JOHN NOLTE: Disney Sells Out to AI (Again) with Adobe Deal.
Pure gobbledygook. So I asked Grok what it meant. Grok’s first explanation made no sense. So I asked Grok to dumb it down. Now we’re getting somewhere…
“Disney’s teams (especially the people who design theme parks) already sketch ideas on paper. The AI can quickly turn those rough sketches into polished concept art that looks like official Disney style (Mickey, Star Wars, Marvel, etc.),” Grok explained. “They’re also building private AI models that only know Disney’s characters, worlds, and art styles. That way the AI won’t invent weird or off-brand stuff, and everything stays under Disney’s control.”
Bottom line: “It speeds up the early design process for parks, rides, movies, and ESPN stuff so ideas can move from ‘rough sketch’ to ‘ready to show the bosses’ much faster.”
Grok then falls for the spin with the claim that none of this will replace Disney artists or create AI-designed movies or rides.
Except it will.
Of course it will.
Former Cheers producer Rob Long has a better suggestion for using AI in Hollywood: The Showbiz Jobs AI Should Replace.
If David Ellison, the new owner of the Antietam battlefield called Warner Bros., replaced every single executive tomorrow, no writer in town would realize that the call was no longer coming from an office on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica but a data farm in the Nevada desert instead. It would be like swapping out the Darrins on Bewitched. After a day or so, no one would notice.
And what would the server rack need to learn? Not much. After every pitch, it would learn to say this: Fun stuff, let us talk internally and get back to you. In every notes session, this: Is there a way to show more of the quirks of the female character? A consistent body of language has been created that a large language model can master in an hour. What I’m proposing is a next-token prediction engine: It produces, one word at a time, whatever response is statistically most likely. If you’ve ever sat through a notes call, you’ll recognize that as the job description.
I know, I know: Crazy Modest Proposal stuff, right? But in 1729, when Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal, his satirical pamphlet that calmly suggested the Irish poor solve their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich, the poor weren’t actually doing it. Not so in Hollywood. Several studios already run scripts through AI coverage before a human reader ever sees them. There’s a new tool that tells a studio, within nanoseconds of uploading new script drafts, whether a writer took the studio executives’ notes. Hollywood has spent three years worrying that AI is coming for the writers and artists and Mystery staff, but it hasn’t yet; meanwhile, the Spreadsheet side has invited its own replacement into the meeting and taught it how to say, There’s lots here in this pass we love, but we have a few places that bump for us.
Rob’s article was written prior the November midterms; leftist politicians and activists are curiously, “Progressives” who find technological progress rather frightening, and are counting on voters to feel the same: Everything is Stupid Now.
