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.