictures, Universal, Focus Features, and running production and development for Dev Patel's company. 27 00:02:13.980 --> 00:02:15.240 It's a powerful combination. 28 00:02:15.640 --> 00:02:23.182 Advertising people know how to make things fast, on budget, and for clients who change their minds between breakfast on Thursday and dinner on Thursday. 29 00:02:23.582 --> 00:02:26.723 Hollywood producers know how to get films financed, cast, and finished. 30 00:02:27.123 --> 00:02:30.564 Put them together and you've got speed plus credibility, and that's a hard thing to copy. 31 00:02:31.124 --> 00:02:32.604 And I think there's a bigger reason to do it. 32 00:02:32.684 --> 00:02:35.485 In the AI era, execution is getting cheaper by the week. 33 00:02:35.845 --> 00:02:38.986 So what an agency is really selling is that it understands culture. 34 00:02:39.466 --> 00:02:41.406 The trouble is that every agency says that. 35 00:02:41.446 --> 00:02:43.267 It's on every credentials deck in the world. 36 00:02:43.387 --> 00:02:48.488 It's probably phrased, we move at the speed of culture, or we have our finger on the pulse of culture. 37 00:02:48.588 --> 00:02:48.908 Great! 38 00:02:49.208 --> 00:02:49.568 Prove it. 39 00:02:49.768 --> 00:02:52.950 And what better way to prove you understand culture than to actually be making it? 40 00:02:53.130 --> 00:02:55.031 So I wish him well in this endeavor. 41 00:02:55.051 --> 00:02:56.292 It sounds really interesting. 42 00:02:56.352 --> 00:02:58.853 And if anyone can pull it off, you'd think it'd be widened. 43 00:03:00.937 --> 00:03:05.400 Speaking of Hollywood, Hollywood told OpenAI it already knows how to license things. 44 00:03:05.580 --> 00:03:24.871 On Friday, the Human Consent Foundation, that's run by a bunch of people, including Cate Blanchett, filed an amicus brief in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, co-signed by CAA, the Music Artist Coalition, the National Association of Voice Actors, and others, with Anne Hathaway, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, and Madonna amongst the names in the appendix. 45 00:03:25.491 --> 00:03:26.692 It goes after one argument— 46 00:03:27.092 --> 00:03:28.393 It goes after one argument. 47 00:03:28.533 --> 00:03:36.320 OpenAI and Microsoft have said licensing creative work for AI training is cost prohibitive and that there's no settled means of valuing training data. 48 00:03:36.440 --> 00:03:39.002 And the amicus brief basically calls bullshit. 49 00:03:39.082 --> 00:03:40.563 And its argument is pretty simple. 50 00:03:41.024 --> 00:03:41.684 Yes, there is. 51 00:03:41.764 --> 00:03:43.646 We've been doing it for 100 years. 52 00:03:44.266 --> 00:03:53.134 It points to collective licensing bodies like BMI, which exist precisely because there are too many songs and too many users to do every deal one at a time. 53 00:03:53.394 --> 00:03:56.899 OpenAI and Microsoft are like, well, it's too complicated to pay everyone. 54 00:03:57.339 --> 00:03:58.561 That's not a new argument. 55 00:03:58.661 --> 00:03:59.362 Radio made it. 56 00:03:59.482 --> 00:04:00.183 Bars made it. 57 00:04:00.483 --> 00:04:02.946 The music business answered it a century ago. 58 00:04:03.226 --> 00:04:06.230 And the answer was just boring but effective paperwork. 59 00:04:07.093 --> 00:04:14.058 It's a brief, not a ruling, but the argument has changed shape from don't train on our work to we already built the machine for paying people. 60 00:04:14.259 --> 00:04:15.700 Now you just need to use it. 61 00:04:15.820 --> 00:04:18.822 And so it's hard to wave away that argument because it's pretty strong. 62 00:04:18.982 --> 00:04:24.166 All you need to do is actually put some effort into making sure that you pay people for the work they used. 63 00:04:24.707 --> 00:04:35.355 And considering we reported a couple weeks ago that Microsoft researchers were openly saying that they knew this was potentially the largest copyright theft of all time, they're about to get caught out, I hope. 64 00:04:35.575 --> 00:04:41.819 And so moving on to Google, Google's AI search is very popular, but it makes Google less money and is expensive. 