Netflix Embraces AI for Hollywood Disruption

Today on AI Applied, we are talking about Hollywood and disruption. But here's the interesting thing that Jaden and I have been chatting about, because Jaden and I text kind of throughout the week about interesting things that we'll be talking about. And Jaden texted me immediately about the Netflix story, because one of the things I think we're seeing, and by the way, I see this in other industries as well, there is a hesitation to use AI. Now, especially in something like Hollywood, where authenticity really matters, where there's a lot of jobs at stake, where everybody's been doing some things the same way for a long, long time. It feels like we're kind of like sticking our finger in the dam trying to hold this back. But a lot of studios in Hollywood understand the importance of authenticity to their audience and especially to their actors and all the people who work for them. This is a huge, huge industry, which is why we were so fascinated by this Netflix story where Netflix is like, you know what, I'm just going ahead. And all it takes is one. And, Jane, just as we're sort of kicking off here, I'll say that I see this in law a lot. I swear to God. So, you know, as you know, sort of like go out and I talk with big companies and I train large companies on AI and behavioral shift. And one of the kind of like industries I work with a lot of law firms. And I swear for the first like year and a half, there's not one law firm that had any interest in working together. None. And I was like, OK, it feels like an industry ready for disruption. But then one kind of like called me and said like, hey, will you come in? Because I have this AI mindset course and like and it goes out at scale. And they're like, hey, would you come in and do our whole company? And I was like, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. And then, Jaden, like I've worked with so many law firms since then because the billable hours are about to get hugely disrupted. Anyway, I say all that. Sorry for the long intro here. But I say all that because it's going to be the same with Hollywood, right? I mean, there's so much money to be saved. And Netflix is already just being like, you know what? We are going out in front. Screw sort of like how this all works, what everybody else thinks, like, you know, the whole scarlet letter thing. Forget like how people are going to view us. We're just going all in. So I know you were doing a lot of talking on this. What were you saying on this? because I thought this was really interesting. I mean, yeah, I think I've always been a very big proponent in AI and video. I've always said that it was going to be a big thing. You know, I've famously been quoted as saying that we're all going to be able to be our own movie producers at some point and Netflix will probably integrate the capability sometime in the future. I was hoping it was going to be this year, but maybe we've got a little bit longer to wait before you can describe your whole movie and have it generated for you. But it doesn't feel like we're very far away. And one thing that's interesting to me is when we had Sora 2 come out, I posted about this on LinkedIn and I was blown away by the like the pushback on that. A lot of people just saying, you know, this is it's basically horrible. And it's just all this AI slop and it's just disseminating AI garbage all over the whole Internet and people are going to use it for terrible things. And so, like, I'm sure that there is like negative use cases for AI generated video. A hundred percent like there's negative use cases for chat GPT. Right. If you remember when it first came out and everyone was worried about the guardrails of it, like telling people how to make nuclear bombs and bioweapons. and rob the bank and like, yes, you could use it for bad things, of course. I mean, so I think the guardrail element of it is important. And maybe these, maybe someone like opening an eye on Soar, there's like more work to be done there. But regardless, I mean, these are hiccups in the road that we're going to traverse. And when there's an issue, talk about it, sure. But like, this is amazing technology and it's going to be used for really incredible things. Netflix appears to be going all in on this, right? So it definitely controversial And the reason I bring up like the you know the negative response I got on LinkedIn is because I think there a huge part of Hollywood and the entire movie industry that feels the same way And some of them maybe it because they feel like their job is threatened Others, you know, and that's probably like the main thing. But I think at the end of the day, it's going to make people more creative. So getting into getting into the actual shareholder letter that Netflix recently shared, I was blown away. One quote that jumped out to me is that they said that they were very well positioned to effectively leverage ongoing advances in AI. And they're not just saying this, they're actually using this. One thing that their CEO, Ted Sarando, said that I thought was great, he said, it takes a great artist to make something great. AI can give creative tools or AI can give creatives better tools to enhance their overall TV movie experience for our members, but