The Race to Build AI's TikTok

Underwater fashion shows, the 'auntiverse': TV and movies face another time-sucking attention stealer and what Hollywood can do about it while it still can

AWAY WE GO A tinkerer put his vacation videos into AI to create a wild, surreal video that shows him morphing through his trip, offering a glimpse into how AI content is becoming its own distinct media type. (screenshot)

The generative AI revolution is not even two years old, but the AI in Hollywood conversation feels akin to discussing automation in Detroit in the 1980s. Yes, robot welders annoyed unions and created more efficient assembly lines, but the cars being made didn’t look all that different. Back then, if we were a worker in the sad cavern of a Ford plant, we may not have been able to contemplate how automation would eventually lead us, decades later, to Tesla — and if you’ve seen a Waymo in Los Angeles in the last six months, driverless cars.

As we’ve explored since Reel AI launched, artificial intelligence can play a role today in everything from script coverage to voice dubbing to de-aging actors. As cool as some of that tech is, Hollywood’s leaders need to think beyond using AI just to save money and use it to create never-before-seen spectacles and experiences such as real-time, personalized highlight reels. 

But I didn’t think we’ve had that Tesla moment yet, much less a Waymo one . . . until I saw a guy put his vacation videos into AI and create one of the most surreal, can’t-turn-away experiences I’ve ever seen. In the span of 80 seconds, the guy develops water jets for legs, transforms into a surfing dinosaur, breaks into dozens of lizards and so forth.

The most disruptive forces to media have always been totally new environments that time-shifted fundamental behaviors away from the privileged and protected spaces of old media and into new, less stodgy destinations altogether. Think of TV upending radio and cable ruining the protective gardens of network TV. More recently, consider that Hollywood never properly anticipated the most disruptive forces to its core existence: user-generated video (YouTube), SVOD (Netflix) and the whirling kaleidoscope of short-form entertainment (TikTok).

So it’s worth asking: Could AI not only disrupt the process of making content but also time-shift viewing into new formats altogether? What if that fundamental shift leads to different viewing behaviors, which would thereby lead to different viewing destinations? If that’s the case, when one considers how AI will disrupt the dusty backlots of studios, we need to accept that the answer might be found outside of Hollywood and that this answer could eat up hours of consumer time that could be spent watching films or series.

In this article, you’ll learn about:

• Evidence there’s a market for a dedicated platform for AI content

• Several micro-communities to watch where we see interest in AI content emerging

• The wannabe ‘HBO of AI’

• What current attempts at a destination site devoted to AI content look like

• Several current examples of weird, seemingly impossible video manipulations getting people excited

• Hard lessons for Hollywood learned from the rise of Twitch, Crunchyroll and TikTok

• How Hollywood should respond to this nascent medium (and it’s probably not to litigate)