65 00:04:42.459 --> 00:04:46.741 On Wednesday, Google said that search queries grew at their fastest rate in five years. 66 00:04:46.902 --> 00:04:47.482 That's great. 67 00:04:47.822 --> 00:04:55.727 Then its chief business officer, Philip Schindler, explained why search revenue growth slowed to 12%, down from 19% at the start of the year. 68 00:04:56.467 --> 00:04:59.030 Google's stock tanked 10% on that news. 69 00:04:59.210 --> 00:05:05.758 He said that the strong growth in AI mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization that we're seeing in AI mode. 70 00:05:05.958 --> 00:05:13.347 So I would expect, almost immediately, when you do a search on Google, that helpful little AI mode isn't going to be coming up first. 71 00:05:13.547 --> 00:05:17.011 And Google's response is likely to be to put more ads in the AI answers. 72 00:05:17.071 --> 00:05:19.052 Joining OpenAI in that strategy. 73 00:05:19.292 --> 00:05:25.636 Now, looking at the other end of the pipe, Reddit says that its average weekly search referrals in October were down by more than a million. 74 00:05:25.816 --> 00:05:30.618 And Steve Huffman pointed to Google AI's overviews in AI mode as major contributors of that. 75 00:05:30.839 --> 00:05:33.820 Reddit's response is to start moving towards a mostly logged in site. 76 00:05:33.840 --> 00:05:35.841 And I don't know if that strategy is going to work. 77 00:05:36.021 --> 00:05:39.003 People don't like friction added into their user experience. 78 00:05:39.143 --> 00:05:44.131 So what's happening is that Google's answering your question on its own page rather than referencing Reddit. 79 00:05:44.551 --> 00:05:48.257 And so Reddit gets fewer visitors, and so they're locking the door to Google. 80 00:05:48.457 --> 00:05:54.686 Google used to be the hotel concierge who sends you to the best restaurant in town, but then gets a little kickback from the restaurant for it. 81 00:05:55.167 --> 00:05:59.669 Now, it's the concierge who makes you a sandwich in the lobby and then wonders why nobody's paying him anymore. 82 00:05:59.809 --> 00:06:02.110 And then the restaurant's response is to go members only. 83 00:06:02.130 --> 00:06:04.231 This sounds like something where everybody loses. 84 00:06:04.371 --> 00:06:09.293 If your business lives on search, pay attention to this, because you're gonna have to do something to respond. 85 00:06:09.513 --> 00:06:11.834 And then big tech has finally spent more than it makes. 86 00:06:12.214 --> 00:06:15.175 Two weeks ago, we asked who's paying for all this AI. 87 00:06:15.235 --> 00:06:16.456 This week, we got the answer. 88 00:06:16.956 --> 00:06:20.938 Reuters crunched the numbers from Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle. 89 00:06:21.398 --> 00:06:33.340 In the first nine months of this year, they generated a record $542.9 billion in operating cash and spent $556.9 billion on chips, data centers, and power. 90 00:06:33.780 --> 00:06:38.381 That's the first time spending has outrun cash generation in data going back to 2011. 91 00:06:38.581 --> 00:06:41.882 A year ago, these five had a free cash flow surplus of $143.5 billion. 92 00:06:41.942 --> 00:06:43.422 Now it's a deficit of about $14 billion. 93 00:06:46.323 --> 00:06:48.085 Buybacks fell 83%. 94 00:06:48.365 --> 00:06:51.127 Alphabet and Meta haven't bought back a single share this year. 95 00:06:51.527 --> 00:06:57.973 So think about that when you're investing, because if the company you're investing in doesn't think their own shares are worth buying, pay attention. 96 00:06:58.153 --> 00:07:01.156 Alphabet raised $29 billion of debt this year. 97 00:07:01.636 --> 00:07:04.338 Amazon raised $48 billion in a single quarter. 98 00:07:04.739 --> 00:07:08.462 The richest software companies on Earth are borrowing like railway barons. 99 00:07:08.662 --> 00:07:09.543 So who's paying? 100 00:07:10.063 --> 00:07:11.504 Well, for now, the shareholders. 101 00:07:11.945 --> 00:07:14.207 The AI tool on your laptop feels cheap. 102 00:07:14.527 --> 00:07:18.490 The thing behind it is the biggest capital spending spree in modern corporate history. 