It is definitely changing it. We were already experiencing the move from a "celebrity" being an individual with huge talent to just a marketing tool that gets giant financial rewards for merely existing. These larger than life pop culture icons that 100s of millions or billions of people care about is a recent phenomenon and I welcome generative AI killing it off.
If media had one-shot generated actors we could just appreciate whatever we consumed and then forget about everyone involved. Who cares what that generated character likes to eat for breakfast or who they are dating they don't exist.
You're describing commodification. Too bad it doesn't work out that way in practice because people are not interchangeable. Look at all the "ship of Theseus" entertainment companies we have today. They still have the IP rights, but the people who actually made it good are long gone. Franchises running on fumes.
Is this really a change? Haven't people loved celebrities for as long as they've existed? Before this, characters in books, poems and songs commanded the same level of attention.
> I welcome generative AI killing it off.
It probably will, but that pushes us in the direction that Neal Stephenson describes in Fall - millions of people sitting alone consuming slop content generated precisely for them, perfect neuro-stimulation with bio-feedback, just consuming meaningless blinking lights all day and loving it. Is that better than what we have now? It's ad-absurdum, yes, but we live in a very absurd world now.
> Who cares what that generated character likes to eat for breakfast or who they are dating they don't exist.
You never needed to know this about celebrities, and you still don't need to now. Yes, others are into it; let them have their preferences. No doubt you're into something they would decry.
I definitely draw a distinction between like... famous medieval leaders and generals being well known versus what we do with people like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Kim Kardashian etc. I am sure they had local celebrities back then but there is no way they extended much beyond a small region or a single nation.
In my ideal world generating content becomes so easy that it loses all value unless you have some relation to the creator. Who cares about the new Avengers movie, Rick from down the street also made an action movie that we are gonna check out. Local celebrities return. Global figures are generated because why would Coke pay 100m for Lebron to dunk a can of coke on camera or some dumb shit when his image has been absolutely trashed by floods of gen content.
- How do I know Rick down the street, anymore, if I'm inside consuming perfectly addicting slop all day?
- How do I ensure that I am also consuming content that has artistic merit that is outside my pure-slop comfort zone?
- Why would I notice or care about a local artist when they can't produce something half as perfect "for me" as a recommendation algorithm trained on all human artistic output?
> Global figures are generated
This I agree with. Ian Macdonald wrote about "aeai" characters in his early 2000s novel River of Gods, where a subplot concerns people who watch TV shows starring AI characters (as actors, who also have an outside-of-the show life). The thing is, right now we see Lebron in the ad and it's an endorsement - how can an AI character of no provenance endorse anything?
