What if anyone could make perfect films and shows?

An app appears on every smart phone and computer in the world today. It allows you to create any film or show exactly the same in every way as a normally made one. You wouldn’t know it was artificially generated but for the site you’re viewing it on. The site can’t be blocked or taken down in any way. You can input entire scripts and lengthy lists of instructions or you can put in general prompts and get a quality product to be posted or refined further. You can make a Star Wars film written by Scorsese and scored by Williams, an anthology show directed by Tarantino, a crime film starring Brad Pitt and Rebecca Hall, etc. The results will all be perfectly categorized and sorted by length, genre, cast, etc. for everyone to access.

The only restrictions are that you can’t make something more extreme than an R rating and the films and shows made on the site can’t be viewed or shared anywhere else by any means.

What would happen next and how would this affect society and the entertainment industry?

Almost everybody would start making the same two or three films over and over. Maybe a few brilliant and original selections now and then. But mostly a massive reversion to the mean.

Quality is, of course, subjective but I assume you mean a polished product. I assume it would wind up a lot like video game mod/level/map maker sites where a small number of creations take off and get 1,599,340 downloads and 5/5 stars and the rest languish in obscurity. Not sure of the effect on the entertainment industry as a whole but I assume they’d lean into watching stuff natively on the big screen (or even big television) versus on your phone or trying to project your phone/PC onto a larger screen.

It would make an interesting App for a streaming service. “Custom TV. Tell us what YOU want!” You provide the prompts like in the OP and watch the output. Maybe they could have a service where you upload your pic and they can put you in any part of an existing movie. It would be Seinfeldvision but for yourself.

In a smaller sense something like this has already happened with writings and opinions. Once, the cost of printing and distribution served as a filter for writings based on how well-received the ideas expressed were. Publishers and the writers they vetted could gain a reputation for being worth listening to, vindicated by sales. Music and video had even higher entry barriers.

Then the Internet came and now anyone could write anything and it could potentially reach a planetary audience. Quickly vindicating Theodore Sturgeon’s opinion that 90% of everything is crap. (And in hindsight Sturgeon was being generous). If anyone can produce a Hollywood-quality video, then the problem becomes one of sorting needles out of haystacks; what’s worth even looking at? My take is that this situation will end up mirroring the rise of “influencers”, people who for one reason or another have been successful at capturing the public imagination.

People would complain that it was “stealing” if past human creations were in any way involved in the creation on the software. Also, say that it “isn’t art”, that the creators are “techbros”, and that they’re taking their jerbs.

We currently have that technology for still images. Nobody is creating a Mona Lisa or Sunflowers with it, instead it’s bland unimaginative shite. I anticipate no difference if the images move and tell a story. See all self-published novels for further examples of the unfathomable garbage most of us would churn out.

Basically only rare talents would shine and stand out. No different to current Creators today.

Granted, the Mona Lisa was made over 500 years ago. Arguably, no one is making Mona Lisas anywhere using anything lately and the art people know of as famous and important is a teeny tiny miniscule fragment of pieces over all of human history and cherry picked by time.

The Butlerian Jihad.

Look to how & whether 1970s punk rock affected Mainstream Megavinyl. In sum not much at all I think. A handful of bands gained wide notoriety (to the dismay of some of their elitist fans), while the vast majority sank into obscurity. And then, after not very long, MM learned how to skin the energetic appeal from authentically crafted music and wrap the same old industry drek in it, thereby reclaiming that market without having to bother with divisive things like meaning or higher messaging. So in short, some extraordinarily lucky indie producers will get a blockbuster, maybe a dedicated fan base. But mostly, before too long, the Industry Elites will have themselves another profit machine.

How creative is the app?

IMHO, ubiquitous media / creative tech is a double-edged sword. It allows more people to create independent works outside a production system or business model that might be restrictive. But it also draws attention to the fact that most people aren’t all that creative or talented.

Sort of the difference between “fan fiction” and works by someone who is truly talented. Someone who is talented can tell a story in a way that maybe you didn’t expect and maybe didn’t feel comfortable with, but are nevertheless entertained. Fan fiction just feels like copying an authors work to make something you think you want to see.

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I’m not sure it would have much of an effect at all considering that a film like that could only be viewed on the single phone they were created on. That doesn’t allow for any distribution beyond holding the phone up for your friends to watch on a tiny screen. Doesn’t seem like much of a threat to traditional films on large screens.

According to the hypothetical these films can’t be downloaded or distributed in any way.

Anyone could produce a Hollywood-quality film except that that film can only be see on one device and that device has a tiny screen and tiny speakers. So really, not like a Hollywood film at all. It’d be all hay and no needles.

In this scenario, you’d replace downloads with views

Well, considering only 2 or 3 people can comfortably watch the screen on a phone at one time it would take a very, very long time for 1,599,340 views thus reducing any chance for word-of-mouth and viral-ness.

Also, how do you get over a million people to come to one place and wait for weeks and months to watch a tiny screen? Wouldn’t this fill up all the nearby hotels? Wouldn’t it cause massive health, law enforcement and waste disposal problems? Who wants to travel and wait to watch a movie on a tin screen?

I take…

films and shows made on the site can’t be viewed or shared anywhere else by any means.

