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Comment by jackcosgrove | Hacker News Reader

The article does not mention the departure of John Lasseter, who was forced out because of sexual improprieties during the Me Too movement. He was the creative force behind the glory days of Pixar.

If someone has information that he was more of a figurehead, I'd welcome it. But this seems like a pretty big omission.

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Yeah, obviously one has to be careful about lamenting this stuff, but it seems pretty clear that #MeToo not only ended the careers of many successful senior creative visionaries but it probably provoked a more-cautious stance from many companies towards the mere idea of having powerful visionaries to begin with, especially if they're male. They represent potentially catastrophic single points of failure, after all - and it's not just coming from #MeToo, but having an errant tweet or even an inkling of "problematic" political beliefs could suddenly end one's career and whatever works they have in motion would be ruined.

But as a consequence of this caution, we're also seeing that Disney and Pixar and other firms are just dissipating their brand capital by putting out safe, corporative-approved and committee-driven works. Within the next 5 years we'll probably see the first movies released where most of the writing was done via LLMs. I'm going to guess that it won't end well, unless the LLMs get much better...

Hollywood has been using algorithms to evaluate new movie scripts for decades. Consumer entertainment was never really an outlet mainly for creative expression; creative expression was just instrumental for making the business viable within certain market conditions. Now that indignation has been inculcated in culture by leftist social engineers, the machinations of capitalism are adapting the products accordingly. But the fundamental character of consumerism remains unchanged: endless variations, on themes that are favourable to incumbent financial interests, and which put the creative, revolutionary spirit into a slumber; elevator music. And LLMs are uniquely suitable, indeed.

That is one of the key issues behind the current Writers Guild of America strike. Producers want to be able to use LLMs to write script rough drafts and then pay human writers a lower rate to edit those scripts.

https://movieweb.com/why-the-wga-strike-hopes-to-cause-monum...

> ended the careers of many successful senior creative visionaries

The individual in question went on to found Skydance Animation, hardly an ended career.

The relative quality of Skydance’s single film, “Luck”, to pre/post Lasseter Pixar films is needed to know if he’s the culprit.

But who has Apple TV+?

A lot more often than not I have seen in my life (60+ years) that wonderful things are born if whole a lot of things fall into their places. I've seen many times when someone with every reason to believe that "it's all about me!" leaves the company/band/whatever to discover that "no, it was about whole team, timing, place, culture etc".

This industrialisation of art becomes ripe for disruption. Didn’t Pixar step in originally where the industry had become tired and stale? They capitalised on the novelty of computer generated graphic animation, but it was their stories and characters that really won. Someone else will step in soon and do the same (hopefully).

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