Yes, the self-owning of Hollywood—the absurdity of budgets and costs, the entitled/clueless behavior etc— is not in dispute.
But that “$2000” price tag? That needs its tires kicked.
Namely: if companies like Kling (and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion etc) had to pay even PART of the cost to originally create, or even legally license, their vast training datasets—rather than stealing (“scraping”) them wholesale from artists and creators—the estimated cost would surely range from $5-30 billion. (Sources: MarketIntelo; UX Collective)
So that cost of “$2000” sure covers a lot of hidden externalities. All of them incurred by the wider society and culture.
Key point: those “data sets” aren’t some natural resource, like a seam of coal or an oil field, that was “discovered” and then exploited.
It’s straight-up theft, strip-mined from the lifetime work of other humans. Without attribution, or remuneration. So let’s at least be honest about the real bottom line.
Agreed -- that $2,000 just covers the cost of subscriptions and compute, not the money spent (or not spent) to develop them. So far, there's been little retribution for creators who have seen their content ripped and used for training. It'll be interesting to see how that legal battle plays out.
However, the large studios that do have the resources to fight the AI powers that be (Disney, Lionsgate, Amazon MGM, etc.) have already entered into partnerships with AI companies. Disney with Adobe/OpenAI, Lionsgate with Runway, Amazon MGM with AWS. Unfortunately, it seems to me like those relationships would have to significantly deteriorate for any serious concessions to be made.
A fully AI film will never be more than a curio. It’s remarkable only because of how it was made. A film with sound sync issues, out of focus shots and technical errors would never be selected for a prestigious film festival unless there were extenuating circumstances. Once the novelty wears off, what is left?
I think what's left are the tools and processes Koosha used to make the film, and how they will or will not be applied to filmmaking moving forward.
I'm on the same page that entirely AI-generated films aren't the future. Five years out, I doubt a fully AI film makes a festival lineup. But plenty of the ones that do will have used AI in some capacity -- it just won't be the selling point.
So far I haven't seen a machine that woke up one day and decided to write a story, all on its own, without human input. AI can be a useful tool - but like all tools, it needs some learned skills to work, and as for all expressions, it needs editing. A lot of editing. New art forms, using new tools, build on old forms, and add their own expressions. No worries. Old forms are still viable and loved. Definitely there's plenty of new slop, and lots of experiments that didn't work out as planned. But there also may be some great stuff coming.
Anyone in the comments thinking IP should exist is also end career mode.
IP is, beyond any rational explanation, a criminal conspiracy to control what others do with their brains and hands and mouths.
Just because you wrote it first doesn't mean you have any right to prevent me from reading it out loud.
I can't wait for these old hogs to fade away and be forgotten.
When we make Ai content today, we WANT OUR AUDIENCES BOOTLEGGING IT. They spread the brand themselves, monetize a little, and the bigger audiences finds our product, follows our profiles, and makes us richer.
I saw Ash Koosha interviewed on Morning Joe recently, along with two scenes. Both the Director and the film were impressive. I look forward to seeing the entire film when it's released. There is no question that AI has been used in filmmaking for a while. As the technology continues to improve, it will allow Mr. Koosha and others like him to tell stories we need to know. In my view, that's a very good thing.
Great analysis! The cost-cutting that kills jobs narrative often dominates the conversation, but it overlooks how the same tools are making filmmaking more accessible. Lower barriers to entry mean more diverse voices and stories, and less dependence on traditional gatekeepers to decide what gets made.
While Hollywood continues to struggle, indie filmmaking is in a creative renaissance. What we've seen firsthand at ShotKraft - hundreds of filmmakers are using AI to streamline pre-production and make the most of their budgets, no matter the size. It's about expanding who gets to create.
The detail that says everything: Koosha’s already planning to put veteran department heads back in the room for the next one.
The man who just proved you can make a feature with no camera, no crew, no set — and his takeaway is that he wants more human judgment, not less.
That tracks with what we see every day. We built YBA (www.yba.world) around exactly these tools, and the $2,000 headline is the wrong number to fixate on. People tend to focus on the compute cost and evaluate the process through the lens of the technology. But technology doesn’t execute itself. Tools don’t create, people do.
When the first full-length AI-generated feature film, Hell Grind, premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the filmmakers had run 61,487 generations to keep 960 shots — a 1.5% survival rate. That 98.5% left on the cutting room floor is the work — a person deciding, thousands of times over, what’s worth keeping. The tool didn’t lower that cost; if anything it moved it upstream, where every call a DP or editor used to make now lands on one set of eyes.
The feeds are flooded with “AI slop” right now because the barrier to entry is low and everyone’s experimenting — but most of that output has no purpose behind it, and it’s saturated the very funnel through which most people first meet this technology.
So one shallow use case ends up standing in for the whole universe. People see the slop and decide that’s what AI is, when it’s only the easiest thing the tool can do.
I feel that misunderstanding directly. We build content for brands, and we walk into rooms where people’s idea of AI has already been formed by the slop they’ve been scrolling — so the work has to fight that impression before anyone’s looked at a single frame of what we actually do. The deeper universe — what this Tribeca piece is actually pointing at — is a genuinely powerful instrument that’s also still unstable, hard to navigate, and demands real craft to control.
Yes, the self-owning of Hollywood—the absurdity of budgets and costs, the entitled/clueless behavior etc— is not in dispute.
But that “$2000” price tag? That needs its tires kicked.
