Harry Potter and the Culture of AI | The Backdrop
This week's episode of The Backdrop is now available!
Apologies for the delay on the Patreon post.
Comments (9)
The proliferance of AI and its widespread acceptance being a result of nostalgia baiting audiences for decades is a very interesting perspective. I tend to think more about the suits and tech oligarchs pushing the stuff, not how some large portion of society actually wolfs it down.
I am a big fan of the idea of things being multifactoral, in that it is not as easy as one thinks to foist something the public doesn't want upon them - look at the Metaverse - but if you can cultivate an appetite for it, you're golden.
Compelling original content takes time to create. Building a community around new IP takes time. The impact of a new work takes time to digest. Fan contributions to a work are generally appreciated because of how much time they had to invest to realize their creation. The promise of AI is that it will massively reduce the time needed to create content.
Yep. It's a complete rejection of the idea of process and context as relevant to engagement with an object. It treats the object as an end unto itself, and so the shortest most cost effective (to the company) path to producing that object becomes an ideal.
Really interesting analysis. Thanks once again Darren.
I saw an argument somewhere recently, can’t recall where. Anywho, they suggested that the point of the Harry Potter TV show was not actually nostalgia, but rather to erase and replace the movies in fans’ hearts. Or at least that this is JK Rowling’s goal. That this is Rowling being a petty, hateful troglodyte towards the actors who rejected her by erasing their contribution to Harry Potter fandom, and that this is why it cleaves so closely to the films. Not sure I agree, but it was an interesting idea.
Another great video essay from Darren. This one left me wondering, in the context of some previous Backdrop essays, about the long-term viability of endless AI nostalgia farming based on properties that are meaningful to Gen X and Millennials (see, e.g., "The Hand-Me-Down Nostalgia of Skeleton Crew" [1] and "Maybe Kids Don't Need Superheroes When They've Got Chainsaw Man" [2]). Are the kids going to want AI videos of rehashed stories featuring Harry Potter and Darth Vader, or will they even care about those characters in the same way? And if they don't, what characters step into that role if we're no longer creating new ones, or at least not creating new ones with the same cultural resonance? And, finally, if the answer is that there are no such new characters, how can the model replicate itself going forward? I have some hypotheses, each grimmer than the last ... [1] https://www.patreon.com/posts/117434749?collection=206904 [2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/152939828?collection=206904
Setting aside the implication that fans of Star Wars Legends is why the sequel trilogy failed, the problem isn't that general audiences are willing to choose slop, its that we aren't given any viable alternative. Just like physical media, over time we are getting less quality push on us to the point that statistically that's whats going to be successful
This, exactly. The AI slop content is so much better than what we get from the legitimate source because it isn't afraid to make mistakes and hitch at times.