As Tinseltown’s Power Wanes, AI Waxes
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“Sora is here,” OpenAI announced in December 2024. The company explained it employs text to produce uncannily realistic videos. “Sora serves as a foundation for AI that understands and simulates reality—an important step towards developing models that can interact with the physical world.”
The average person probably hasn’t heard of Sora. Not yet. The average person probably isn’t considering the implications of this sea change. To appreciate the juggernaut of AI video to come—not just because of Sora—but due to competitors like Runway, Kling, Haiper, and more, requires us to understand the importance of a monoculture.
As Wikiwands explains, “The monoculture (also called global monoculture) is a concept in popular culture studies in which facets of popular culture are experienced by everyone at once, either globally or nationally. Critics such as Robert Christgau and Chuck Klosterman have posited that the monoculture existed from the 1960s to the 1990s and early 2000s but had ended by the 21st century, mainly toward the end of the 2010s, due to the rise of streaming media and the fracturing of popular culture.”
I accept Christgau and Klosterman’s premise. Here’s why. Hailing from Generation X, I straddle two worlds, the analog and the digital. I grew up playing video games like Oregon Trail in elementary school yet can still recall a time before the Internet. Especially before ubiquitous screens.
Living in a monoculture back then meant if you went to an out-of-state summer camp you could still expect your peers to know the same movies and TV shows as you. You could also expect them to have heard the same music. Probably on MTV.
Aw, MTV. We hardly knew you.
I love my MTV. Even Now…
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The World Wide Web blasted the monoculture to smithereens. Case in point: It’s fair to say the 1990s were a high point of auteur filmmaking with modern classics like Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Magnolia, and L.A. Confidential.
Unfortunately, it also signified the end of our shared monoculture.
Each year since we’ve only splintered more as a nation with fewer people seeing the same movies. It’s not just that box office sales are down, driven by changing view habits, COVID aftereffects, and declining attention spans. The fact is, films, once the lifeblood of our monoculture, no longer unify us.
We don’t watch or listen to the same stuff, especially not together.
Once upon a time, the Academy Awards drew huge numbers of viewers. Likewise, Hollywood stars were adored in hagiographic terms. We saw celebrity actors like Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Robert Redford as something beyond mere mortals. Consequently, we rushed to see their movies.
Nowadays? Perhaps only Tom Cruise possesses such box office power.
This brings us back to Sora and the AI-video revolution. Ever seen a family out at a restaurant with each person staring at their separate screen? Then you can appreciate what I believe is coming: Hollywood’s YouTubization.
To understand what I mean travel back with me to 2006. That year Time picked “you” as person of the year. The magazine applauded Internet 2.0, specifically a new company called YouTube. It enabled budding filmmakers to become auteurs in the Hollywood tradition.
“Who are these people?” Time asked. “Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do.”
That was nearly 20 years ago.
Time’s tastemakers were prescient but couldn’t foresee where this trend would go—to our technically advanced, yet cultural fractured era. At the same moment Web3 is coming into focus, empowering tomorrow’s creatives with decentralized AI tools, our monoculture is on its way out.
It’s quite possible Hollywood celebrities will soon be dethroned by … us? Let me paint that picture. Imagine it’s three years from now. You and your partner have plans with another couple. If this were 1997, you might go see Titanic and bawl your eyes out. Or laugh hysterically at Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. (Or reverse these actions depending on your cinematic sensibilities.)
In 2028?
You and your friends don’t go see a film starring celebrities. You put yourselves in the movies. This is no idle prediction. Ashton Kutcher is one industry insider who sees the writing on the wall concerning generative artificial intelligence. In an interview with Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, he acknowledged “the dawn of AI Cinema” as TomsGuide reports. “Instead of watching a movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate a movie and watch my own movie,” predicted Kutcher.
Date Night Becomes Movie Night. Starring You.
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Zooming out, I think I speak for many when I say watching celebrity culture die is a mixed bag. On the one hand, star worship has gotten out of control, especially as actors have become activists on both sides of the aisle. On the other, I miss Tinseltown’s former grandeur and elegance. It’s sad to think this uniquely American artifact may go the way of silent pictures and vaudeville, quaint relics evoking little more than nostalgia.
‘90s icon Kevin Costner, himself a star of Yellowstone, a rare modern mainstream hit, makes a good point with this related quote: “If you’re going to tear down a hero, you should never forget that you’re tearing down someone else’s hero.” While we may personally dislike the antics of self-important movie stars in recent years, let us not forget their societal impact.
As we drift deeper into a decentralized age bereft of shared cultural touchstones, we would do well to appreciate their value. Ready Player One predicted a future where you and your buddies could make yourselves the actors in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off using AI and VR. Sure, that sounds fun. But it’s no way to keep societal cohesion bound by mutual experiences.
And yet, each problem offers a solution—especially when it comes to business. Perhaps Hollywood’s YouTubization will lead to a new creative golden age where future people wield AI tools like Sora and others to make movie marvels to rival even cinematic triumphs from the ‘90s.
Now, that’s a future I’d like to see onscreen.
