Ben Golik: AI’s Cruise v Pitt slop isn’t the threat – our IP doom loop is
As Uncommon’s creative partner explains, the viral deepfake dust-up looks like Hollywood déjà vu for a reason. The real issue isn’t the tech, it’s an industry that turned creativity into formula, IP into autopilot and storytelling into best practice.
The latest piece of AI content to put the creative industries on edge pits Tom Cruise against Brad Pitt in a fight over Epstein. Classic social catnip.
It’s easy to dismiss it as the latest bucket of AI slop, but the lighting is decent, the cuts bring energy and the likenesses are uncanny (even if our boys suddenly put on jackets halfway through the action).
It’s summer blockbuster stuff because, the truth is, slop predates AI… the Transformers franchise, Bridgerton season four’s Cinderella redux, live-action The Lion King. And it’s not just film. Fashion houses mine their archives while Zara mines their mining.
Humans are guilty of turning creative success into self-generating, auto-regurgitating formats. Only we give that a different two-letter acronym: IP. It’s a doom loop of nostalgic reincarnation, truly pop eating itself. Now, AI is at the buffet and it is ravenous.
Our recent reliance on the tried-and-trotted-out can now be done without us. We have reduced storytelling to formulas, content to algorithms and brands to best practice. Ripe pickings for robots.
Perhaps the flaw was built into the system? Creativity has always demanded that we expand our palette of references and draw ever more novel connections between everything we can ingest.
AI offers industrialized remixing, but (and this ‘but’ is our savior) it has no filter, no taste. That’s still us, thankfully.
The real problem with Cruise v Pitt isn’t that it was a simple prompt suckling off stolen inputs, it is that it looks exactly like what we know, another Hollywood fight scene that looks like another Hollywood fight scene.
It’s not a case of AI doing us in, it’s AI doing what we’ve already done and that’s a reminder it’s on us to do the new.
Pitt v Cruse was made using Seedance, a product created by ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, a place where millions of young creators have cut their teeth in the attention-deficit economy – our industry’s new talent pool and its new audience.
With the storytelling power they now have, let’s hope they see the positive potential of technology like this. New tools for a generation of creatives raised differently, with a chance to think differently and to make differently.
The problem isn’t new tech, it’s that we need new ideas.
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