it doesn't automatically make you a great storyteller if you're not. And I think that is literally the key. So many people are so worried that this AI is going to completely take our jobs and people are going to. But like at the end of the day, if you're not a good storyteller, you could make an AI video that's just not interesting and doesn't resonate or connect with people. But if you're an amazing storyteller, all of a sudden you have this incredible tool to tell your story in a bigger and better way. And so like what does that look like in the future? Well, whoever can tell the most story will no longer be constrained by do you have a big enough budget to make it look like interesting and realistic. It's just whoever can tell the best story and can direct the AI the best way will be able to make something really incredible. So to me, I'm actually pretty excited about that future. I'm so glad you brought that up. And we can kind of get back to like what I mean, because Netflix is also working in like the algorithm space around like making sure that, you know, you can actually talk to Netflix and be like, hey, I'm kind of looking for this or this. So the tech is really cool. But what Jaden brought up, I think, is almost the more interesting point here. So I want to spend a second on that, which is AI and jobs. Right. And we could do a whole podcast on this, Jaden, obviously. But, like, I get asked this a ton, right, like sort of like anywhere I go. I'm like, hey, so what's going to happen with jobs, all that kind of stuff. And I have a really strong opinion on this with Jaden. Jaden, I think you're probably, you know, even just based on what you're talking about there, probably feel the same way. Yes, AI can make anybody sort of like a producer, anybody a director, but will they be good or not? When you see, like, movies, there's no way. Like, I have an iPhone. I could sort of film things. There's no way I could tell that story because I don't know how. The example I use sometimes is, so my creative strategist at AI Mindset is Robert Haslam. He's just like a genitive AI genius, right? But he's also a creative guy, and he does all our images, anything that you see of my stuff on LinkedIn. That's Robert doing that. And the thing is, so he and I can both go into MidJourney, and I'll be like, oh, I kind of want a typewriter that's turning into the future or something like that. MidJourney will give me something, whatever MidJourney thinks. and I'll kind of run it a couple of times. And so I'll get like 16 images and I'll pick the best one. But Robert's prompts, and I'm not a big prompt engineering guy, but Robert's prompts because he understands the elements that should go into that. And he has a creative vision of what that would look like. He gets mid journey started off that. And now mid journey is like riffing off him. And so his images end up being way, way better, obviously. Now let's apply that for a second to the jobs, you know, that we have sort of like, that are happening right now in the entire workforce and labor market as a whole. The thing is, yes, anybody can come in and be using AI, and they'll produce so much more and all that kind of stuff And there a temptation at least I hear the temptation in organizations all the time especially in finance organizations Okay how can we now get rid of this percentage of our analysts And I like you got to be out of your mind Because at least with those analysts they have some kind of grounding in what good looks like. So AI can spit out a ton of stuff and it can iterate all day long. The thing that we're missing is, is it good quality or not? And that's why critical thinking skills and everything else are so important. But most importantly, if you're worried, oh, this thing is going to take my job, what you have to start doing is having AI do a tremendous amount of work that you are overseeing. We are in a space where we are moving from content creator to content curator. And yesterday I was just at this giant, you know, again, like finance conference. I got asked that they're like, oh, well, you know, but the problem is it hallucinates. I just have to do all that work myself. I'm like, yeah, but people can hallucinate too. You have to be the quality control on this thing. And if you can master that folks, if you can sort of like take what you know and what you do well and then have AI under you producing more of it and you look at yourself more as a quality control curator not just I'm going to give Chad GPD a question it's going to give me an answer I'm going to pass that on you have to be the one that actually uh does sort of like the passing on of good work quality work and so Jaden I think that you're absolutely right on that Netflix point uh by I think it was the CEO you mentioned which is look this is not just about anybody that can now uh you know come and work for Netflix and create movies. Still, the great artists are going to be the great artists. They are just not constrained by budgeting. 