Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

The Fusion of Hollywood and Gaming: “Immersive Media”

Let’s break down why this fusion is likely and what it might look like:

  • The Limitations of Passive Media: Traditional movies and TV shows are passive experiences. You watch and listen, but you don’t interact. Video games, on the other hand, are inherently interactive. As AI and XR technologies advance, the desire for more agency within our entertainment will grow.
  • The Power of XR: XR technologies (VR, AR, MR) offer the potential to create truly immersive experiences, blurring the lines between the real and the virtual. This is the key to making the “playable movie” concept a reality.
  • AI as the Game Master: AI agents will act as dynamic “game masters,” adapting the story, characters, and environment based on the user’s actions, preferences, and even their emotional state. This goes beyond the branching narratives of current interactive movies; it’s about creating a truly responsive and personalized experience.
  • Generative AI: Building the Worlds: Generative AI will be used to create the assets of these immersive experiences:
    • Environments: Generating realistic or stylized virtual worlds on the fly.
    • Characters: Creating believable and responsive non-player characters (NPCs) with unique personalities and behaviors.
    • Dialogue: Generating dynamic dialogue that adapts to the user’s choices and actions.
    • Story Elements: Weaving together plot points, quests, and challenges based on the user’s preferences and the evolving narrative.
  • User Agency and Control: Players (or “experiencers”) will have varying degrees of control over the narrative:
    • Full Control: In some cases, they might be able to make major decisions that drastically alter the story.
    • Guided Experience: In other cases, the AI might guide them through a more structured narrative, but still allow for meaningful choices and interactions.
    • Passive Observation with Customization: Even in a more passive mode, users could customize the experience by choosing their preferred characters, viewpoints, or emotional tone.

The “Star Wars” Example (Revisited as Immersive Media):

Imagine experiencing Star Wars not as a movie, but as an immersive media experience:

  1. Choose Your Role: You might choose to be a Jedi Knight, a smuggler, a Rebel pilot, or even a civilian caught up in the conflict.
  2. Enter the Galaxy: Using XR technology (a VR headset, AR glasses, or a mixed-reality environment), you step into the Star Wars universe.
  3. The AI Adapts: The AI agent, acting as your game master, crafts a story tailored to your chosen role, your preferences (action, intrigue, romance), and your current mood.
  4. Interact with the World: You can interact with characters, explore locations, engage in combat, solve puzzles, and make choices that affect the outcome of the story.
  5. Dynamic Storytelling: The AI generates new scenes, dialogue, and challenges on the fly, ensuring that your experience is unique and engaging.
  6. Social interaction: You may encounter Avatars controlled by either AI, or real humans.
  7. Persistent changes: Actions by both AI and humans could alter the world in a meaningful, persistent way.

The Implications of Immersive Media:

  • The End of “Canon”? The concept of a fixed, canonical storyline might become less relevant. Everyone’s experience would be, to some extent, their own personal canon.
  • New Forms of Storytelling: This opens up entirely new possibilities for storytelling, blurring the lines between traditional narrative structures and open-world game design.
  • The Rise of “Experiential IP”: Intellectual property would be licensed not as fixed stories, but as interactive worlds and systems.
  • New Business Models: We might see subscription services for access to these immersive experiences, or microtransactions for specific content or customizations.
  • The Metaverse, Redefined: This vision of immersive media is much closer to the true potential of the “metaverse” than the current focus on virtual social spaces. It’s about creating truly interactive and personalized digital worlds.

Challenges and Considerations:

  • Technological Hurdles: Creating truly believable and responsive immersive experiences will require significant advancements in AI, XR technology, and computational power.
  • Accessibility: Ensuring that these experiences are accessible to everyone, regardless of their physical abilities or economic status, is crucial.
  • Content Moderation: Managing user-generated content and preventing harmful or inappropriate behavior in these interactive worlds will be a major challenge.
  • The “Reality” Question: The lines between the real and the virtual will become increasingly blurred. This raises philosophical and ethical questions about the nature of experience and reality itself.

