The Topline
- Disney announced it would invest US$1 billion into OpenAI and would license its Marvel and Star Wars characters to the AI startup’s video and photo generator, Sora
- The partnership sparked controversy from creative professionals in various sectors concerned about the economic and artistic impact this could have
- Disney’s announcement comes at a perilous time for artists and other creatives, who feel threatened by corporations’ use of AI tools and what that means for their job prospects
Art is essential to the human experience
One of the quiet dangers of AI-generated art isn’t that it may reduce jobs, but that it’ll reframe what art actually is.
Art is more than just output. It’s a record of the human experience, intellectually and emotionally. It captures how people feel living through a moment in time, and its success hinges on the individual experiencing it.
From a commercial perspective, art is a massive liability to corporations. Sometimes the work is a massive hit, sometimes it fails commercially, and sometimes it reshapes how people think years later.
More often than not, however, it flops. Most films do , anyway. It’s a messy business proposition that doesn’t always line up well with quarterly disclosure statements. This messiness is what Netflix is essentially trying to smooth out with its data-driven approach to programming, for example.
AI tools, especially when deployed by corporations like Disney, are designed for their reliability and consistency in order to bring the cost of production down. Generative AI like Sora and ChatGPT pull from artistic and creative works that are proven to be “successful” – narratives, aesthetics, and viewpoints that are the most relatable, searchable, and mainstream. These tools reward familiarity rather than depth – which just so happens to be what large corporations are after with all these reboots and sequels .
The result is a kind of artistic remixing at an industrial scale. When a machine can generate Disney art without actual artists – pulling from work originally created by artists – the human’s value in this process collapses fast. It’s an ethical nightmare at the very least, never mind a very real-world one for hundreds, if not thousands, of professionals working in every nook and cranny of the creative industries.
The danger right now isn’t that AI replaces Andrew Stanton . It’s that it replaces all the working artists and technical professionals – the creative labour employed behind the scenes – whose jobs AI can do cheaper, faster, along with a reduced HR department.
So where does it end? If audiences become accustomed to low-cost, AI-generated movies, television, music and so on, then our cultural expectations begin to shift. The time, care, and intentionality that used to be spent developing the culture-defining creative works begins to look inefficient – indulgent even.
Is there a place for working artists in this AI-generated landscape? And what does that say about us, as a culture? Because when artistic expression shifts toward a synthetic approximation of the real thing, we all risk becoming Haley Joel Osment’s character in that Steven Spielberg sci-fi film from 2001. What’s it called again…?
AI’s just another evolution
Audiences have been consuming machine-assisted art since Photoshop was launched. And look! Photoshop didn’t kill photography, just like CGI didn’t kill film, nor did Auto-tune kill music.
Granted, these examples are creative assistant tools – they’re not generative tools, the way ChatGPT and Sora are. But tools are still just tools, directed by human minds for creative ends. And each time a new technology enters the market, panic ensues among the purists of whichever discipline is being affected.
And each time, audiences shrug and keep watching, or looking, or listening.
It’s also important to understand that new tools don’t kill the creative drive of creative people. Writers will continue to write, painters will continue to paint, and so on. New technology has a tendency to yield entirely new modes of expression.
Generative tools let solo creators do what once required a studio – animate shorts, prototype films, visualize worlds, test ideas cheaply. This is a big deal for creators locked out by geography, lack of funds, or industry gatekeeping.
Ultimately, what dictates the success or failure of a creative work, regardless of how it’s created, is the audience. Most people don’t choose a movie because it employed 100 unionized animators, nor do we stream an album because it took eight years of tortured labour to record (though some of us might).
We choose this film because we heard it was good, or this album because it relaxes us, or this show because it keeps the kids quiet while we make dinner.
Research shows that audiences are largely ambivalent if AI is used as a collaborator in creative projects, sometimes preferring it to work conceived only by humans (which, I must say, is wild). If the art “good” – whatever that means to whomever is watching it – then they’ll keep coming back.
And if it’s bad? Well, again, audiences are the ultimate deciders. Disney steered us all into mindless consumption of their most prized IPs, Star Wars and Marvel, and we eventually got bored and the company changed tactics .
All of this is to say, AI itself is not the great destructor of art in film or otherwise. If Disney uses AI to lower costs and increase output, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the end of storytelling.
If anything, it means audiences may get more stories, more niche content, and more experimentation. The costs saved in pre and post-production may well be used to invest in new ideas that can’t be developed by robots.
But more importantly, we have no idea what untapped creativity these tools will lead us toward. The biggest cultural shifts rarely look impressive at first. Early film was theatre-on-camera. Early TV was radio with pictures. Early internet video left much to be desired .
AI art is still clumsy and derivative, but it may unlock new genres, new workflows, new hybrid roles we don’t have names for yet – all of it directed by the human mind. New modes of expression are possible, potentially even infinite.
There’s no doubt that this will disrupt the creative industries as we know it, and there are ethical concerns over how AI-generated art is sourced and processed.
But does this spell the end of all human artistic expression? Unlikely.