103 00:07:19.111 --> 00:07:21.853 And somebody is eventually going to want to get paid back. 104 00:07:22.214 --> 00:07:26.738 And then in the world of music, Spotify is going to let you remix licensed songs for a fee. 105 00:07:26.918 --> 00:07:36.446 Financial Times reported on Thursday that Spotify plans to launch its AI remix and covers tool early next year, weighing a price of about $4 to $5 a month on top of premiums. 106 00:07:36.606 --> 00:07:39.947 Spotify declined to comment, and neither timing nor price is final. 107 00:07:40.107 --> 00:07:45.249 Subscribers would use AI to make their own versions of songs, turning a folk track into a dance crap, say. 108 00:07:45.669 --> 00:07:46.630 Sorry, dance crap. 109 00:07:47.110 --> 00:07:48.330 I think that's Freudian. 110 00:07:48.350 --> 00:07:48.831 And you know what? 111 00:07:48.891 --> 00:07:51.091 I'm going to go with it, because it's probably going to be crap. 112 00:07:51.251 --> 00:07:52.712 But anyway, I meant to say track. 113 00:07:52.939 --> 00:07:58.021 but they're only going to do this with artists who have opted in individually, even if their label signed the deal. 114 00:07:58.261 --> 00:07:59.422 And I like the shape of that. 115 00:07:59.762 --> 00:08:05.184 Spotify has licenses with Universal, Merlin, Cobalt, and Believe, with Sony and Warner still negotiating. 116 00:08:05.644 --> 00:08:10.086 Royalties go back to the original artists, and your remix counts as a play of their song. 117 00:08:11.100 --> 00:08:13.842 This is what licensed generative music actually looks like. 118 00:08:14.003 --> 00:08:16.945 And it's a long way from typing a prompt to getting a fake Drake. 119 00:08:17.586 --> 00:08:19.187 Fans already remix everything. 120 00:08:19.267 --> 00:08:23.571 Every sped up TikTok version of every song you've ever heard, mostly without anyone getting paid. 121 00:08:23.651 --> 00:08:27.034 Spotify is trying to turn an unlicensed habit into a revenue line. 122 00:08:27.274 --> 00:08:31.358 The question is whether people will pay $5 a month for something TikTok lets them do for free. 123 00:08:31.538 --> 00:08:32.719 And it's not unprecedented. 124 00:08:32.779 --> 00:08:36.820 It reminds me of when Apple started putting up TV shows for a buck 99. 125 00:08:37.180 --> 00:08:37.921 People will pay. 126 00:08:38.061 --> 00:08:39.741 On some level, they wanna do the right thing. 127 00:08:39.821 --> 00:08:42.382 Or maybe it's just the pirating things makes people uneasy. 128 00:08:42.623 --> 00:08:43.243 And you know what? 129 00:08:43.323 --> 00:08:43.703 It should. 130 00:08:44.203 --> 00:08:48.345 And then onto the world of gaming, where Roblox's AI agents started buying up the store. 131 00:08:48.665 --> 00:08:58.807 Open 3D Lab, a free site for sharing 3D models, says a crawler tagged with a Roblox address downloaded 145 gigabytes of its models, including, it says, adult files. 132 00:08:58.907 --> 00:09:03.168 So these files moved on to the servers of a company whose audience is famously children. 133 00:09:03.368 --> 00:09:13.471 Roblox says one of its researchers built an agent to collect publicly available 3D assets and that it mistakenly scraped content from Open 3D Lab, failing to operate as intended. 134 00:09:13.871 --> 00:09:18.332 It says the agent's been shut down and that the data wasn't used for anything, including AI training. 135 00:09:18.872 --> 00:09:20.853 It hasn't said whether the files were deleted. 136 00:09:21.394 --> 00:09:25.957 Roblox's entire business runs on people making 3D things and trusting the platform with them. 137 00:09:26.457 --> 00:09:31.060 Our robot took your work by accident is a sentence that creative industries are going to hear a lot. 138 00:09:31.440 --> 00:09:34.922 And failing to operate as intended is doing an awful lot of work there. 139 00:09:34.962 --> 00:09:39.145 And then Elon Musk keeps showing up in these news items in really weird and funny ways. 140 00:09:39.205 --> 00:09:44.348 But this time, he promised an AI feature film of the Odyssey and we got seven minutes of it. 141 00:09:45.048 --> 00:09:50.850 In July, Elon Musk said that Grok imagined would make a historically accurate odyssey before the end of the year. 142 00:09:51.010 --> 00:09:55.392 I think we can all agree that what he probably meant by that was that he would make everybody cis and white. 