In conclusion, the fusion of Hollywood and video games, powered by AI and XR, is poised to create a new era of “immersive media,” where everyone can “play” their own personalized version of their favorite stories. This represents a fundamental shift in how we consume and interact with entertainment, moving from passive observation to active participation and co-creation. It’s a future where the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the storyteller and the audience, become increasingly blurred, offering both incredible opportunities and significant challenges.

Post-AI Hollywood: The End of a ‘Shared Reality’

The Breakdown of “Shared Reality” in Entertainment

Several factors are driving this potential shift:

  • AI-Powered Personalization: As we discussed, AI agents will be capable of understanding individual preferences, moods, and contexts with incredible precision. This makes it technically feasible to tailor content at a granular level.
  • Generative AI: Technologies like deepfakes, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and advanced natural language processing are rapidly improving. This allows for the dynamic modification and even creation of content on the fly.
  • The Rise of Interactive Media: Video games, interactive narratives, and other forms of interactive media are already blurring the lines between passive consumption and active participation.
  • Declining Mass Media: The era of mass media, where everyone watched the same few TV channels or went to see the same blockbuster movies, is waning. Streaming services and the internet have fragmented the audience, creating a long tail of niche content.
  • User Agency: Users now expect to be able to change and adjust settings in a way that previous generations did not.

How Individualized IP Experiences Might Work:

Here’s how this might play out with, say, a Star Wars property:

  1. Licensing the “Building Blocks”: Lucasfilm (or Disney) wouldn’t just license the right to show a pre-made movie. Instead, they would license the “building blocks” of the Star Wars universe:
    • Characters (models, voices, personalities)
    • Settings (planets, spaceships, environments)
    • Story elements (plot points, conflicts, themes)
    • Visual and audio assets (music, sound effects, visual styles)
    • “Rules” of the universe (how the Force works, what technology is possible, etc.)
  2. The AI Agent as Director/Writer: Your personal AI agent, knowing your preferences and current mood, would act as the director, writer, and editor of your personal Star Wars experience.
  3. Dynamic Content Generation: Based on your profile, the AI might:
    • Change the Plot: Alter the storyline to emphasize certain characters or themes you enjoy. Maybe you prefer political intrigue, so your version focuses on the Senate. Maybe you love action, so your version has more space battles.
    • Adjust the Tone: Make the story lighter or darker, more humorous or more serious, depending on your mood.
    • Recast Characters: Use deepfake technology to replace actors with others you prefer, or even insert you or your friends into the story (with appropriate consent, of course).
    • Modify the Pacing: Speed up or slow down the story based on your attention span and preferences.
    • Create New Scenes: Generate entirely new scenes or dialogue to fill in gaps or explore alternative storylines.
    • Change the Ending: Give you a happy, sad, or ambiguous ending, depending on what you’re in the mood for.
  4. Interactive Elements: You might be given choices that influence the plot, or the AI might adapt the story in real-time based on your reactions.

The End of Water Cooler Moments? (And the Rise of New Ones)

This individualized approach to entertainment would have significant consequences:

  • No Shared Experience: The traditional “water cooler” conversation about the latest episode or movie might disappear. You and your friend could watch “the same” Star Wars movie, but have completely different experiences.
  • New Forms of Social Interaction: Instead of discussing the same content, people might share their versions of the content, comparing how the AI tailored the experience for them. This could lead to new forms of social interaction and creative expression.
  • The “Meta-Narrative”: While the specific details might differ, there would likely still be an overarching “meta-narrative” or framework that provides some common ground. People could discuss the general themes and concepts of the Star Wars universe, even if their individual experiences are unique.
  • The Rise of “Prompt Engineering”: The ability to craft effective prompts for your AI agent, guiding it to create the kind of experience you want, could become a valuable skill.
  • Remix Culture on Steroids: This would be the ultimate extension of remix culture, where users are not just consuming content, but actively shaping it.

