Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway.

We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years.

And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years.

When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Hollywood never made Steampunk Vampire Hunters of Ganymede, but in the future there will be creators filling every void. There won't be much reason to revisit old catalogues that don't cater to modern audiences unless it's to satisfy curiosity or watch one of the shining diamonds in the rough.

There will be a few legacy titles that endure (Friends, Star Wars), but most of it will be washed away in a sea of infinite attention sinks.

We're about to hit post-scarcity, infinite attention satisfiability. We've already looked over the inflection point, so it doesn't take much imagination to reason what's next.

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Edit: copying my buried comments from below to expand on this.

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I have direct experience with this field.

I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.

We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.

You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.

Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.

Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.

I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.

Yeah, just like how the Odyssey became worthless when people started writing things down, the bible fell into obsolescence with the printing press, and Ulysses was usurped by the internet.

>With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway

That’s just not how humanities work

Yeah I can't wait for "Forest Gump 2", The Simpsons Live Action starring John C. Reilly as Barney, and "Lord of the Rings But It's A Wes Anderson Movie". AI distilling the absolutely worst and most cynical Hollywood trends into full length motion pictures. I've yet to see anything remotely approaching non-slop from AI-generated video.

Thanks, I hate it. Can you point me to any examples of AI-generated content that's actually worth reading/watching/listening to?

Silicon Valley Brain Rot claims another victim. Sad to see.

Art doesnt cease to be art when new forms of art are materializing. Its up to the viewer.

That wasn't the argument.

The argument is that few will watch the majority of WB's back catalogue, because their time is being spent with all the other attention sinks.

This places a monetary value on the content, not a social or cultural value.

It seems most of the things Netflix produces is optimized by the algo for attention. When I feel it directing me gives me the ick. Looking at you Squid Game.

I have direct experience with this field.

I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.

We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.

You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.

Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.

Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.

I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.

I absolutely agree.

It’s also a silly to believe that because it’s old it’s culturally significant. There’s plenty of ancient dross in the back catalogues.

100%.

The back catalogue will have a few scattered gems that you can find amongst the sea of mass media that appealed to its audience at the time. Most of that content no longer relates or makes sense to us. There's also a massive load of dreck and garbage.

People should be realistic about this instead of emotionally invested against AI as the news media has tried to sway this. It's just a tool, and artists are starting to use it productively.

This was already true irrespective of any emerging media.

It's super early, and a lot of artists have issues with controllability that make the tools hard to incorporate. This is quickly changing.

Here's a really small scoped short film made with the limited tools available half a year ago. It accomplished simple storytelling with limited tooling:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc

You're going to see more and more ambitious stuff soon. We're beginning to have the ability to control characters, have consistency, block, and steer.

Tell you what, let's make a bet. I'll bet you $100 that there will not be a successful long form (more than 20 minutes) AI production in the next 10 years.

By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI. By successful, let's say something that wins a non-AI award (For example, an Oscar or Emmy) or receives something like a 70% positive review on rotten tomatoes, IMDB, or some other metacritic platform that is not specifically made for reviewing AI art.

I do not believe the AI will live up to the hype of "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years."

I think we'll see long form AI, I don't think it will be high quality or even something that most people want to watch. The only people that will want to watch that sort of AI slop are AI enthusiasts who want AI to be amazing.

I don't agree with that argument. I am constantly finding new movies and TV shows to watch that I genuinely enjoy, but I still (reasonably often, even) watch or re-watch older content that I end up enjoying just as much.

Flooding the market with AI-generated content -- even if that content is good -- is not going to stop me from watching (or re-watching) older human-created productions.

I don't think I'm all that unique. I don't watch broadcast/cable television anymore, but I know people (especially those less technologically sophisticated, of any ages) who still flip through the on-screen TV guide, and are happy to tune in to watch a 1980s movie on some random channel, ads and all.

"Culturally significant" is the wrong metric, and shows that you don't really understand why people watch what they watch.

People watch all sorts of things, from all different time periods, because they enjoy them. Sometimes those things are "culturally significant", but I'd expect that's not the most common case. Sometimes those things are B-movies from the '70s or brain-candy sitcoms from the '90s.

In the same way AI will replace bland techno and run of the mill lofi hop hop, it’ll do the same for all the cgi crap Dreamworks puts out twice a year.

AI can copy things that are already copied, but you’ll never get something as paradigm shifting as Toy Story 1.