143 00:09:55.492 --> 00:09:58.013 On October 23rd, Grok posted episode one. 144 00:09:58.213 --> 00:10:07.416 It's seven minutes long and made by a London startup called Wonder Studios with director Dev Walker, a team of three in under two weeks, for reported tens of thousands of dollars. 145 00:10:07.636 --> 00:10:13.218 Nolan's version reportedly cost around 250 million and has made 1.8 billion at the global box office. 146 00:10:13.678 --> 00:10:18.000 The Guardian gave the AI version one star and compared it to a laptop screensaver. 147 00:10:18.480 --> 00:10:22.782 Wonder Studios says the next episode will address criticism about the accuracy of the boats. 148 00:10:23.002 --> 00:10:24.103 So what's the news here? 149 00:10:24.223 --> 00:10:25.363 Elon being provocative? 150 00:10:25.563 --> 00:10:27.144 I mean, that doesn't really count. 151 00:10:27.664 --> 00:10:34.488 But three people, two weeks, to get something that technically exists and doesn't look horrible, let's be honest. 152 00:10:34.708 --> 00:10:36.629 That is new, but becoming normalized. 153 00:10:36.689 --> 00:10:37.969 And I think that's the point here. 154 00:10:38.609 --> 00:10:41.631 Being able to make stuff used to be the hard part. 155 00:10:42.231 --> 00:10:43.612 Now it's incredibly easy. 156 00:10:43.792 --> 00:10:47.994 But as we're seeing, making something that's good, that's the hard part at any price. 157 00:10:48.415 --> 00:10:52.737 And then finally in Halloween news, your kid might be dressed as an AI tonight. 158 00:10:53.457 --> 00:10:59.861 Among this year's costumes at Spirit Halloween is Ballerina Cappuccino, a ballerina with a cappuccino cup for a head. 159 00:11:00.241 --> 00:11:06.905 She's one of the Italian brain rot characters that came out of AI-generated images and videos that went viral on TikTok last year. 160 00:11:07.445 --> 00:11:11.948 So in about 18 months, we've gone from a prompt to a meme to a costume in a shopping mall. 161 00:11:12.109 --> 00:11:15.911 And in the U.S., purely AI-generated material generally can't be copyrighted. 162 00:11:16.292 --> 00:11:21.876 So some of the most recognizable new characters of the year may not have an owner in any meaningful legal sense. 163 00:11:22.456 --> 00:11:25.338 Mickey Mouse took 95 years to reach the public domain. 164 00:11:25.739 --> 00:11:28.481 Ballerina Cappuccino may have been born there. 165 00:11:28.741 --> 00:11:31.323 And she's knocking on your door tonight asking for candy. 166 00:11:31.423 --> 00:11:34.465 And this is the type of news that reminds me to laugh at all of this stuff. 167 00:11:34.505 --> 00:11:37.729 Because we are living through a very spooky time. 168 00:11:38.710 --> 00:11:39.731 So anyway, that's the news. 169 00:11:39.971 --> 00:11:43.315 But there is one story I wanted to kind of do a bit more of a deep dive on. 170 00:11:43.435 --> 00:11:45.297 And it's one from the world of music videos. 171 00:11:45.518 --> 00:11:48.721 Most people covered it as a plagiarism story, but I think it's much more than that. 172 00:11:48.902 --> 00:11:54.248 I think it's a story about people who never used to be able to complete your work getting to do just that because of AI. 173 00:11:54.508 --> 00:11:58.170 So that's the main story this week, is that everybody seems to think that they're a director now. 174 00:11:58.230 --> 00:12:03.974 And although that's very inspiring and exciting for young kids, not so much when you're talking about commissioners. 175 00:12:04.535 --> 00:12:10.318 So last week, ASAP Rocky put out a song called Shroom Clouds on October 16th with a music video. 176 00:12:10.439 --> 00:12:22.887 A week or so later, a VFX artist called Cash Bunny posted a side-by-side comparison of a sequence they had made in 2019 with the filmmaker Ari Fararoy, except the person in the middle had been swapped out for ASAP Rocky. 177 00:12:23.347 --> 00:12:27.030 The claim is that their footage was taken, run through AI, and given a new lead. 178 00:12:27.190 --> 00:12:31.233 ASAP Rocky's creative director posted on Instagram and, to his credit, didn't dodge it. 179 00:12:31.673 --> 00:12:39.458 He said a breakdown in our review process of generative AI assets led to the unattributed use of Cash Bunny's work and that he has to take accountability. 