China's AI Made Slick Memes of Fat U.S. Workers. H'wood Should be Scared
A new category leader is poised to do to entertainment what TikTok did to Silicon Valley — at $79 a year
Erik Barmack writes every other Tue. for paid subscribers. He recently covered the billion-dollar opportunity in eternal celebrities; OpenAI’s Ghiblification moment as a wake-up call for Hollywood; and how AI fan fiction is entertainment’s next cash cow.
“I’ve been contacted by a variety of heads of studios who’ve said, What the hell is it?” writer-director-showrunner David S. Goyer told me during The Ankler’s Business of Entertainment track at NAB Show, explaining the new sci-fi world Emergence that he’s building on Incention, the AI-powered platform he’s partnered with to crowdsource the development of new IP and track credit. “Once I explain what it is, they’re like, ‘God, I wish there was a way that we could cut through the red tape and innovate on our side as well.’”
Goyer, who wrote the story for the Dark Knight trilogy and is showrunning Foundation for Apple, could get any meeting he wants at virtually any studio and yet he’s choosing to develop a complex and tech-forward content company. We had a great conversation about why, his take on OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli moment, the state of Hollywood, the power of stories and why the big hits always come out of nowhere. Give it a listen:
The world of generative AI is also one where the hits come from nowhere. Just after I chatted with Goyer and as chaos reigned with President Trump’s tariff policy and he threatened a severe escalation on China, videos started popping up on TikTok — and then quickly everywhere — depicting Americans doing the kind of factory work that the Chinese routinely do, from sewing underwear to making iPhones.
The videos, set to dirgeful Chinese music, devastatingly made their point with obese, exhausted American workers moving at a snail’s pace to produce the cheap goods Americans have grown accustomed to. Some versions swapped in Trump, VP JD Vance, Elon Musk or Patagonia vest-clad finance and tech bros doing menial work, but the point remained the same: This is what the USA would be like if Trump gets his way.
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Maybe it’s not Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, but the videos are effective satire, Chinese propaganda — and cutting-edge AI. Although we don’t know the precise tool used to create these video memes, they bear the hallmarks of Kling AI, a Chinese text-to-video model spun out of a company called Kuaishou (a rival to TikTok’s owner ByteDance), which is heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Fortuitously, Kling released its 2.0 model a week later, and as you’ll see below it is shockingly good and surely giving U.S. rivals OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo a serious case of imposter syndrome.
The new Cold War with China is currently about trade but it’s also about AI — and culture. What was the first thing China did after Trump imposed his tariffs? It reduced the number of U.S. films it would allow into the country. AI supremacy has been seen as vital to each country’s interests since the mid-2010s and that goes well beyond drones. Generative AI is the only thing that can produce propaganda at the speed of culture.
Here we need to consider the profound shift in the geopolitical realm of tech platforms and content. Up until five years ago, every major platform to influence Hollywood came from the U.S. and was an export product: internet browsers, social media platforms, SVOD services. These all stemmed from Silicon Valley. Then came TikTok, the most important platform to be released, which was Chinese, immediately global, a subject for regulation and . . . too big to fail.
If we believe that AI is more transformative than the internet, how can Hollywood ignore the best-in-class video-generation tool, despite its China ties and the enmity that exists between it and the U.S.? In an era where the American government is doubling down on both great power competition with China and domestic AI innovation, where will studios, writers, and creators fit in?
In this issue, I’ll show you:
How fast generative AI video is progressing
Kling’s ability to handle everything from swapping actors to creating action sequences to complex animation
How quickly Kling lets you create a virtual actor from a still photo
Whether it can even fool a mother’s ability to know her own child
How Kling compares to U.S. champions from OpenAI and Google
Why generative video can be more disruptive to Hollywood than TikTok
What China having the world’s best video AI means for movies and TV
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Erik Barmack is a working producer and the founder of Wild Sheep Content. He also runs a news site dedicated to AI in the entertainment industry called AI in Hollywood.