> By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI.

I don't think LLMs can write nuanced character arcs, so let's not include them.

On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?

I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.

If you can make that adjustment, then I think we have a bet.

AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.

Yeah, even I, who is pretty bullish on AI in general, agree in doubting the premise that AI is going to make movies that are so good that people stop having any interest in older movies.

I think it's more likely that once Gen Z is the oldest surviving generation, maybe no one will watch any content longer than a TikTok due to attention span degradation and Hollywood just churns out vertical 2 minute videos direct to phones rather than release movies, and those would be some mixture of AI and human-created work.

Birdemic 3, deathstalker 4, star wars episode N, star wars episode N+1, star wars non-episode A, star wars non-episode [...]

Yeah, boy, I'm glad humans are making novel stuffs.

This already happens without AI, it's just that studios can only produce so many films given the budget, labor, and time constraints.

Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'll have their way.

There will be amazing art made using AI, and AI will enable extremely talented creators that could have never made it in the classical studio system.

Don't be so pessimistic.

We're going to have "Obra Dinn" and "Undertale" equivalents in film soon. Small scale auteurs sharing their mind's eye with you.

It's part of the same phenomenon we see in social media. The first waves of social media and YouTube were predicated on the idea that you either seek out content yourself or view a feed of content you'd already taken action to subscribe to/follow. Services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pivoted to go from "pull" where users select content or stay within their own networks, to a "push" model where the algorithm predicts and autoplays content, mostly from strangers, based on highly accurate predictions of virality and eyeball-retaining potential.

Things like Netflix realized it too and buried the "Continue Watching" at a randomized index in an endless carousel, added Autoplay and even starts autoplaying something different after you finish a series. And of course, newer things like TikTok have always been this way. All these things are, I'd argue, user-hostile in that they're optimizing toward, in the extreme case, complete addiction.

Yeah that is literally all the movies being made by people, unlike AI which has produced groundbreaking creative works.

I agree with that, although for me it's books that I really enjoy currently.

After quitting most of social media, the jump-cutting in a lot of shows and movies nowadays gives me headaches weirdly... maybe that's just me though.

Also, everyone that's at least a teenager has grown up on human produced content - most of this worry will only manifest if there's a generation that strictly prefers AI produced content instead of it just being a complement (e.g. the generated pictures in articles, or automatic clips from Twitch streams)

By a whisker, I would bet you're right. But only because of your clause 'completely done by AI'. And I think that renders the bet kind of irrelevant.

I would also bet that sometime in the next 10 years, we'll have a masterpiece of cinema on our hands where the heavy lifting (visuals, sound, even screenwriting) was largely done by an AI, helpfully nudged and curated at important moments by human experts. Or, by just one person.

> On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?

Yes I exclude that, because the primary reason to say "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years." is that AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors. I'd accept a model trained on motion data or whatever, but I do not think something that augmenting that visual input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.

I'd accept modifications to the bet that would still allow for rapid media production. If the human staffing is virtually identical to what it is today then that's not AI actually reducing costs. Hence, AI needing to do the majority of the labor.

For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above. I'd reject it if the film is "Watch ted go insane in this room" (I think for obvious reasons).

> I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.

We already have that AFAIK. But again, I don't think that's a huge cost or time savings.

> AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.

I agree, it is a tool. I disagree with claims of how much content it will ultimately enable to be produced.

Seems like we should have seen these groundbreaking creative works that have been totally inaccessible to create without AI by now rather than a million "X as a Wes Anderson Movie" trailers. Filmmaking has not been an inaccessible creative endeavor since like the 1910s. Budget price cameras have been with us for a long time. It's a weird AI company invention to suggest there are people who've been shut out of this pursuit for some reason. Creators don't need to wait around for AI to generate slop out of prompts, they can make movies.

I'm willing to modify the bet to "Just one person does all the labor with AI as the primary tool".

What I meant by "completely done by AI" is that AI is doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Sound, visuals, script and ultimately humans are just acting as the director of that AI.

In otherwords, a masterpiece of cinema created by one person and AI prompts. Masterpiece being judged by the above success criteria. I won't accept some spam film that an AI magazine touts as being a masterpiece.

> Yes I exclude that,

So humans steering diffusion is off limits? No Krea, no Invoke, no articulated humans?

It's like you're taking away Premiere or Final Cut here. Text prompts are not the currency of AI film. Controllability levers are essential to this whole endeavor.

