Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue

Hollywood is losing audiences due to Hollywood fatigue.

Here’s the thing with AI: it’s simply a tool.

I use it in my work as a visual effects artist, and for me it’s basically a glorified Google search, a faster way to find elements for pre-comps. Honestly, it’s useful for that, because I don’t have to waste time digging through endless images trying to match the right look.

But AI is not creativity.

Give anyone a little free time with these image generators and you’ll see the same pattern: they’ll have some fun ideas for about ten minutes, then they hit the wall. You can only mash up random things you’ve already seen elsewhere for so long. After fifteen minutes, “Bob Barker in Back to the Future” gets old, and people move on.

You still need the creative spark which is why I hate that bullshit talking point about AI “democratizing art.” As if someone was stopping you from picking up a pencil, drawing something, or opening a word processor and writing.

What AI has really done is empower people with zero creativity to think they’re creative.

I’m not afraid of AI taking my job. I’m afraid of people who think AI can do my job taking it instead. And frankly, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Every single person reading this has a favorite film, probably a whole list of favorite films and shows, and I can guarantee you ALL of them were made in spite of executive interference, not because of it. Now executives have a tool they believe replaces the creative process entirely, cutting out the actual talent.

I’ve got a personal anecdote. I worked on a major film a few years ago where the sequence of events went like this: after buying the rights to a major New York Times bestseller, the studio hired (in order) the cast, the makeup artist, the cinematographer, the VFX supervisor, the writer, and finally the director… then told him to “make it work,” while giving him zero authority over his own project.

Needless to say, the film bombed.

And that was before COVID. It’s only gotten worse.

There are now more producers than artists or crew on these films. More executives calling themselves “creatives,” making decisions purely from a cost-saving standpoint instead of understanding the product they’re actually making.

AI isn’t the problem.

It’s exposing what the real problem is: greed, and an executive class that has never understood what they’re selling. They used to have no choice but to go along with artists, because artists were the only ones who could actually make the thing.

Now they think they don’t need them.

And film is going to die unless something fundamentally changes.

There’s already more “media content” available than we can consume. There’s already hundreds of great TV shows released every month I don’t have time to watch, dozens of new movies released every year I miss in theaters and thousand of old movies I haven’t watched yet, not to mention books, video games, theater shows, music, and so on.

So why would I choose to engage with IA-generated, meaningless slop when I already can’t keep up with what humans create?