NBC’s Saturday Night Live aired a sketch mocking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last weekend.
A day earlier, an AI-generated music video took a similar swipe, featuring a fake Amodei singing “Hit the Breaks Except for Me.”
I laughed harder at the AI version.
Created with an AI tool called Slopcannon, it needed little more than an audio file, a few images, and an idea. Compare that with the SNL sketch, which took a team of highly paid professional writers, actors, and a major TV studio.
This is a glimpse of where entertainment may be headed. And as I’ve argued before, it’s both an opportunity and a threat for Hollywood.
AI can help studios make films and TV shows faster and cheaper. But it also lets individuals produce videos more easily, creating more competition for viewers’ attention. (I’ve watched the Slopcannon video more than the SNL skit, for instance).
Yes, plenty of AI-generated videos are still terrible. Then again, so is a surprising amount of human-made content on social media — and even on Netflix. The quality gap is closing.
Something sensible
DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks Hollywood should embrace AI, the way it embraced other new technology in the past.
“As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling,” he wrote on X. “Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.”
After all the extreme AI warnings of the past few weeks, it’s a relief to read something sensible.
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