The Great Replacement—of live humans on camera—is upon us.
Last week some powerful new AI video tools were released to the public. My X feed was suddenly larded with AI-generated videos starring fake people who looked real, talking to each other and interacting in a normal, realistic but still fake way.
The scripts were often self-referential: fake people talking about how they are fake and living inside a fake world, and how cool it is.
If you don’t look too closely, the only way you can tell they’re fake is that these fake people are totally unfazed by the fact that they’re ghosts. No souls, no bodies, no backstories, no problem!
Here’s one from Google’s new Veo 3 platform:
People freaked out.
A friend who works at a Hollywood talent agency warned me before these videos dropped that he’d seen some demos of what these new products can do.
He was morose, utterly dejected. His takeaway was that it’s over for companies like his: AI video talent won’t need talent agents, entertainment lawyers, contracts, negotiations, fees, riders, trailers, auditions, deals, cocaine, Ozempic, rehab, limos, hookers, or hotel suites, food, oxygen, health insurance, or anything else humans tend to demand.
Hollywood is over, TV is over, actors are over, it’s all over. Everything will be AI-generated videos, forever.
Say goodbye to movie stars, influencers, TV shows, singers, celebrities, and real people on screens. Tom Cruise is out. Timothée Chalamet is toast. Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman are hereby retired. It’s Veover!
The fake people are great actors with realistic human emotions. I mean, imagine humans doing things like this on camera — a human could never.
The Google Veo 3 people can also sing and perform way better than you ever could, too. AI Taylor Swift won’t ever get dumped. AI Britney Spears won’t ever have bipolar episodes. AI Diddy won’t host any parties.
AI video talent can work all hours with no craft services, no expensive wardrobe, no makeup artists, no drug habits, no attitude, and no ego stroking required.
My friend glimpsed the future, and it was a hellscape where his entire industry had vanished; all of Hollywood shrunk into one guy with an app.
There would be a new Hollywood: and there would be One AI Prompt to Rule Them All.
But wait. Just stop. And now compare your experience watching the fake people to watching 18-year-old ballerina Polina Kulikova dance to Jailhouse Rock with her partner:
If you thought Polina was fake, an AI generated mirage, you probably wouldn’t watch more than a few seconds.
But she’s mesmerizing—because she’s real.