- Hollywood Tech Nerds
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- A New Direction for This Newsletter
Yo Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
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Big news today: we are pivoting this newsletter from an overview of the intersection of technology and entertainment to a promotion of our new business endeavor helping you achieve success by selling our exclusive line of men’s leggings and knives made for babies.
Our new brand BabyLegs is laser-focused on getting your self-owned business off the ground, starting at the low, low price of $1000 for our starter pack.
Join the BabyLegs family and combine your love for men in leggings and knife-wielding babies with a drive to create your own success story. BabyLegs offers a unique blend of fun, community, flexibility, and earning potential. It's not just about dressing up and helping babies cut things; it's about having fun while lifting others!
People often ask us: why men’s leggings? Well, our question back is: why not? Do men not typically wear leggings because they don’t want to or simply because they are unable to? We don’t need any research telling us the answer, we’re doing what our dreams demand!
People often ask us: why knives for babies? Simple answer: babies like participating! Too many knives have burdensome wooden or metal handles which hurt the tender hands of innocent babies. Our BabyLegs baby knives instead feature soft and squishy handles without losing the incredibly sharp edge of your favorite cutting/stabbing knife. It’s the best of both worlds!
So if you want to join the exciting world of entrepreneurship, where you take on all the risk in exchange for giving us money, sign up at www.babylegs.com to provide us your contact and credit card information.
AI-pril Fools
Obviously the BabyLegs post is our little April Fools’ joke and absolutely not a real thing. I hope you all had a good laugh, and by you I mean people reading this on April 1. Somebody reading this edition of the newsletter on some random day: do not email us about BabyLegs! It isn’t real!
Speaking of things that aren’t real, I loved Deadline’s deep dive into the world of movie trailers, which are often partially or completely AI-generated. You know the ones, you’re looking for a movie’s newest trailer and you come across multiple grandma-fooling monstrosities like this:
Is Superman fighting Doctor Octopus??? From Deadline:
There are big audiences for these videos, with many actively seeking out the simulacra. Other YouTube users hate-watch fake trailers and rage in the comments below. Some are completely fooled by what they are watching — particularly if they are not familiar with the telltale signs of generative AI. “My parents watched this and thought it was real,” one person noted on the DiCaprio Squid Game video. VJ4rawr2 says: “The majority of fan trailers today are only popular because they’ve effectively fooled people into thinking they’re real.”
People being this easily fooled by these trailers is probably not a good thing, for the movie business specifically and the human race generally! Why are these being made in the first place?
Being early to a topic can help push a video up YouTube’s search ranking, while new videos are often boosted, which is why Screen Culture hits certain franchises fast and hard. Deadline searches found Screen Culture had high-ranking results for many major upcoming movies, including Thunderbolts* and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, with all the videos embellished using AI. YouTube’s algorithm also rewarded some videos by pushing them into its recommendation sidebar and ‘People Also Search For’ menu. YouTube was approached for comment.
No big surprise that the YouTube algo has trouble distinguishing between slop and not-slop, particularly when the slop-AI trailer is for a slop-real film! What is surprising: some of the studios were collecting real cash from the fake trailers!
Emails reviewed by Deadline show how Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has claimed monetization on Screen Culture trailers for Superman and House of the Dragon. This means that instead of copyright striking the videos (if a channel accrues three strikes within 90 days, it can be banned from YouTube), WBD is asking YouTube to ensure it receives the ad revenue from views. Similarly, Sony Pictures has claimed revenue on fake trailers for Spider-Man and Kraven The Hunter, while Paramount did the same on a counterfeit Gladiator II video. WBD, Sony, and Paramount declined to comment.
Since Deadline’s initial article, YouTube has demonetized these trailers. I wonder if any of that ended up in the pockets of the films’s stars. I’m sure they were all well-compensated for their likenesses being used in these fake trailers. April Fools!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
StudioBinder on how AI will reshape the film industry. (link)
The TV industry’s next frontier of advertising: screensavers? (link)
How Mickey 17 director Bong Joon Ho controls the frame, but not the actors. (link)