Challenges and Concerns:

  • Copyright and Licensing: The legal and logistical complexities of licensing IP in this way would be enormous.
  • Quality Control: How do you ensure that the AI-generated content maintains a certain level of quality and coherence?
  • Artistic Integrity: What does this mean for the role of the artist and the concept of artistic vision?
  • Bias and Manipulation: AI-generated content could reinforce existing biases or be used to manipulate viewers.
  • The “Echo Chamber” Effect: Will we become trapped in our own personalized entertainment bubbles, never exposed to new ideas or perspectives?
  • Loss of Communal Experience: There’s value in shared cultural experiences. What happens when that is lost?

In conclusion, the future of entertainment is likely to be one of increasing personalization, driven by AI and generative technologies. The idea of a single, shared “reality” in media may fade, replaced by a multitude of individualized experiences, crafted on the fly by AI agents using licensed IP as their raw material. This raises profound questions about the nature of storytelling, the role of the artist, and the social fabric of our increasingly fragmented world. While it offers exciting possibilities for customized and engaging entertainment, it also demands careful consideration of the potential pitfalls and ethical implications.

From Passive Consumption to Active Co-Creation: The Post-AI Hollywood Experience

Today, we choose what to watch from a (relatively) static library of content. Streaming services offer recommendations, but they’re based on broad categories and past viewing history. The future you envision is far more dynamic and responsive:

  1. The Empathetic TV: Your TV (or whatever display device we use in the future) isn’t just a screen; it’s an AI-powered interface. It uses facial recognition, not just for identification, but for emotional analysis. It detects your mood – tired, stressed, happy, curious, etc. – with a high degree of accuracy. This goes beyond simple emotion recognition; it might also consider your physiological state (heart rate, skin temperature, etc.) via subtle sensors.
  2. The AI Agent as Entertainment Curator: Your personal AI agent, the same one managing your digital life and deploying “dittos,” also acts as your entertainment concierge. It has a deep understanding of your:
    • Tastes: Your preferred genres, actors, directors, themes, and even specific stylistic elements.
    • Viewing History: Not just what you watched, but how you reacted to it (did you fast-forward through certain scenes? Did you rewatch others?).
    • Current Context: Your schedule, recent events in your life (as far as you allow it to know), and even the weather outside.
    • Long Term Goals: Is your goal to relax? To Learn?
  3. Dynamic Content Selection and Generation: Based on your mood and the AI’s comprehensive understanding of you, it doesn’t just recommend existing content. It might:
    • Curate a Personalized Playlist: Select a sequence of shows, movies, or even short clips perfectly tailored to your current emotional state.
    • Modify Existing Content: Adjust the pacing, music, or even the color grading of a show to better match your mood. Imagine a normally fast-paced action movie becoming more deliberate and atmospheric if you’re feeling contemplative.
    • Generate New Content: This is where it gets truly revolutionary. The AI might generate new content on the fly, tailored specifically to you and your mood. This could range from:
      • Personalized Storytelling: Creating short stories, interactive narratives, or even entire “episodes” featuring characters and themes you enjoy.
      • Dynamic Music Generation: Composing original music that matches your emotional state.
      • Abstract Visual Experiences: Generating abstract visual patterns and soundscapes designed to soothe, energize, or inspire you.
      • “Deepfake” Mashups: Seamlessly integrating you or your loved ones (with your consent, of course!) into existing movies or shows, creating a hyper-personalized viewing experience. (This has significant ethical implications, as discussed below).
  4. Interactive and Adaptive Entertainment: The entertainment experience becomes interactive and adaptive. The AI might:
    • Adjust the Story in Real-Time: Based on your reactions (facial expressions, body language, even brainwave activity), the AI could subtly alter the plot, pacing, or tone of the generated content.
    • Offer Choices: Present you with branching narratives or interactive elements, allowing you to influence the direction of the story.
    • Create “Living” Worlds: Generate persistent virtual worlds that evolve and change over time, based on your interactions and the actions of other AI agents.
  5. Beyond the Screen: This personalized entertainment experience wouldn’t be limited to your TV. It could extend to:
    • Augmented Reality: Overlaying digital content onto your physical environment.
    • Ambient Intelligence: Adjusting the lighting, temperature, and sound in your home to create the perfect atmosphere.
    • Wearable Devices: Providing haptic feedback or other sensory stimulation to enhance the experience.

