From Tilly Norwood to Critterz, It's Time To Be A Grown-Up About AI

In 2012, after years of people telling me my screenplays were too wild and expensive, that the unions would never let me make movies for the budgets I knew they could be done for, that I'd have to go through the studios to make movies that they would change and own the rights to, I packed up and left Hollywood, with my family, to become an Award-winning filmmaker with my first feature film, The Quantum Terror. I saw the writing on the wall. Nobody there gave a crap about me. They were too wrapped up in their status game, and even then, I was predicting the industry's implosion. I am now working on my second feature, an animated sci-fi adventure blending my love of miniatures, practical effects, and stop-motion with AI animation and enhancements. It's a dream project of mine that I've been working on since 2016 called Escape From Planet Omega-12, featuring everything you'd love about a story like that: aliens, robots, spaceships, ray-guns, beautiful women, and action. In short, it's all the stuff audiences keep telling Hollywood they want, yet the industry seems incapable of providing.

However, it seems that Hollywood is not content to die and let live. Even though they've made their bed, they seem to think that everyone else but them should sleep in it, giving them all the attention, nodding in total agreement, spending our hard-earned money on them, and picking up our pitchforks and torches to go after anyone who falls out of lockstep with their moronic, self-centered idolatry.

Declaring themselves the "good" people, they work hard to defend their delusions by lecturing us from their picket lines, press tours, and red carpets. They'll despise us from the silver screen, blacklist or cancel us on social media, and issue veiled two-tier threats at us from their late-night TV studios, saying in one breath that if we think a certain way we're a certain kind of nasty person and in the next breath suggesting to their sycophants at large that the world might be a little better if there were a few less of those certain kind of nasty people around. Then, when they see someone go and badly hurt or kill someone who fits their description, they run cover for them, making sure that we're all aware that any of us can have crosshairs put on us from the airwaves if we don't want to play by the rules. The game is always rigged in their favor.'

"Hollywood is not content to die and let live."

They're getting increasingly comfortable with being this way when it comes to getting what they want, or maybe it's more out of desperation, because they see that the majority of people have had just about enough of this. From politics, to religion, to economics, right down to the granular of every little thing we do, including creating, they want to have a say in our lives, and just like an abuser will always prey on their victim's desire to be morally good, they'll find a reason to give us another backhand.

In their mind, it is up to them if you are worthy to exist, let alone prosper, outside of their perimeters.

So, when I start making my social media rounds for the day, it always amuses me to see what has them all playing their favorite role, The Victim, on any particular week. It's a shame I can't bet money on the cause because it's almost always a sure thing that it'll be something they stepped in, themselves, and are now looking to blame anyone for it but themselves.

In that way and that way only, AI has been a gift to them.

You may have heard the names: Tilly Norwood, the 100% AI-generated digital character being billed as the entertainment industry's first synthetic performer, and Critterz, the upcoming feature film backed by OpenAI, which uses AI to slash animation time from years to months. These two projects are not just novelties; they are the first concrete harbingers for those who are not paying real attention, if not the flimsy first attempts within the industry of a seismic shift. They represent the simple truth that Hollywood's crisis isn't a future technological threat. It is a present economic necessity driven by the industry's own self-destruction.