> I do not think something that augmenting that input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.

You haven't spent much time on set, then. An animator can do a performance capture on their webcam and adjust the IK. That's way different than booking a sound stage, renting an Arri Alexa and lenses, and bringing out a whole cast and crew. Set dec, wardrobe, makeup, lighting versus the moral equivalent of a Kinect and a garage studio.

My 6 AM call times, early mornings climbing up to the top shelf of the prop house to grab random tubas and statues, and signing countless legal forms and insurance paperwork all beg to differ with your claims here.

> AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors.

I don't think it necessitates this at all. Kids are going to be flocking to the media to turn themselves into anime VTubers and Han Solos and furries and whatever they can dream up.

Artists want to art. They're going to flock to this. We're going to have to open up the tech for that reason alone.

I'm sure fast moving marketers and the cottage industry of corporate workplace training videos won't use humans, but the creative side will. ElevenLabs is great, but there's also a reason why they hired Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Jack Black in the Mario movie.

> For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above.

I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.

> Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

It is already starting too. Click on some random 'read a sci-fi story' and your YT feed will be full of AI pictures with moderate coherency (depending on what AI tools they are using). Sometimes it will be very short videos with moderate in scene and poor inter scene coherency. It was utterly garbage a year ago with most of them sticking to static pictures. Voice clone is like 98% there and hard to tell at this point. If you listen to the story structure you can tell an AI probably wrote the story too.

There are services out there were you can say 'write me the lyrics to a metal song about ducks and chickens' and then take that paste it into another service and say 'make a metal song with these lyrics' then paste the results into another service and put an AI voice of darth vader over it using the lyrics. That this is coming to video is not that big of a leap. That has gone from random limbs popping out of peoples foreheads to weird little janky things.

I can today just use chatgpt and say 'write me a SCP memo on a man eating couch that stalks elephants of keter class' It will. I can add some small details and it will be an acceptable waste of my time. Written form is today being consumed quickly by the likes of chatgpt. The other types are next in line.

People are already doing this. It is all over YT and tiktok.

> humans are just acting as the director of that AI.

My pro-AI director friends tell me this is ultimately what they've been doing with humans all along. Sometimes he humans don't give them what they're looking for, so they ask again. And they have to fit within logistical and budgetary constraints.

Is there such a thing as a "HN Vote" post? Because this would be a great vote to put on the front page. The question would be "How much of the production will AI be doing in the movie/TV industries in 10 years?" and these would be the choices:

1) Everything. A single prompt will generate a full-length, high quality movie.

2) One person will be able to spend a few weeks or months to produce a high quality movie using purely AI generated visuals and audio, with at least part of the script written by AI.

3) AI will never replace some aspects of high quality movies, although it's not quite clear yet which aspects. It could be writing, acting, directing, or something else.

4) AI will never replace most aspects of high quality movies.

5) Society will rebel against any form of AI in movies; it doesn't matter how good AI gets, nobody will watch movies touched in any way by AI.

My guess is 2.

> I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.

If that happens in the next 10 years and we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria. You would win the bet.

We on?

#2, minus the part about AI script writing, and with a caveat that changes "purely AI generated visuals and audio" to something human-driven, AI-accelerated.

I think so.

> we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria.

Just to clarify, this would be an AI film or "tv show" winning at traditional awards: Emmys (The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences), SAG Awards, Oscars (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), etc. Or traditional film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, eg. winning the Palme d'Or. I would even be happy setting a threshold whereby a film or long-format show must win more than one award from several such institutions.

Maybe a preponderance of praise (20 or more) from major film and media critics like Roger Ebert (RIP), Leonard Maltin, Richard Brody, et al. could also be a criteria that must be met. Though perhaps that's a necessary condition anyway.

This all sounds good to me.

No need to suspect, they are advertising that openly and are proud of it. Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show. It was a story of many articles about Netlix back then.

You've got the cart before the horse.

The technology has to exist first. The technology is first picked up by early adopters: hustlers, marketers, hypsters. Not by practicing professionals.

It takes time for the new tools to work their way into the creative field. It first gets pushback, then it happens a little, and then all at once.

We're still super early days into this tech. Give it more time and it'll be all-capable and everywhere.

The canary in the coal mine is all the young people playing with it.

