Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

AI & ‘Undead’ Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve now heard two different respected podcasts broach some variation of a future that I’ve been ranting about for some time now — the idea that soon there won’t be any art but AI generated art. So, 30 years from now, there won’t be any “mass media” anymore in the sense that we’ll all be watching very, very specific entertainment generated not just for us specifically, but a specific mood.

So, rather than paying $15 a month for a streaming service, we’ll pay a similar amount for access to the bodyscans of our favorite Hollywood stars. Hollywood will soon enough be in an “eternal now” populated with undead stars who may not even exist at all, depending on how sentimental you might be for some star you saw before the AI generated art revolution took over.

I still think that there is a least possibility that in the future the goal of actors will be not to make it in Hollywood, but rather make it on the stage so they can then turn around, get a full body scan and make all their money passively off of the licensing of those scans. It’s at least possible there will be a huge Broadway revival for macro economic and technological reasons.

And, what’s more, all of this could happen very, very fast and very very soon. It could be — especially with a Hollywood writers’ strike looming — that we’ll wake up in 18 months and ChatGPT 8 is spitting out all of the content that we consume. The streaming wars will seem very, very quaint.

Of course, all of this may have to wait for the “Fourth Turning” to sort itself out and it could be that much of the world will be rebuilding itself after several limited nuclear wars because the United States was too busy imploding to keep the world order.

That got kind of dark pretty quick.

Anyway, if I had any money at the moment — which I don’t — I would short Hollywood and long AI.

Wait, What: Is Shailene Woodley Married To A Woman?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

All I have on this is a blind item I saw somewhere — I think Tik-Tok — that suggested one of my favorite crunchy-granola celebrities, Shailene Woodley, may be married to a woman.

I could care less one way or another if she is, and, let’s be honest — no one reads this blog other than my stalkers and family members who for some strange reason are curious what’s on my mind without telling me to my face what they’re doing it. (Ugh.)

But it IS fun to think about.

I really like Ms. Woodley and she seems — at least relative to my media world — to have dropped off the face of the earth. It’s all very curious. It would be a fun-interesting thing to see the entertainment press — which actively hides Kaia Gerber’s activity in the lady pond — have to explain how the poor man’s Jennifer Lawrence is into women.

But, lulz. Whatever. This is probably bullshit. I wish her well, regardless.

We’re On The Cusp Of AI Generated Celebrity Porn Being A *REAL* Problem

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems to me that, in the end, the first tranche of AI-related regulation will probably concern AI generated celebrity porn. Whenever there is a new technology, porn is usually the thing that everyone uses it for most effectively right out the gate.

If my Twitter feed is any indication, a bunch of fucking hornytoad Incels are going to start making all of their dirtiest dreams come true by generating massive amounts of porn using celebrity images so good that they look very, very real.

As such, I think it might be possible that some sort of legislation that would one demand celebrity approval or compensation may get enacted as well as some sort of watermark requirements. Or, put another away, AI-related regulation is going to start streaming out of Congress far, far sooner than you might think.

We’re just about to reach a tipping point where the current Wild West of AI simply is no longer viable. I say this in the context of the 2024 presidential election cycle beginning to pick up steam. Regulating AI generated celebrity porn will just be the first wave of it all because it’s sexxy and everyone likes to think about porn.

How Netflix Could Challenge Disney

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve given it some thought, and here’s a hypothetical media goliath that would give Disney a run for its money. See, here’s what you do — combine Paramount with Warner Bros Discovery and NetFlix.

The reason why this works is if you combine Paramount with Warner Bros Discovery rather than NBCUniversal, you don’t have the touchy issue of what the fuck to do with CNN. It would be easy to fuse CBS News with CNN, something that has long been talked about.

Meanwhile, if you fuse Netflix with this combination, it’s a win-win: Netflix gets a massive back catalog and two has-beens in the streaming wars get an instant link into Netflix massive subscriber base.

Remember, Disney is fucking huge. Enormous. And so the combination of these three companies would allow this new and improved Netflix the ability to challenge Disney head-on.

Do I think this will happen — probably not. There are too many variables and given what idiots corporate suits are in general, it’s far more likely that it would be Warner Bros Discovery merging with NBCUniversal. Then we all spend a year watching as the politics of Who Will Own CNN gets fought over in a very, very public manner.

This is Hilarious: Allegedly, Kaia Gerber & Cara Delevingne Were Back At It After The Oscars

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Pete Davidson may get all the PR for his “big dick energy,” but it’s Cara Delevingne who is the DL MVP of Hollywood’s collective sexlife. The woman can not be stopped.

Just “friends.”

But her amazing ability to bed female celebrities is obscured because Hollywood doesn’t want us Poors to know what’s going on. If the Hollywood press was clear about what they knew of Delevingne sapphic exploits, it would raise a lot of questions from us Poors that they the Powers That Be would just rather not be asked.

The issue — we Poors just can’t process that the amount of bi-sexualism found in the upper ranks of society. This is especially the case for women. The Elite hold we Poors in such low regard, that they actively gaslight us whenever Delevingne beds yet ANOTHER high end Hollywood starlet.

What I care about is not so much who Delevingne beds, but the fact that the Hollywood press is gaslighting us. This is really grating on my nerves when things like this happen — apparently, Cindy Crawford’s daughter might be hooking up with Delevingne, despite having a “boyfriend.”

The rumor mill has it that the two women were all over each other at some post-Oscar function. I first became aware that they were OBVIOUSLY fucking when I saw a picture of the two women in a two-person cardigan gifted to them by none other than Taylor Swift of all people.

Given that fucking Delevingne is some sort of rite of passage for any hot woman in Hollywood, the idea that the Hollywood press would wilfully not mention what was going on between the two women when the picture was taken is very, very annoying to me

Just tell the fucking truth, people.