Ethical Considerations and Potential Downsides:

This hyper-personalized, AI-driven entertainment future raises several important ethical concerns:

  • Privacy: The amount of personal data required to power this system is enormous. How do we protect this data from misuse?
  • Manipulation: Could this technology be used to manipulate our emotions or influence our behavior?
  • Addiction: The potential for creating highly addictive and immersive entertainment experiences is significant.
  • Authenticity: What are the implications of blurring the lines between real and generated content?
  • The “Filter Bubble” Effect: Will this technology lead to us only being exposed to content that confirms our existing biases and preferences?
  • Loss of Serendipity: Will we lose the joy of discovering new and unexpected things if our entertainment is always perfectly tailored to our known tastes?
  • Creative control: who has the ultimate control? The user or the creators of the platform?

The Future of Hollywood:

This shift would fundamentally change the role of Hollywood. Instead of creating mass-market content, studios might focus on:

  • Building AI Engines: Developing the AI engines that power these personalized entertainment experiences.
  • Creating “Raw Materials”: Generating vast libraries of characters, settings, storylines, and visual assets that can be used by AI to create customized content.
  • Crafting “Meta-Narratives”: Designing overarching storylines and frameworks that AI agents can adapt and personalize.
  • Curating Experiences: Focusing on the overall design and curation of the AI-driven entertainment experience, rather than just creating individual pieces of content.
  • Live performances: A renewed focus on experiences that cannot be easily replicated.

In conclusion, the post-AI Hollywood could be a world of hyper-personalized, dynamic, and interactive entertainment, where your AI agent acts as your personal storyteller, composer, and director, crafting experiences tailored not just to your tastes, but to your moment-by-moment emotional state. This future is both exciting and potentially unsettling, raising profound questions about privacy, autonomy, and the very nature of entertainment itself. It is a future that puts the individual viewer at the very center of the creative process.

Worried About J-Law

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to be worried about Jennifer Lawrence. She countenance continues to be…sad. It makes me wonder if she has a broken heart ever sense all those nudes of her were leaked a few years ago.

Are you ok, babe?

I think about this possibility way too much.

J-Law used to be so chipper and have such an effervescent personality that her more subdued presence makes me suspicious that something deeper is going on. And yet, she is a mom now and older and so maybe she’s just matured?

What The Next Tech-Romance Movie Will Be About, Probably

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I suspect the next “Her” will be something to do with an AI getting a body. It will feature a lot of sex and nudity done by some starlet that wants to make a name for herself in Hollywood.

That seems the next inevitable step in the “guy falls in love with an AI” genre of movies. Though, to make it more interesting, I would have it so the female AI was smitten with the guy and pestered him into a relationship. Something like that.

I would write the screenplay for such a movie myself, but, alas, I’m old, don’t know how and I live in the middle of nowhere. This has been a problem all my life — I can come up with really great ideas, but there’s always some reason why I can’t actually write them.

But I will admit that I’ve gotten better — I have, in fact, written a novel and am re-writing at the moment. And I have a number of short stories that I want to write forthwith.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to develop this type of movie. It would be really good.

The Only Thing Stopping Me From Throwing Myself Back Into Working On My Passion Project Novel Is The Fucking Election

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw yet ANOTHER person who was clearly interested in my passion project novel poking around this blog. They went from looking at the link about Lisbeth Salander to that about Corrie Yee. Now, I’m by nature extremely paranoid, so my first reaction is — “Oh, shit, someone is going to cherry pick my idea for some sort of screenplay.”

My heroine — who looks somewhat like Corrie Yee in my imagination — has a sleeve tattoo like Megan Fox does in this picture. (Totally different design, though)

And, yet, you can’t live your life in fear and paranoia. So lulz, I’m going to keep working on the novel until something pops out that makes it clear that my idea has, in fact, been “stolen.”