Wow, cool! Here's my poll. We'll see if anyone notices. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955244

> Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show

This does not appear to be true based on any articles I can find. I do believe they heavily follow the trends from their analytics in what the shows they buy and what they cancel, though.

Yup, with the small caveat that the category for the award isn't something silly like "best use of AI in a film". I'm fine if it's like best VFX or whatever, but I'd have a hard time if the awards committee created a new category specifically to give awards for AI.

No, that's not at all what happened. House of Cards was a highly regarded UK TV series from BBC (made in the early 1990s). Like many UK TV series, it was ripe for an American adaptation. Netflix won the bidding war for that adaptation.

Making up "famous" examples doesn't make your case stronger, but the opposite.

Perfect. You're on! :)

No special category, and I'm even willing to bank on it being a category that isn't the moral equivalent of VFX.

Let's remember to check back.

> Let's remember to check back.

:D Probably the hardest part of this wager.

Absolutely, haha :P

Deathstalker 2 is a classic... of sorts...

I suppose the point here is that although the tech may become ubiquitous, it can't make people creative. Previous young people had access to cheap digital video cameras, and the best they could do was Blair Witch. The bottleneck when it comes to good movies is not the technology, it's creatives being any good. There's not a bottled-up reservoir of creative juice waiting to surge forth as soon as friction is reduced, any more than in previous decades.

Which, to be fair ... considering the past, we always have one or two notable indie films inspired by access to tech, so we'll probably see one or two more in years to come, amid a sea of slop.

you completely misunderstand what it means to enjoy a film experience.

This misses the forest for the trees.

It doesn’t need to win awards or prestige.

Someone needs to say “play me new episodes of the office or arrested development” and it needs to generate something that resembles the office or arrested development. People can have the noise on in the background, and it won’t matter if it isn’t quite coherent or super funny.

I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.

A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.

Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.

There was a Mario Brothers music video set in a swampy trailer park, actually watched that to the end.

Couldn't work out if this channel is the creator but there a bunch of them - https://m.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos

If the singing is ML-generated then I think that's pretty impressive too.

Looks like the channels started out as still images with Ken Burns Effect only 2 years ago. That's some progress.

The bet is stupid.

David Lynch The Grandmother would be considered a "masterpiece" by this definition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y0rYWVcxF4

Anyone could make something along those lines right now with AI tools. The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.

AI video is going to stall bad because it is just too expensive and what we have now is complete trash. Sora is such a massive disappointment to anyone who was interested in doing exactly what is being described.

> Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?

These things are "not AI".

> The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.

Okay, so that's a risk of false positive success. It doesn't mean the bet is pointless, just that it's not the ultimate metric.

> because they enjoy them

The premise is that there is so much good AI content that if you just pick something you enjoy, no other criteria, 90% of the time it'll be an AI work.

The only people that would be watching a significant amount of older work are the people that have a reason beyond that.

Nope, the video isn't long enough and wouldn't qualify.

I also agree that AI will stall which is the point of the bet. I also don't think an AI recreation of the Grandmother would see critical acclaim. Lynch already did it.

A flood of content has actively devalued media even before AI.

In the era of "the cinema has fewer screens than an AI character has fingers", "big media" -- movies and TV -- were cultural touchstones. Everyone knows Luke Skywalker, the Brady Bunch, or the Jaws theme as baseline references, even if they've never seen the corresponding media.

Now, even before the AI boom, we've got so many choices that we're all in independent fandoms with less and less "common currency". If I made a joke at work about dressing up as a human-sized NEC PC-9801[0], what are the odds any of my co-workers will get it?

AI would accelerate that process. You'll have a thousand niche movies a week all sliding through the local cineplex. There might be fifteen people who ever pay to see "Dragon Locomotive Mechanic Samurai Warrior XVI: Return Of Admiral Becky", and will anyone want to talk with you about it after you leave the cinema?

[0] plug for 16-Bit Sensation

I'd argue there is a lot of cost-scale issue.

Blair Witch was achievable not just because it was low-tech but because the premise can be done cheaply.

If I want to make (for example), a globe-trotting spy film, locations and travel are expensive. If there's going to be car crashes, props are expensive. If I do it on a hobbyist budget, it will look the part.

To be honest, I expected to rise of the "all CGI" film more than the AI-gen film. You still have full artistic control rather than wrestling the gacha on specifics, but now you can afford to level Paris and rebuild it in the next scene, and you don't have to worry about the lead actor gaining 10kg before the sequel.