There's a quiet kinship among those of us who started making AI video before anyone was watching. Nobody talks about it, but the early AI video crowd shares something real. We remember the melting faces, the six second clips, the late nights chasing one usable frame. We remember being told this wasn't art. We kept showing up when the tools barely worked and the outside world didn’t yet believe in what we were building. That's why a win like this hits different. When one of us rises, we all rise. Congratulations @JeffSynthesized on taking the Future Vision prize. You earned every bit of this, and you carried a piece of all of us with you. 🏆

People never understood what indie productions have to do to work. On Earthworm Jim I worked 14 hour days 7 days a week for a year. I was 27, so doable. Neverhood took 14 hour days, 6 days a week for a year. I was 31. 22 graphic novels always took 10 hour days, 6 days a week for 6 months, I was age 35-55. Doable. NFTs I worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week for 5 months. I was 56. My body broke down. Ai I’m working 14 hour days, 6 days a week and after 2 weeks I’m about to throw in towel. I’m 60 and can’t do that any more. I know Josh Daws and Mary Sue took him every waking hour for a month to do 11 minutes. The reason why we go indie is because you want to make something and studios are often not funding the front end of things. They wait until Obsession is already made before they get it. The big budgets are what allow the work hours to be dispersed to a bigger team. Ai is a work multiplier so anyone using can do more, but it can’t do everything. You still need people to push it into useful production. Here’s to the indie producers out there, no matter what project you’re working on. Respect the grind.

AI video will become so easy very soon that most brands will create all of their own social media content themselves. A huge amount of work that agencies currently handle will be gone. Creating original IP, shows and content is the opportunity right. Tell me why I am wrong. 👇

An 8-minute animated film . Generated in 14 minutes. Crazy ! very soon and only on @fal ! ( lora made for this in 1930 style Fleischer Studios for that will be share as well very soon )

For the ghosts, dreaming of the lives that could have been. @runwayml

This is true and I lived it for 20 years working in Hollywood. Anti-Ai people almost certainly don’t have the values, art integrity or experience to know how difficult it was to get anything made… and I have one of highest % of graphic novels ever sold into Hollywood… none got made. Convincing mid-level managers and execs to back your pitch to grant you the gift from in high that you’d get to tell a story was what stopped nearly every great artist. Two anti-art limitations now end with Ai: 1. That your stories were rejected because an exec said they weren’t good. 2. That you can’t tell your story because you don’t have big studio budgets.

A city in Italy is hosting a 10K run where participants can eat unlimited tiramisu after finishing It will take place as part of Treviso's annual Tiramisu World Cup

We need to remove the word “Artificial” from AI, because it’s anything but that. It’s Generative Intelligence, and it’s far from stupid, which is the last ditch of a desperate critic.

Here is a thought that might sounds odd/wrong the first time you hear it: recorded media is a phase. A long one, but a phase. For most of human history, media was live. Stories were told around fires by people who changed the ending depending on who was listening. Music was something that happened in a room, once, and never the same way twice. Theater was rewritten nightly by the mood of the crowd. For fifty thousand years, the default state of media was performance. It was unrepeatable, responsive, and it was alive. Then, about 150 years ago, we invented recording. The phonograph, the camera, film. Suddenly a performance could be frozen, copied, and shipped. It was kind of a miracle and we built the entire modern media economy on top of it with studios, labels, theaters, networks, streaming etc. All of it is infrastructure for the one core idea of capture once, distribute many. We’ve lived inside that model so long we mistake it for the natural state of media. For a law of nature. It is not. It’s a temporary phase. When AI generation becomes real time, and oh boy it is becoming real time really fast, media stops being something you retrieve or playback and becomes something that happens. The model is not a camera pointed at the past it is more like an instrument played in the present. And instruments imply performers. I call the last 150 years The Recording Interlude. A brief, strange period in which media was, by technical necessity, fixed and identical for everyone. One to many. The interlude gave us masterpieces and an industry. It also gave us a generation of creators who have never once made media with an audience, only at one. I like to think about what comes after the interlude and it looks like we might come full circle. Think about what we already pay the most for. Concert tickets cost more than albums ever did. While writing this, the starting ticket for one of the NBA finals in NY is $12,000 and World Cup tickets for a random game start at $4,000. Live sports is the last thing holding television together. Theater survives every technology that was supposed to kill it. Twitch streamers out earn film studios attention per dollar. The market has been telling us for two decades that liveness is the scarce asset. Generative models change the format. For the first time, constructed reality, not just captured reality, can be live. A story/world that improvises with its audience the way a jazz quartet improvises with a room. A film performed once, tonight, for these two hundred people, shaped by their reactions, and then gone. This already feels like sacrilege to anyone raised inside the interlude. We were taught that the artifact is the art. You have to reverenced to the final cut, pay your respects to the master tape, the canonical version etc. But “final cut” is not an artistic concept. It’s a logistical/technical one. It exists because changing a film after release used to be impossible. When media can respond in the moment, finality stops being a virtue and starts being a decision or a choice. The great media makers of the next era look less like directors hunched over timelines and more like conductors, DJs, game masters, jazz musicians or people who treat the model as an instrument and the audience as a collaborator. None of this means recorded media dies. Painting survived photography. Albums survived streaming. The fixed, finished, perfect artifact will survive too, as one form among many, no longer the default. This is not a zero sum game. For most of human history, stories existed only in the moment. Then we captured them. Now we might be returning to the moment again.

AI startup CFO, CEO, CMO, and CTO