Katzenberg makes the case for AI in creative work

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Disney Animation and co-founded DreamWorks, joined X on 23 September with a single essay, The World is Changing: AI For Creativity. It reached close to eight million views within four days.

• He doubles down on his 2023 forecast that AI can cut animation production time and cost by as much as 90% within three years.
• His distinction travels well beyond film. Reasoning evaluates, and works towards an answer that is already there. Creating starts from a blank page and, in his words, conjures a single right answer where there was none. On generated images his line is that it is statistics, not soul.
• His ask is procedural rather than moral: credit, consent and compensation first, then the argument about what fairness requires. Worth stating that he is an investor in the category through WndrCo, which backs the AI animation company Cartwheel.

The 90% number is the part that travels. Marketing content supply chains, product and packaging visualisation and training material all sit on the same curve, and most organisations are still costing them at 2023 rates. The second point travels further. The companies that write the credit and compensation terms early will keep the people who make the work worth watching, and the ones that wait will negotiate those terms with a union or a court instead. (Jeffrey Katzenberg on X)