The crisis currently gripping Hollywood isn’t simply a technology problem, nor is it a sudden, unforeseen disaster; it is, at its heart, a relationship crisis, a cultural divorce decades in the making. For years, we’ve watched the industry’s powerful guilds, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, elevate their authority, leveraging their control into bloated budgets and an increasing sense of untouchable self-importance. During this time, they allowed their work to turn from art and entertainment into a vehicle for ideological lecturing, seeing themselves as cultural superiors rather than humble entertainers. Meanwhile, studio heads remained complicit, rubber-stamping a decade of declining product quality as long as the content served the prevailing corporate narrative. Now, the audience is rejecting this systemic arrogance by walking away and taking their money with them, leaving the major studios facing a choice: pay the escalating price of human arrogance and cultural hostility, or embrace the quiet replacement.
Looking at the test cases, the disruption is clear. For Critterz, the story and character concepts are entirely human-led by experienced screenwriters. However, AI is being used to rapidly and cost-effectively generate visuals from human-made sketches, proving that human creativity no longer needs the years of production time traditionally controlled by the established guilds. Similarly, Tilly Norwood is a photorealistic composite, not a traditional actor, but a fully controllable, potentially licensable piece of intellectual property, a highly versatile brand character who will never age, never ask for a raise, never cause a scandal, and never scold the audience. Her performance is infinitely pliant, providing studios with an attractive new form of asset control. Ironically, they have yet to figure out that they don’t need to “book” her. Anyone can create their own AI actors at home.
Unsurprisingly, the reaction to these projects is not merely a debate about job protection; it is a weaponized campaign of hostility in a desperate attempt for grifters to keep hold of their unearned monopoly, so they once again go to their standby.
Lies and threats!
The lies are on a spectrum, depending on how susceptible they deem you to be to them, going from “AI is theft,” to “Well, if it’s ethically trained it could be alright for some things but not for the real work,” which is really just their way of ghettoizing it so you won’t do anything of real significance to make a place for yourself in the market they seek to forever dominate.
“AI will make it a hell of a lot easier to solve the problems created by actors and bloated productions.”
The legal threat is wielded by the guilds in contract disputes, holding up the works as the studios hemorrhage money, while the cultural threat is leveled by high-profile personalities. This sentiment, encapsulated by commentator Chris Ray Gun’s call to “Bully anyone promoting this stuff into oblivion. Generative AI users, collaborators, and CEOs should never be able to walk the streets without getting spit on or having their coffee slapped out of their hands,” is designed to create more of the toxic environment that we’re already all too familiar with, so fierce that anyone wanting to use this new tool to empower themselves, to create productions will wonder if they’ll be the next target. If this is how things are going to go, then only major studios can afford the legal and public relations shield required to use AI, and that well could be by design. The true aim of this organized cultural attack is to scare away the independent creators who want to march to the beat of their own drum but lack that shield, thus eliminating the only real, agile competition to the established, guild-controlled system. The fact that they would employ this tactic after the death and destruction we’ve all seen recently is a testament to just how sick and depraved their “main character syndrome” has made them.
Others think they can just use all the commotion to jockey for a position they’d never be able to accomplish on their own merit, looking for that camera looking for a sound bite that would never be asked from them usually, not thinking about the damage their hot takes might do to someone just trying to do something new and different, where they were never able to before.
This brings us to the core of the studios’ calculation. The rise of AI makes it easier to solve the problems the industry has spent the last decade creating. Studio heads indulged their expensive talent, signing off on content that routinely scolded its own consumers, leading to a precipitous decline in quality and audience trust. Now, when the industry is tanking, executives are asking themselves, why should they endlessly invest in a project starring adult-children who can’t stop themselves from publicly attacking the consumer, demanding continuous pay raises, and shutting down productions with another strike? Why not, instead, invest a fraction of that cost into a synthetic asset that will not talk back, lecture, or insult them?
