{"id":2212166,"date":"2025-12-25T21:12:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T21:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2212166"},"modified":"2025-12-25T21:12:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T21:12:23","slug":"in-2025-hollywood-cozied-up-to-ai-and-had-nothing-good-to-show-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/in-2025-hollywood-cozied-up-to-ai-and-had-nothing-good-to-show-for-it\/","title":{"rendered":"In 2025, Hollywood cozied up to AI and had nothing good to show for it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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AI isn\u2019t new to Hollywood \u2014 but this was the year when it really made its presence felt. For years now, the entertainment industry has used different kinds of generative AI products for a variety of post-production processes ranging from de-aging actors to removing green screen backgrounds. In many instances, the technology has been a useful tool for human artists tasked with tedious and painstaking labor that might have otherwise taken them inordinate amounts of time to complete. But in 2025, Hollywood really began warming to the idea<\/a> of deploying the kind of gen AI that\u2019s really only good for conjuring up text-to-video slop<\/a> that doesn\u2019t have all that many practical uses in traditional production workflows. Despite all of the money and effort being put into it, there\u2019s yet to be a gen-AI project that has shown why it\u2019s worth all of the hype.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This confluence of Hollywood and AI didn\u2019t start out so rosy. Studios were in a prime position to take the companies behind this technology to court because their video generation models had clearly been trained on copyrighted intellectual property. A number of major production companies including Disney, Universal<\/a>, and Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a> did file lawsuits against AI firms and their boosters for that very reason. But rather than pummeling AI purveyors into the ground, some of Hollywood\u2019s biggest power players chose instead to get into bed with them. We have only just begun to see what can come from this new era of gen-AI partnerships, but all signs point to<\/a> things getting much sloppier in the very near future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Though many of this year\u2019s gen-AI headlines were dominated by larger outfits like Google<\/a> and OpenAI<\/a>, we also saw a number of smaller players vying for a seat at the entertainment table. There was Asteria<\/a>, Natasha Lyonne\u2019s startup focused on developing film projects with \u201cethically\u201d engineered<\/a> video generation models, and startups like Showrunner<\/a>, an Amazon-backed platform<\/a> designed to let subscribers create animated \u201cshows\u201d (a very generous term) from just a few descriptive sentences plugged into Discord. These relatively new companies were all desperate to legitimize the idea that their flavor of gen AI could be used to supercharge film \/ TV development while bringing down overall production costs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Asteria didn\u2019t have anything more than hype to share with the public after announcing its first film, and it was hard to believe that normal people would be interested in paying for Showrunner\u2019s shoddily cobbled-together knockoffs of shows made by actual animators. In the latter case, it felt very much like Showrunner\u2019s real goal was to secure juicy partnerships with established studios like Disney that would lead to their tech being baked into platforms where users could prompt up bespoke content featuring recognizable characters from massive franchises.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That idea seemed fairly ridiculous when Showrunner first hit the scene because its models churn out the modern equivalent of clunky JibJab cartoons. But in due time, Disney made it clear that \u2014 crappy as text-to-video generators tend to be for anything beyond quick memes \u2014 it was interested in experimenting with that kind of content. In December, Disney entered into a three-year, billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI<\/a> that would let Sora users make AI videos with 200 different characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netflix became one of the first big studios to proudly announce that it was going all-in on gen AI. After using the technology to produce special effects for one of its original series<\/a>, the streamer published a list of general guidelines<\/a> it wanted its partners to follow if they planned to jump on the slop bandwagon as well. Though Netflix wasn\u2019t mandating that filmmakers use gen AI, it made clear that saving money on VFX work was one of the main reasons it was coming out in support of the trend. And it wasn\u2019t long before Amazon followed suit by releasing multiple Japanese anime series that were terribly localized into other languages<\/a> because the dubbing process didn\u2019t involve any human translators or voice actors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Amazon\u2019s gen-AI dubs became a shining example of how poorly this technology can perform. They also highlighted how some studios aren\u2019t putting all that much effort into making sure that their gen AI-derived projects are polished enough to be released to the public. That was also true of Amazon\u2019s machine-generated TV recaps<\/a>, which frequently got details about different shows very wrong. Both of these fiascos made it seem as if Amazon somehow thought that people wouldn\u2019t notice or care about AI\u2019s inability to consistently generate high-quality outputs. The studio quickly pulled its AI-dubbed series and the recap feature down, but it didn\u2019t say that it wouldn\u2019t try this kind of nonsense again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Disney-provided examples of its characters in Sora AI content.<\/em><\/figcaption>Image: Disney<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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All of this and other dumb stunts like AI \u201cactress\u201d Tilly Norwood<\/a> made it feel like certain segments of the entertainment industry were becoming more comfortable trying to foist gen-AI \u201centertainment\u201d on people even though it left many people deeply unimpressed and put off. None of these projects demonstrated to the public why anyone except for money-pinching execs (and people who worship them for some reason) would be excited by a future shaped by this technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Aside from a few unimpressive images, we still haven\u2019t seen what all might come from some of these collaborations, like Disney cozying up to OpenAI. But next year AI\u2019s presence in Hollywood will be even more pronounced. Disney plans to dedicate an entire section of its streaming service to user-generated content sourced from Sora, and it will encourage Disney employees to use OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT products. But the deal\u2019s real significance in this current moment is the message it sends to other studios about how they should move as Hollywood enters its slop era.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Regardless of whether Disney thinks this will work out well, the studio has signaled that it doesn\u2019t want to be left behind if AI adoption keeps accelerating. That tells other production houses that they should follow suit, and if that becomes the case, there\u2019s no telling how much more of this stuff we are all going to be forced to endure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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