Woke Hollywood Is Sexless Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the reasons why I’m so pleased with the appearance of the movie No Hard Feelings is it’s a saucy, spicy “hard comedy” like I remember back in the 1980s. With the rise of Hollywood’s bifurcation into Woke and Comic Book genre movies all the sauciness has been drained from the movie going experience.

I fucking hate this woke test.

It’s all very strange.

Most people explain it this way: with the rise of abundant online porn, the #MeToo moment and “intimacy co-ordinators” Hollywood has just given up on giving adults the type of entertainment they once had.

I definitely believe there is credence to this idea, just like there is credence to the idea that all the angry young men who might otherwise start a punk or rock band now are keyboard warriors on Reddit.

And, yet, the case could be made that if we go from the success of Cocaine Bear to an equally successful No Hard Feelings that all the quibbles that Hollywood has had about saucy, raunchy hard comedies will fade away.

Hollywood as it should be. Wink.

But the thing I’m worried about is sexless the “woke cancel culture mob” is when it comes to entertainment. Gen Z apparently wants everyone to be “realistic” (read: unattractive) in their media and they also totally “over” any sort of sexxy time in entertainment for some strange reason.

So, we have no sex and we have no rock and the only thing we have left is drugs.

It’s all very curious. But there is a market for adult-oriented, saucy entertainment like The Wolf of Wall Street, The Wedding Crashers and The Hangover.

So, there is a possibility that if No Hard Feelings is a hit that Jennifer Lawrence will join Tom Cruise as someone who “saved Hollywood’s ass.” I do wonder how much the pandemic is responsible for this New Era in Hollywood in the sense that it scared the ever living shit out of movie studio executives to the point that they decided to go back to basics.

What The Fuck Is Going On With Henry Cavill?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While I’m a fan of James Bond and also was impressed with Henry Cavill’s performance in that one Mission:Impossible movie he was in….I really don’t know the specifics of what I’m about to write about.

I know, in vague terms, that something strange is going on with Cavill and I’m just too lazy to do much investigation.

But one thing I do know is that, for some reason, Millie Bobbie Brown allegedly had a “strictly professional” relationship with Cavill on the set of Enola Homes. This is curious because why would she go out of her way to note such a thing? And why would Cavill be so distant?

There is a lot of bad buzz about Cavill about things that if you’re all that interested in, you can look into yourself. But, let’s just say, some of abrupt changes in Cavill’s career may be explained by these bad vibes.

Who knows. I still half want him to be the next James Bond. He would be great.

Could A Writer’s Strike Prompt Hollywood Studios To Experiment With AI Written Scripts?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was so busy thinking about how a recession might cause the widespread adoption of AI that I totally missed a scenario whereby a Hollywood writers’ strike was the thing that caused it to happen.

The Robots of Hollywood.

So, the thinking goes, should there be a major, long-term Hollywood writers’ strike, the studios might, out of desperation, begin to experiment with AI-generated TV and movie scripts. This sounds pretty dystopian and hysterical, but it’s exactly a shock to the system like a strike that might cause the adoption of AI to write scripts.

And, remember, the issue is — new technology just has to be good enough. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough.

It will be curious to see how things work out. It could be that AI just isn’t developed enough for my fears to become a reality. And, yet, I suspect if a writers’ strike lasts long enough that someone, somewhere is going to at least try to see if they can avoid using human writers altogether.

I, For One, Look Forward To A New Chatbot Media Overlords

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It has occured to me I am looking forward to a future where all media is design and personalized for us all on a individual basis. I struggle — and I mean STRUGGLE — to watch ANYTHING on Netflix. I just can’t find anything at all that interests me that I haven’t already seen.

I think, of course, that some of that comes from how difficult is for me to consume media as opposed to produce it. I find myself producing a great deal of writing every day — not that any of it is usable relative to my personal expectations.

Anyway.

It would be nice sit down in front of a TV, have the set scan my face to figure out what my exact mood at that very moment is and then sit down to watch a two hour movie with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin in it, or whomever. I would have access to thousands of actor’s body scans that my digital personal assistant could use to pump out very specific entertainment that I might actually watch.

But that’s probably a decade or so from now. We’re going to have to wade through a civil war / WW3 before we get cool stuff like that. Hopefully, we won’t bomb ourselves into oblivion to the point that we never get to enjoy such “cool stuff” once the Fourth Turning / Great Reset is over

Actors As ‘Ringtones’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Everyone in Hollywood needs to read David Brin’s scifi novel “Kiln People.” One could posit it as an allegory for what may be about to happen to Hollywood within a decade or so. In the novel, as I recall, scans of actors are treated much the same way as ring tones were in the past.

As an aside, I think we’re all going to have to get used to the idea that Hollywood may soon be in an eternal “now” in which the stars that existed about the time of the AI revolution are forever making the same content over and over and over again as if they live forever.

The need for this to exist for Hollywood was grazed — but not touched directly — by Matthew Belloni when he said, rhetorically, that it’s not like Michael C. Hall is going to want to make Dexter shows for the rest of his life.

Well, lulz, what if he didn’t? What if the producers of the show just used his body scan and kept making the show forever — or at least as long as it was profitable — allowing Hall to live passively off the use of his scan?

I think that is a very, very real possibility. There may be a pause in the adoption of such technology because we have a Second American Civil War and WW3 to get through, but in the end, I think AI could totally transform the very idea of what entertainment is.

Or, to put another way, instead of paying $15 for a monthly Netflix subscription, you will pay the same amount for a license of the body scans of your favorite actors to use in, I don’t know, the metaverse or some shit.

All of this plays into my belief that we’re careening towards a Petite Singularity. Things could change so dramatically in the infotainment industry that we just can’t keep up.