100%. One thing that I think is really... But this is where also I sort of like saw Netflix... Sorry, sorry. I was just going to say, one thing that I do think is really impressive about Netflix in particular is beyond them just saying like, look, we're positioned to use AI, I like to see them actually use it. And so there's a couple different cases. They talked about the final footage for their, there's a show in Argentina called the Ethernaut. And they actually use AI to help create a scene of a building collapsing. So something like this is interesting. Like you can have the budget to make the whole show. You can go ahead and create the whole show. But then like some of the most expensive scenes, right? You usually spend a ton of money to go demolish a full building, you know, in a real movie. And that's just a lot of money. Is it super necessary? I don't know. So in the background, they're using AI to do like a big building collapse scene, which is, you know, obviously that would save them a ton of money. Apparently, it's the same filmmaker that made Happy Gilmore 2, and they used gender of AI to make one of their characters look younger in the film's opening scene. I also kind of love this. You know, I think it's kind of a tricky bit that a lot of film studios have to make is like when they're doing a flashback to like an earlier scene trying to find like a younger doppelganger of a person. Imagine it's kind of hard. It's probably just a headache, but just being able to do something like, oh, look, we'll just grab the actual actor, make them do it. Then we'll just get AI to make them a little bit younger and then move on. We don't have to worry about it. So I think for that, it's kind of a cool use case. Apparently the producers of Billionaire Bunkers used it as a pre-production tool to help them imagine what the wardrobe and set design was going to look like. Again, I think that that's really cool. We can have mid-journey to create images. And I know at the beginning, a lot of film studios were using MidGerney to create like images of storyboards of their film when they would pitch it. But we don't have to do that anymore. Now you can actually do like a full video and really get immersive into the field. So I think that there so many different use cases for this And basically that what their CEO is saying He said quote we confident that AI is going to help us and help our creative partners tell stories better faster and in new ways And I think a couple of interesting things there, like better, and a lot of people could argue, well, I could do it better from scratch. Okay, maybe. Faster, undoubtedly, right? And so the question then becomes like, maybe you're an amazing film producer, but if you have these AI tools that can help speed you up, right? Like going to finding a doppelganger, which might be really time intensive or going and recreating a whole building collapse scene, which would be just really, you know, eat up a ton of your budget. So if you can get those things out of the way, you can make these movies a lot faster. And an incredible film producer that might, you know, maybe would make one film a year or every two years sometimes can all of a sudden do two or three. And so I'm just excited because I feel like the top talent is going to be empowered to make more content that is more interesting for more people. and I'm just excited for the day when I can get away from No Shade, but like there's this one film studio and for some reason my wife absolutely loves them. It's like this, it's kind of like a B-rated film studio that makes these rom-coms. My wife will make me watch all of them. I don't even know who they are. It's someone on like Amazon. They post all their shows on Amazon, but like they're so cheesy and corny and I'm just looking forward to the day when AI can like hopefully make all of those shows better so all the rom-coms that i have to watch with my wife this is this is so great by the way just just sort of like in in in uh just in like wrapping up here like uh one of the i'm just imagining jaden this whole notion of you know when you sort of like look back at old movies and you're like oh that's clearly fake or it's like a person in a monster suit or something like that like i'm guessing now people are going to look back on this and be like uh holy cow like you know why they why is that like their younger version of themselves is like a totally different person that's going to look totally surreal to people. But yeah, I agree. I think that in the end, you know, what we're looking at here is just good storytellers. I think it's going to open up the, it's going to sort of democratize this in a certain way where new people who just never had the budget to do this now have the ability to show that they can tell stories too. And we're going to discover a whole new generation of filmmakers just through this. So to me, this is super exciting, but I'll let you close it out. But I agree. It's not just about, oh, this, this, Because it can do this, it can take the job. We have to think about the quality of it all. Yeah, I would just say, look at big firms like Netflix as an indicator of where the entire industry is going. It feels like the industry is divided and arguing about it right now. But I think we can follow the money and follow basically the enhancements that are able to happen in the industry. And this is where we're going to see more in the future. Hey, guys, thank you so much for tuning into the episode today. 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