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- TikTok Eats the Industry
Happy October Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
📱 TikTok Eats the Industry
❓️ Did the WGA Get Everything It Wanted?
🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for
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TikTok Eats the Industry
Are any of you other nerds on TikTok? You should be! I myself am a TikTok user but absolutely not a TikTok creator (I’m too soft for the comments section: those kids are mean!).
I’ve regularly lost an hour or two here and there due to the social media app’s insanely predictive algorithm. BTW: TikTok is not just viral dances, I’ve found much enjoyment from content like CJ Trowbridge explaining why Elon Musk is the obstacle to his own self-driving dreams or meme videos featuring the dreamy gaze of bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn.
Thus I was particularly interested in two recent articles from the CBC and The Wall Street Journal on TikTok’s growing use as a streaming platform for film and TV, albeit mostly pirated content.
According to the WSJ:
Uploaders split up the clips, mixing them in with other content to evade detection. Accounts don’t always finish uploading the full episode or movie, leaving viewers on a cliffhanger.
These accounts appear to make themselves look more popular using bot followers, says Antoine Vastel, head of research at DataDome, a bot- and fraud-detection company. This helps them manipulate the TikTok recommendation engine into promoting their posts.
How are the studios handling TikTok? Some are embracing it! More from the WSJ: “Peacock, owned by NBCUniversal, is among the streaming providers experimenting with building an audience for shows on TikTok, uploading full episodes of “Killing It” and “Love Island USA” to the service.”
The last lines of the CBC article echo some of my own concerns about the potential impacts of TikTokification on storytelling:
The app's influence on the music industry… could happen to movies and TV… as hours-long productions are made simply to showcase a few moments, themselves designed to be turned into minutes-long posts.
"What people in the field are calling the 'meme-ification of film,'" Shyminksy said of the latest trend. "Because if we're building stories," he said, "if we're structuring narratives around meme-able moments, will they actually hold up as a story?"
I don’t want algorithmic juicing to make us lose the hypnotic dread of a film like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms or the aching melancholy of a TV show like Rectify. However, the daily creativity I see on TikTok gives me hope that it will be the source of new forms and styles of media that will grow organically (as opposed to say, Quibi). Send me some of your favorites!
Did the WGA Get Everything It Wanted?
After almost 5 months, the WGA strike is over in what looks like a resounding win for the WGA and its members. I thought a few of the deal provisions were particularly interesting given the thrust of this newsletter, and I’ve highlighted them below:
The Companies agree to provide the Guild, subject to a confidentiality agreement, the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). The Guild may share information with the membership in aggregated form.
This is quite a get, as the streamers have been notoriously secretive about numbers on their original content. That said, it seems unlikely much of this will be reviewable by the public; I don’t foresee this data being published in Variety like the weekend box office.
The agreement’s AI provisions are also very interesting!
AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights.
A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.
The Company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material.
The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.
The first point was particularly important to writers, as highlighted in my newsletter covering the David Lack interview from a few weeks ago. The WGA was afraid of studios simply having AI generate TV and movie premises and then claiming it as intellectual property.
Writing in Wired, actor Alex Winter is skeptical of the WGA deal, pointing out:
It's hard to imagine that the studios will tell artists the truth when being asked to dismantle their AI initiatives, and attribution is all but impossible to prove with machine-learning outputs. Likewise, it's difficult to see how to prevent these tools from learning on whatever data the studios want. It's already standard practice for corporations to act first and beg forgiveness later, and one should assume they will continue to scrape and ingest all the data they can access, which is all the data.
Winter goes on to suggest the unions and the AMPTP should together be wary of even larger danger: “This agreement should also reflect an understanding that studios are as threatened by the voracious appetites of Big Tech as the artists, that the unions and the AMPTP are sitting on opposite sides of the same life raft.”
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:
Defector’s David Roth on the type of TV streamers can’t make. (link)
Are Boomers network TV’s last best hope? (link)
How to take back control of your photo and video storage. (link)