…to mean that you can’t share films off of the site (i.e. put them on YouTube, etc). Along with a handwave against “I record it on my other phone” or other ways around it being locked to that site. Seeing as how it also says…

The results will all be perfectly categorized and sorted by length, genre, cast, etc. for everyone to access.

I won’t fight the hypothetical then. Carry on.

As someone who made a living out of writing for hire (advertising, etc.) I agree. For every thousand people who can come up with an idea, there’s probably no more than 5 who can actually tell it well, no matter how much technical support they have.

Thank goodness I never had the itch to become a novelist.

Just how much user input does this thing need? Can I just prompt it with “Make the funniest comedy ever”, and leave all of the details up to it? Which it will then perfectly execute, and make an actual hilarious movie?

The question is ill posed. Let me transpose the problem to help illustrate:

All around the globe right now, there are amateur musicians going up on stage and giving their genuine, heartfelt rendition of their personally created music to a room of 8 people, half of which are half listening. Some of these musicians are technically incompetent and are unlikely to have a true market demand of any size but there are statistically, many people struggling who “have what it takes”, far more than actual slots in the industry to accommodate them. We know this because we know of stories of people who were plucked from obscurity into stardom and later fans took a retrospective look through their music and discovered even the early, obscure stuff was deeply meaningful to them.

If you look at this pattern of events and start with the hypothesis that our primary relationship with music is with the content, then this is a deeply startling state of affairs. We could all be listening to much better music than we currently are because we have not tapped on sufficient potential. We should be sending talent scouts out to every single bar in the world and devising cheap tests to screen out the worst musicians so we can properly evaluate how many “hidden gems” there are in the world and allocate them the prestige they deserve!

But there’s an alternative explanation that fits the observed pattern better: our relationship with art is mostly relational. That is, musicians plausibly need to clear some lower bar of quality to become famous but once they are famous, a large part of what we are engaging with is the fame itself. We listen to musicians because our friends have heard about them, they come to represent symbolic aspects of our identity, they represent tribal belonging to certain subcultures etc. There is limited space for fame in music because we have a finite set of relational requirements and every musical object we consume fits those slots first and the quality of the music influences how well they fit those slots.

There’s a second way music is relational: You posit that a relationship with art is similar to a scientific instrument assaying a substance and declaring independent variables like “funny”, “well acted”, “tight plot”, “exciting”. But a moment’s thought also reveals that we are changed by art as much as art is consumed by us. Art is what shapes our receptivity to other art, a Kpop album is deeply meaningful for an American teen who has consumed broadly from the genre but literal gibberish for someone who is encountering it for the first time. An American teen from 30 years ago would have had no entryway into Kpop, regardless of the quality. Americans had to be taught how to consume Kpop before they could even tell what Kpop was good or bad. An iPod that was handed to an American teen in 1999 with the world’s best 2026 Kpop on it would be meaningless.

You smuggle this assumption in from your description: “You can make a Star Wars film written by Scorsese”

You posit that the “Star Warsiness” of a film is a property contained inside of the pixels, that it’s meaningful to extract some durable essence of Star Wars and transform that with an essence of Scorsese to create a brand new art object. But the “Star Warsiness” obviously belongs much more to the social reception, that it became a cornerstone of nerd culture and the meaningfulness of it passed along generations and how saying the word Star Wars evokes a rich set of emotional attachments. There’s an alternate universe where Dune became the big blockbuster to do that and you’d be here, on this forum, asking the same about “A Dune film written by Joe Blow (who was a very big director in this universe)”. The pixels haven’t changed, so you can’t derive this quality from the pixels.

So the answer to your question of “What happens if an app appears” is: it already did. It was called the mass production of cheap musical instruments and a culture of indie performance. The impact was not nothing, we have a different musical landscape now than when classical music was commissioned by rich patrons and spread from the top down. But it wasn’t totalizing, it changed the position of various players in the marketplace, it didn’t destroy and remake a marketplace.

The recent release of The Backrooms is actually an excellent example of this phenomena in action: The Backrooms movie is a product of director Kane Pixels (legal name: Kane Parsons) who uploaded a series of Youtube shorts around the Backrooms that went viral with the first one having 90M views. This caught the attention of Hollywood that gave him a budget to film The Backrooms practically.

In this case, an app was created that fit every single one of your requirements: it was called Blender. It can run on every single device on the planet, it’s open source so nobody can take it down, Kane’s videos are indistinguishable from real footage despite being artificially generated and his output can plausibly be described as [Famous X] meshed with [Famous Y] (ie: Blair Witch Project mixed with SCP).

It’s even more permissive than your hypothetical because Blender definitely allows for more than R-Rated stuff to be created in it and that’s an ahem big genre of Blender content.

What’s revealing is that the instantiation of an exact fit that matches these requirements generally elicits a reaction in the asker of “no, not like that!”. There’s still some essence missing in the description that wasn’t specified in the query but was expected in the answer. And the answer to that is: Blender still looks obviously hard. It’s obvious that an amateur’s work in Blender would be unimpressive to anyone and that Kane Pixels had to dedicate considerable skill and taste to produce the artifact he did. What people are really asking from this question is, can I now get expert level results without expert level investment and this is what the entire AI art debate always circles around. The answer is straightforwardly no and it’s been no for all of human history and will continue to be no for extremely straightforward reasons but there’s a certain class of people who desperately want it to be yes and every new technology is an opportunity to fool themselves into thinking the yes might now be plausible.