180 00:12:39.478 --> 00:12:40.079 And you know what? 181 00:12:40.159 --> 00:12:41.580 Good for him for owning up to that. 182 00:12:41.800 --> 00:12:44.202 So far, it's an AI plagiarism story. 183 00:12:44.782 --> 00:12:46.503 But then the production company spoke up. 184 00:12:46.623 --> 00:12:51.566 The video was made by a production company called Prodco, with a director called Isoltan Saitov. 185 00:12:51.826 --> 00:12:55.869 Prodco says it delivered the finished director's cut to the client in January 2024. 186 00:12:56.329 --> 00:12:57.670 The song came out this month. 187 00:12:58.070 --> 00:13:01.052 So the client sat on that finished film for almost three years. 188 00:13:01.592 --> 00:13:09.957 Prodco says the version it delivered had none of the AI shots or the disputed imagery, and that all of it was added later without their knowledge and without the director's consent. 189 00:13:10.057 --> 00:13:12.538 Prodco was even left off the production credits. 190 00:13:13.098 --> 00:13:18.060 And on Tuesday, Saitov and Prodco released their own director's cut and said it's the end of their involvement. 191 00:13:18.260 --> 00:13:20.081 Now, we don't know who made those changes. 192 00:13:20.481 --> 00:13:22.482 ASAP Rocky is credited as co-director. 193 00:13:22.842 --> 00:13:25.643 But nobody said he did it himself, and I'm not saying that either. 194 00:13:26.283 --> 00:13:32.804 What we do know is that somebody on the client side took a finished film, made new material for it, cut it in, and then released it. 195 00:13:33.164 --> 00:13:35.805 And nobody picked up the phone to tell the people who even made it. 196 00:13:36.005 --> 00:13:44.586 So as the production company and the director, you pitched it, cast it, shot it, cut it, and put your own money and people on the line. 197 00:13:44.666 --> 00:13:48.107 People might not realize how little money most music videos have. 198 00:13:48.387 --> 00:13:53.548 Most production companies put their own money into it as a showcase for their directors that they believe in. 199 00:13:53.608 --> 00:13:57.210 So you've put your own money and people on the line, delivered it, and moved on. 200 00:13:57.871 --> 00:14:02.693 And probably been waiting for when it's gonna be released so that your director can take a moment in the sun. 201 00:14:02.713 --> 00:14:11.198 Then three years later, it comes out with shots you've never seen, without your name, and it's in the news because one of the shots you didn't make was stolen from somebody else. 202 00:14:11.459 --> 00:14:14.520 What I think everybody's missing is that the client always owned the footage. 203 00:14:14.941 --> 00:14:16.862 Labels have recut music videos forever. 204 00:14:17.082 --> 00:14:18.903 Agencies recut commercials constantly. 205 00:14:19.223 --> 00:14:21.785 I've been on the wrong end of that more times than I'd like to remember. 206 00:14:22.385 --> 00:14:24.846 Nothing about who owns the footage has changed. 207 00:14:24.986 --> 00:14:27.186 What's changed is what the client can actually do with it. 208 00:14:27.747 --> 00:14:37.109 Before, if a label wanted new shots in a finished music video, it could pay the original team to make them, or secretly hire a different production company to shoot more behind their back, I suppose. 209 00:14:37.849 --> 00:14:39.610 Almost nobody did the second one, though. 210 00:14:40.050 --> 00:14:43.912 Partly because it's expensive, mostly because it's an extraordinary insult. 211 00:14:44.212 --> 00:14:48.494 Word gets around, and you wouldn't really get a decent director to work with you after that. 212 00:14:48.694 --> 00:14:55.857 And I increasingly feel like we told ourselves a nice story about the respect that commissioners showed to their production partners. 