GMCU: Grand Ma’s Cinematic Universe
By: Minh Do, partner, fantastic day.
AI is here. It’s everywhere. It has invaded our social media. It’s on the news every day. It’s pushing our electrical grid to its limits. The big question to me is where is this all headed? Especially if it isn’t stopped abruptly by copyright, lawsuits, cold feet, and the usual big tech war room drama. So if this all moves forward what does this mean for creativity? What does it mean for the big guys like the studios and the audience, like us? And for that matter, the machine learning cat is out of the bag, there’s no putting AI back into its pandora’s box.
We are on the precipice of a new generation of AI filmmakers, game makers, musicians, and creators. I view this split into two main segments: consumers and professionals.
AI Professionals: Pioneers in the Creative World
In the professional group, these are people who are using multiple AI tools today or employing AI tools in existing traditional workflows to create new works of art. In general, that’s an easy group to understand. These are editors, digital artists, and more who are embracing AI in a new way.
For AI startups, most of them want AI creators to embrace their offerings, pay subscriptions, and use their tools in creating content. The result of this becomes evident: films get more beautiful and complex, writers, directors, and producers can pitch their ideas faster and in more diverse ways, and big Hollywood studios get even more ambitious in building games, worlds, metaverses, TV shows, etc. connected to their films. AI is going to be an accelerant for Hollywood and creative industries. And there are plenty of people who are already recognizing this. James Cameron has joined the Stability.ai board. Runway and Lionsgate have entered
The promise of AI for existing creative industries includes making the process cheaper, faster, and more diverse. Fewer people can work with more tools to create bigger projects. Of course, there’s a resistance to this from incumbent people, processes, and institutions. It threatens the livelihood and process that has worked well for over a hundred years.
But once again, like YouTube, Netflix, the RED camera, and more, technology (and tech companies) expands, disrupts, and reorganizes the structure of creative and the humans have to deal with the chaos. I don’t think anyone knows what this looks like after this journey, if it ever ends.
But I think the even larger opportunity is for consumers.
AI Consumers: Stumbling Into Everyday AI Usage
The consumer category is where things get interesting. It’s people who barely touch Gen AI, likely only using ChatGPT or Character.ai right now. They don’t have the clear needs that AI experts or AI-curious creative professionals have. And yet, this is where the bigger market is.
It’s no wonder that companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google are placing AI tools directly in their home pages. From Bing, you can generate images with Dalle3. From Whatsapp, you can generate images with Llama. But it’s not sticky enough just yet. Users do it for fun for a few minutes (or hours) and then it loses its bright and shiny appeal. Most people don’t have a need to generate images all the time. The AI art and video that is piercing through the noise are people who are digging very deep into the tools and getting the footage they want out of it. In other words, creative AI for the average internet user has fallen flat. Like ChatGPT today, it still takes a lot of skill, experience, and curiosity to get the most out of these models.
It won’t stay like this forever. I think AI companies are going in two directions.
The Role of AI Startups in Shaping our Creative Future
Look at Runway and Midjourney for example. If you examine their rollout of features in the last year, they’re listening closely to their most active creators and built features for those creators. That means more specific tools that allow artists to edit, stylize, and add very detailed nuances the average person wouldn’t think of.
At the same time, look at ChatGPT with its Advanced Mode, which represents another trend line where AI companies are incentivized to make AI more approachable. Why? Because that would represent more adoption and growth. It’s taking a while, and this is likely why most AI companies today have to move in the direction of the enterprise model, but it’s where all the energy is headed: multilingual, multi-modal, multi-device, etc. These are massive multi-billion dollar efforts at making AI easier to use for the average person with minimal effort.
If a more useful and easier-to-use set of AI tools is achieved, what happens to this consumer audience? And what kind of creativity is unlocked when more people can use AI tools create a film, a piece of art, or a song with less expertise and effort?
AI Consumers: Casually Using Better and Better AI
This is going to be amazing for billions of people. You won’t need to take a filmmaking course to create a film. You won’t need to understand music theory to create a song. You won’t need your hands to paint. You won’t need to see to create imagery. AI creative tools redefine the creative process. This turns creativity on its head and unlocks creative tools for people who didn’t think they were creative (or lost it as they aged into adulthood) or didn’t think they could be. It democratizes creativity.
It means a new world where on one side AI-enabled professional creatives create massive projects we can’t even conceive of converging with a rapidly expanding audience of creatives that want to interact with art in new and seamless ways where they can also be in the driver seat of imagination. Imagine the Marvel Cinematic Universe on steroids converging with a country-sized AI-enabled art school. Imagine Pokémon Go but everyone can create their own Pokémon and catch them too. Honestly, there is no good analog for what’s coming here; it’s a kind of creative content singularity.
Your grandma will be able to create her own cinematic universe and it’s going to be awesome and completely bewildering. And who knows where it goes from here?
Minh Do is a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in education, music, journalism, and venture capital. Having raised over $30 million for his startups, Minh specializes in the intersection of AI, film, and media through his agency, Fantastic Day, and his community platform, Machine Cinema.