Namely: if companies like Kling (and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion etc) had to pay even PART of the cost to originally create, or even legally license, their vast training datasets—rather than stealing (“scraping”) them wholesale from artists and creators—the estimated cost would surely range from $5-30 billion. (Sources: MarketIntelo; UX Collective)
So that cost of “$2000” sure covers a lot of hidden externalities. All of them incurred by the wider society and culture.
Key point: those “data sets” aren’t some natural resource, like a seam of coal or an oil field, that was “discovered” and then exploited.
It’s straight-up theft, strip-mined from the lifetime work of other humans. Without attribution, or remuneration. So let’s at least be honest about the real bottom line.
Agreed -- that $2,000 just covers the cost of subscriptions and compute, not the money spent (or not spent) to develop them. So far, there's been little retribution for creators who have seen their content ripped and used for training. It'll be interesting to see how that legal battle plays out.
However, the large studios that do have the resources to fight the AI powers that be (Disney, Lionsgate, Amazon MGM, etc.) have already entered into partnerships with AI companies. Disney with Adobe/OpenAI, Lionsgate with Runway, Amazon MGM with AWS. Unfortunately, it seems to me like those relationships would have to significantly deteriorate for any serious concessions to be made.
Notable points.
A fully AI film will never be more than a curio. It’s remarkable only because of how it was made. A film with sound sync issues, out of focus shots and technical errors would never be selected for a prestigious film festival unless there were extenuating circumstances. Once the novelty wears off, what is left?
I think what's left are the tools and processes Koosha used to make the film, and how they will or will not be applied to filmmaking moving forward.
I'm on the same page that entirely AI-generated films aren't the future. Five years out, I doubt a fully AI film makes a festival lineup. But plenty of the ones that do will have used AI in some capacity -- it just won't be the selling point.
I’m so glad he used the IP of others and the energy usage of a Walmart in August to make a film you could write about in your newsletter.
So far I haven't seen a machine that woke up one day and decided to write a story, all on its own, without human input. AI can be a useful tool - but like all tools, it needs some learned skills to work, and as for all expressions, it needs editing. A lot of editing. New art forms, using new tools, build on old forms, and add their own expressions. No worries. Old forms are still viable and loved. Definitely there's plenty of new slop, and lots of experiments that didn't work out as planned. But there also may be some great stuff coming.
IP is dead.
Anyone in the comments thinking IP should exist is also end career mode.
IP is, beyond any rational explanation, a criminal conspiracy to control what others do with their brains and hands and mouths.
Just because you wrote it first doesn't mean you have any right to prevent me from reading it out loud.
I can't wait for these old hogs to fade away and be forgotten.
When we make Ai content today, we WANT OUR AUDIENCES BOOTLEGGING IT. They spread the brand themselves, monetize a little, and the bigger audiences finds our product, follows our profiles, and makes us richer.
Without IP.
I saw Ash Koosha interviewed on Morning Joe recently, along with two scenes. Both the Director and the film were impressive. I look forward to seeing the entire film when it's released. There is no question that AI has been used in filmmaking for a while. As the technology continues to improve, it will allow Mr. Koosha and others like him to tell stories we need to know. In my view, that's a very good thing.
Great job, Dan. I've just unsubscribed from ALL Prof G emails.
Great analysis! The cost-cutting that kills jobs narrative often dominates the conversation, but it overlooks how the same tools are making filmmaking more accessible. Lower barriers to entry mean more diverse voices and stories, and less dependence on traditional gatekeepers to decide what gets made.
While Hollywood continues to struggle, indie filmmaking is in a creative renaissance. What we've seen firsthand at ShotKraft - hundreds of filmmakers are using AI to streamline pre-production and make the most of their budgets, no matter the size. It's about expanding who gets to create.
The detail that says everything: Koosha’s already planning to put veteran department heads back in the room for the next one.
The man who just proved you can make a feature with no camera, no crew, no set — and his takeaway is that he wants more human judgment, not less.
That tracks with what we see every day. We built YBA (www.yba.world) around exactly these tools, and the $2,000 headline is the wrong number to fixate on. People tend to focus on the compute cost and evaluate the process through the lens of the technology. But technology doesn’t execute itself. Tools don’t create, people do.
When the first full-length AI-generated feature film, Hell Grind, premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the filmmakers had run 61,487 generations to keep 960 shots — a 1.5% survival rate. That 98.5% left on the cutting room floor is the work — a person deciding, thousands of times over, what’s worth keeping. The tool didn’t lower that cost; if anything it moved it upstream, where every call a DP or editor used to make now lands on one set of eyes.
The feeds are flooded with “AI slop” right now because the barrier to entry is low and everyone’s experimenting — but most of that output has no purpose behind it, and it’s saturated the very funnel through which most people first meet this technology.
So one shallow use case ends up standing in for the whole universe. People see the slop and decide that’s what AI is, when it’s only the easiest thing the tool can do.
I feel that misunderstanding directly. We build content for brands, and we walk into rooms where people’s idea of AI has already been formed by the slop they’ve been scrolling — so the work has to fight that impression before anyone’s looked at a single frame of what we actually do. The deeper universe — what this Tribeca piece is actually pointing at — is a genuinely powerful instrument that’s also still unstable, hard to navigate, and demands real craft to control.
We loved this piece.
We wrote something on the same theme here: https://ybaworld.com/blog/ai-video-creation-cinema-art-form