213 00:14:56.397 --> 00:15:00.759 Some of it was real, but a lot of it, it turns out, was just a capability gap. 214 00:15:01.319 --> 00:15:03.080 They respected you because they needed you. 215 00:15:03.220 --> 00:15:08.683 Now the people who could never have touched your film before suddenly have the power to fuck it up after you've gone home. 216 00:15:09.463 --> 00:15:18.251 Somebody with a laptop and a subscription can generate a new shot, drop it into your cut, and nobody ever has to find out until it turns out that shot belonged to somebody else. 217 00:15:18.671 --> 00:15:23.055 This is exactly what writers were afraid of when the WGA went on strike in 2023. 218 00:15:23.396 --> 00:15:27.960 A studio executive putting a script into ChatGPT and asking it to punch up the second act. 219 00:15:28.540 --> 00:15:29.201 And they won. 220 00:15:29.681 --> 00:15:35.166 Under the 2023 contract, a studio can't use AI to write or rewrite a writer's literary material. 221 00:15:35.826 --> 00:15:40.750 That matters not just because it's rude, although it is, but because revisions are paid work. 222 00:15:41.251 --> 00:15:44.934 A studio rewriting with a chatbot is taking money out of a writer's mouth. 223 00:15:45.154 --> 00:15:46.375 And it's the same thing here. 224 00:15:46.796 --> 00:15:50.259 New shots would have been a paid job for Prodco and the director. 225 00:15:50.279 --> 00:15:50.479 Yeah. 226 00:15:50.939 --> 00:15:55.203 Instead, the people who made the film got neither the job, nor a phone call, nor the credit. 227 00:15:55.723 --> 00:15:57.284 Writers got their protection in writing. 228 00:15:57.404 --> 00:16:00.607 Music video directors and commercial production companies have nothing like that. 229 00:16:01.087 --> 00:16:07.132 And what they don't seem to realize is that cutting out the production company is also, weirdly, why this went wrong in the first place. 230 00:16:07.773 --> 00:16:11.856 The director and producer are the people with a professional stake in what's in that footage. 231 00:16:12.296 --> 00:16:16.399 Their name, their reputation, their reel, and let's not forget their money. 232 00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:18.602 They're the quality control. 233 00:16:19.083 --> 00:16:25.452 And they weren't in the room, so nobody with skin in the game looked at that AI shot and asked, hold on, um, who shot this? 234 00:16:25.913 --> 00:16:26.914 Where did this come from? 235 00:16:27.094 --> 00:16:30.539 The creative director Gallardo called it a breakdown in the review process. 236 00:16:30.900 --> 00:16:33.564 The review process should have been the production company. 237 00:16:34.545 --> 00:16:36.206 And they got cut out of the whole system. 238 00:16:36.326 --> 00:16:41.489 And so I think what people aren't realizing is that the disrespect and the provenance failure are the same failure. 239 00:16:41.609 --> 00:16:43.771 And this is the type of thing that's just gonna happen more. 240 00:16:44.171 --> 00:16:47.973 The same week Google DeepMind put out Genie 4 as a research preview. 241 00:16:48.174 --> 00:16:51.496 It isn't a video generator that makes a shot, it's a world model. 242 00:16:51.956 --> 00:16:52.997 It makes a place. 243 00:16:53.457 --> 00:16:58.100 You give it a prompt and it builds a photorealistic environment that you can move through in real time. 244 00:16:58.500 --> 00:17:01.822 And while it's running, you can change the weather, move the camera, add a person. 245 00:17:02.202 --> 00:17:02.722 It's early. 246 00:17:02.742 --> 00:17:05.444 A scene only stays consistent for about two minutes. 247 00:17:05.584 --> 00:17:07.525 That's a very expensive establishing shot. 248 00:17:07.645 --> 00:17:09.266 But I think that this is where this is going. 249 00:17:09.626 --> 00:17:12.887 Right now, a client can generate a shot here and there and hope it cuts in. 250 00:17:13.388 --> 00:17:17.290 With world models, they can rebuild your location, your camera position, and your light. 251 00:17:17.850 --> 00:17:19.632 There used to be a ritual at the end of a shoot. 252 00:17:19.692 --> 00:17:20.632 The set gets struck. 253 00:17:20.973 --> 00:17:22.214 The lights go back on the truck. 254 00:17:22.234 --> 00:17:25.917 And if anybody wants more of that world, they have to come back to the people who built it. 255 00:17:26.037 --> 00:17:27.839 Nobody needed to write that deal down. 256 00:17:28.199 --> 00:17:31.081 The physics of the world wrote that deal for us. 257 00:17:31.542 --> 00:17:33.704 But the set doesn't have to get struck anymore. 