Jeffrey Katzenberg gets much of the credit for overseeing the Disney Renaissance of the late 80s and early 90s, and then in 1994 he became the “K” in “Dreamworks SKG,” and continued his winning streak with Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda.
But then he founded Quibi, which was born and died in 2020. And now, in a 2,394-word X post on Wednesday, Katzemberg argues that resistance is futile, and the entertainment industry must embrace AI or else.
“To resist technology is to risk irrelevance,” Katzenberg writes, later adding, “Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away.”
He goes about making this point in puzzling ways. In part, he argues his case by telling the often-told story of John Philip Sousa’s resistance to recorded music. “His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work,” Katzenberg’s essay notes.
But Katzenberg also gives a reverent nod to the orchestra pit musicians of pre-talkie movie houses, whose livelihoods were wiped out by sound motion pictures. “They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back,” he writes.
For whatever reason, Katzenberg doesn’t note that Luddites were in dire economic straits too, and fought a precise and tactical campaign aimed at both preserving their way of life and sparing the machines and people that didn’t affect them despite a draconian new law making their vandalism a capital crime. Lord Byron said in a speech amid the Luddites’ campaign of bloodlessly breaking stocking frames in 1812 that:
“[…]it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress. The perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings, tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large and once honest and industrious body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.”
Anyway, Katzenberg evidently didn’t pick up any books about the history of the textile industry before coming to his conclusion. But he did, he explains, ask a chatbot to describe the difference between reasoning and creating. “Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry,” he writes. He then expounds on the difference between reasoning and creating but I’ll spare you, because I don’t think literally anyone in the world not named Jeffrey Katzenberg has ever confused the concepts of reasoning and creating.
In fairness, twice in the essay Katzenberg says he doesn’t “have all the answers,” and one of those times he adds the self-effacing parenthetical “take Quibi, for one!” And when he says that after AI-powered movies kick in, and budgets consequently collapse, “more films will get made, not fewer,” and studios will “take more risks.” The picture he’s painting may be bleak, but at least his tone is optimistic.
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