My hunch is, if it is “stolen,” it would be that two elements of my dream, my vision which are publicly known — that the heroine Union Pang would have a sleeve tattoo and look a lot like an older version of Corrie Yee — is what would be used in any screenplay.

Corrie Yee

The issue is — I’ve been working on this fucking thing so long that it’s inevitable that some element of it would be used independently by someone else. This just would be an instance of someone using cherry picking some elements I put out pubically.

I live in oblivion — how was I supposed to know anyone would give enough of a shit to do such a thing?

There are any number of reasons why someone would be interested in my novel’s heroine other than stealing the idea, I’m going to just chill out for the time being.

I am just about ready to throw myself back into working on the novel, but for the fact that I’m locked in neutral, not knowing how the 2024 election is going to turn out. What I think I’m going to do is at some point next week, I’m going to lurch back into my normal headspace and THEN I will start to write a lot again.

Raising The Stakes With Scifi

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I think I’m just about ready to get back to working on a few novels. The one novel I’ve been working on the longest — the one that is meant to be part of a six-novel project — is set to be reworked significantly. The chief reason is that the stakes simply aren’t very high at the moment.

The novel is just about one woman’s obsession with owning a small town newspaper. That’s it. But I’ve decided that by leaning into an already-there scifi element of the novel that I can significantly raise the stakes. And, to a certain extent, I can give the novel something of a trick ending, cueing up the next novel in the series. (Which, at the moment, is much more of a traditional murder mystery.)

As part of that, I’m going to have to sit down and rewrite a whole lot of the novel, which is going to slow me down. My goal is now to query something, anything about a year from now.

Ultimately, the six novel series I’m working on will produce an American Lisbeth Salander.

Of course, there continues to be the issue of stripping being a big part of the novel. This is going to make a lot of literary agents blanch, I’m afraid. But that’s my vision for the novel, so there you go. And, what’s more, I still have a few other scifi novels rolling around in my mind that I my piviot towards if all else fails.

Something that doesn’t have the spicyness that the main, passion project novel currently has.

But I am well aware that if I don’t hurry up, I’m going to be in my 60s before I become a published author, if I ever do. And I am well aware there are many, many, MANY reasons — on the face of it at least — why I will *never* get published.

I’m too old. Too bonkers. The list goes on.

Yet, you have to have hope, you know?

One thing I continue to worry about is, of course, the whole Trump situation. I refuse, however, to just be in neutral until the election. I have to get something, anything done. So, starting today, I’m going to stop mulling things so much and start to read, watch and write what I can.

Revisiting The Potential Future Of Hollywood & AI-Generated ‘Immersive Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.

It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.

We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.

So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.

There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.

Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.

And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.

The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.

I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.

I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.

We Need A New ‘Her’ Movie

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If I was 20 years younger, I would probably be seriously interested in learning how to write screenplays. But, alas, barring something I totally can’t expect, that moment in my life is long past.

Yet, that doesn’t stop me from thinking up movie ideas.

One movie idea that I think would be pretty cool would be a movie that was the inverse of “Her,” where the AI was the aggressor. The AI pesters a man during the long, winding path towards it getting a Replicant-like body.

I think that would be pretty interesting.

Another movie idea would be one that would be a bit more dark. It would be about the practical implications of a man falling in love with an android with an LLM-type mind in it and how his family reacts to such a futureshock type thing.

Both of these ideas are pretty good, I think. But, like I said, I’m just too old to do anything with them. But I am still going to press forward with the novels I’m working on.

Even though I’m old, I’m not THAT old yet.

If I’m not a published author — in some way — by my late 50s then…oh boy, is that going to be existential. But I still have some time before that happens.

A Rough Screenplay Treatment

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s a rough screenplay treatment that has popped in my head of late for some reason.

The setup is that we learn that the Greek and Roman gods were real. They were just invisible (to humans) multi-dimensional machine intelligence creatures. They messed with the affairs of Man all the time until Christianity began to take over the world.

Or something like that.

I just can’t figure out what type of plot to give the story now.