258 00:17:33.904 --> 00:17:37.667 So what do you do if you run a production company or direct or run a VFX house? 259 00:17:37.747 --> 00:17:38.728 The answer isn't clever. 260 00:17:39.208 --> 00:17:40.630 You got to put it in a contract. 261 00:17:40.690 --> 00:17:41.030 Yeah. 262 00:17:41.130 --> 00:17:46.875 If a client wants to alter the work after delivery, you get notice at least before it goes out and credit approval. 263 00:17:46.915 --> 00:17:48.897 That way your credit and your work are protected. 264 00:17:49.498 --> 00:17:54.282 And you get first refusal on any new material at a rate because that's a job and it always was. 265 00:17:54.442 --> 00:17:58.165 So yeah, the courtesy the production community used to get was never written down. 266 00:17:58.205 --> 00:17:59.466 It never had to be. 267 00:17:59.907 --> 00:18:02.829 It was just guaranteed by the fact that they couldn't do it without you. 268 00:18:03.630 --> 00:18:04.731 That guarantee is gone. 269 00:18:05.271 --> 00:18:08.532 So if you can't count on a client's manners anymore, put it in the paperwork. 270 00:18:08.592 --> 00:18:12.014 And listen, this isn't only about manners, it's in the client's interest too. 271 00:18:12.414 --> 00:18:18.737 The label paid for a director's eye and a producer's paranoia, and then they threw both away at exactly the moment it needed them most. 272 00:18:19.237 --> 00:18:24.620 If anyone on the client's side had just sent Prodco one email saying, we're adding a few shots, can you have a look? 273 00:18:24.940 --> 00:18:28.282 There's a decent chance Cash Bunny's work never ends up in that video. 274 00:18:28.842 --> 00:18:32.964 Nobody has to post an apology to Instagram, and we're not talking about it on a podcast. 275 00:18:33.364 --> 00:18:35.486 That phone call would have been cheaper than the AI. 276 00:18:36.106 --> 00:18:39.288 So whichever side of the commissioning you're on, the old rule still holds. 277 00:18:39.508 --> 00:18:40.668 Call your collaborators. 278 00:18:41.048 --> 00:18:42.449 Talk to them about what you're doing. 279 00:18:42.989 --> 00:18:47.792 Just because you have the ability to generate something doesn't mean you shouldn't respect the people who actually did it. 280 00:18:47.972 --> 00:18:52.174 And again, let's not forget, production companies invest into these music videos. 281 00:18:52.254 --> 00:18:59.017 It's one of the reasons that when you get married and your father-in-law pays for half the wedding, you have to listen to what he says about the choices you're making. 282 00:18:59.337 --> 00:19:00.438 That's just the reality. 283 00:19:01.278 --> 00:19:09.922 I'm going to be getting into this more because I'm going to be talking on the podcast with Ian Pons-Jewel, who's one of the co-founders of Prodco and a wonderful director in his own right. 284 00:19:10.262 --> 00:19:13.784 We've had some very good conversations about AI and provenance and what's 285 00:19:14.324 --> 00:19:17.968 what's wrong and what's okay in this whole new world we're entering into. 286 00:19:17.988 --> 00:19:19.510 And I'm really excited to talk to him. 287 00:19:19.550 --> 00:19:21.873 So keep an eye out for that in the next couple of weeks. 288 00:19:21.933 --> 00:19:24.135 And, you know, so that's it for this week. 289 00:19:24.275 --> 00:19:25.517 Thank you so much for listening. 290 00:19:25.557 --> 00:19:30.362 And happy Halloween or happy day after Halloween, if you're hearing this with a sugar hangover. 291 00:19:31.003 --> 00:19:37.634 And, you know, if you got something out of hearing this, the single most useful thing you can do is send it to one person who works in the business. 292 00:19:37.914 --> 00:19:41.060 The second most important thing you could do is like and subscribe. 293 00:19:41.420 --> 00:19:42.482 So thank you so much. 294 00:19:42.742 --> 00:19:44.906 And we'll see you in tomorrow's interview episode. 295 00:19:44.966 --> 00:19:46.468 And I'll be back with this next week. 296 00:19:46.749 --> 00:19:47.210 Thanks so much.