Armed With AI, Small Businesses Also Challenge Hollywood
借助人工智能，小企业也在挑战好莱坞

Some of Stevenson’s followers pay $4.99 per month for access to exclusive content and other perks. But Stevenson’s real goal with the videos is to convince tech companies to hire him to make videos to inspire their developers. On his website, he lists Meta Platforms, Apple, Adobe, Snap and Nvidia among his clients.
史蒂文森的一些追随者每月支付 4.99 美元以获取独家内容和其他特权。但史蒂文森制作视频的真正目标是说服科技公司雇佣他制作视频，以激励他们的开发者。在他的网站上，他列出了 Meta Platforms、Apple、Adobe、Snap 和 Nvidia 作为他的客户。

Stevenson is both a creator and the owner of a small business. Those are the two audiences Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed last month at the company’s Connect conference, where he also introduced Meta’s Movie Gen AI model for making videos.
史蒂文森既是一个小企业的创始人，也是其所有者。这是 Meta 首席执行官马克·扎克伯格上个月在公司 Connect 大会上所针对的两个受众，他在大会上还介绍了 Meta 的 Movie Gen AI 模型，用于制作视频。

Zuckerberg said he foresees hundreds of millions of creators and small businesses using AI tools to make interesting and compelling content. In my past three Medium Shift columns, I explored the entertainment industry’s fear about generative AI: Millions of creators and kids in their basements using generative AI tools to create a flood of content that could endanger human storytelling and potentially compete with Netflix, YouTube and Fortnite.
扎克伯格表示，他预见到数亿创作者和小型企业将使用人工智能工具制作有趣且引人入胜的内容。在我过去的三篇《Medium Shift》专栏中，我探讨了娱乐行业对生成性人工智能的恐惧：数百万创作者和在地下室的孩子们使用生成性人工智能工具创造大量内容，这可能危及人类讲故事的能力，并可能与 Netflix、YouTube 和 Fortnite 竞争。

Meta’s Movie Gen and Stevenson’s videos show that Hollywood’s challenge extends far beyond kids in their basements. The bigger threat may come from small businesses, which are better suited to capture and monetize scarce consumer attention with new AI tools.
Meta 的 Movie Gen 和 Stevenson 的视频表明，好莱坞面临的挑战远不止于孩子们在地下室里的活动。更大的威胁可能来自小型企业，它们更适合利用新的人工智能工具来捕捉和变现稀缺的消费者注意力。

Creators traditionally make money largely through sponsorships and selling subscriptions for exclusive content. Small businesses sell goods or services. Stevenson has built his own hybrid model for the AI era.
创作者传统上主要通过赞助和销售独家内容的订阅来赚钱。小型企业销售商品或服务。史蒂文森为人工智能时代建立了自己的混合模式。

Liberated by AI  被人工智能解放

Stevenson says AI tools free him from worrying about how much time and money he spends to make a video. “In the past, the ideas that you would be forced to do were the ones that the studios had confidence that it would make X amount of money,” he told me recently. If you explored your own idea that turned out not to be commercially viable, “you’ve just wasted so many resources.”
史蒂文森表示，人工智能工具让他不再担心制作视频所花费的时间和金钱。“过去，你被迫做的想法是那些工作室有信心能赚取 X 金额的，”他最近告诉我。如果你探索了自己的想法，但结果并不具有商业可行性，“你就浪费了很多资源。”

With AI, Stevenson says, “I’ve probably made more characters, environments, concepts, models in the last year and a half than I have in my entire career.”
斯蒂文森说：“有了人工智能，我在过去一年半里可能创造的角色、环境、概念和模型比我整个职业生涯中创造的还要多。”

Two of Stevenson’s projects demonstrate his approach. In one, he made a music video without lifting a camera—the performers (photorealistic characters), the music and the lyrics were rendered by AI.
史蒂文森的两个项目展示了他的做法。在其中一个项目中，他没有动用相机制作了一段音乐视频——表演者（逼真的角色）、音乐和歌词都是由人工智能生成的。

The second project is a YouTube series where Stevenson films interviews with people in tech-related fields and hand-edits the results. He is aiming the series at a “luxury audience that I imagine can afford maybe a Patreon, a subscription model, private screenings or events.” He envisions these payments as a third revenue stream, supplementing his corporate videos and Instagram subscriptions.
第二个项目是一个 YouTube 系列，Stevenson 拍摄与科技相关领域人士的访谈并手动编辑结果。他将该系列定位于“我想象中能够负担得起 Patreon、订阅模式、私人放映或活动的奢侈观众。”他设想这些付款作为第三个收入来源，补充他的企业视频和 Instagram 订阅。

Stevenson says 80% of his videos will be like the music video, made with AI and requiring little or no additional labor. Social media audiences will watch, usually for free. The followers, likes and views of the 80% will help attract the “luxury audience” who will pay to consume the other 20% of his content. In other words, 80% of his work helps him monetize 20% of his work better than he could do with advertising or sponsorships alone.
史蒂文森表示，他 80%的视频将像音乐视频一样，使用人工智能制作，几乎不需要额外的劳动力。社交媒体观众通常会免费观看这些视频。80%的关注者、点赞和观看次数将帮助吸引“奢侈品观众”，他们会付费消费他其他 20%的内容。换句话说，他 80%的作品帮助他比单靠广告或赞助更好地实现 20%的作品的货币化。

As for Hollywood… 至于好莱坞……

At Connect, Meta also announced that Blumhouse Productions, producer of Hollywood films including “Get Out,” is testing how to use Movie Gen to more efficiently create and edit short films. I asked Stevenson what the Blumhouse-Meta deal and his business model imply for Hollywood.
在 Connect 上，Meta 还宣布，制作包括《逃出绝命镇》在内的好莱坞电影的 Blumhouse Productions 正在测试如何使用 Movie Gen 更高效地创作和编辑短片。我问 Stevenson，Blumhouse 与 Meta 的交易及其商业模式对好莱坞意味着什么。

He predicts, “The smartest teams in Hollywood are going to take some of their larger budgets, and they’re going to invest in small teams of like five people that are all using an arsenal of AI tools to produce the volume and the quality of content that previously was only expected of much larger studios.”
他预测：“好莱坞最聪明的团队将会把他们的一部分大预算投入到小团队中，这些小团队大约有五个人，他们将使用一系列人工智能工具来生产以前只有更大工作室才能达到的内容数量和质量。”

Promise Advanced Imagination, a startup that emerged this week, intends to do just that. Led by George Strompolos, founder of YouTube multichannel network Fullscreen, as well as former YouTube director Jamie Byrne and AI filmmaker Dave Clark, the company will produce films and series in collaboration with generative AI artists and storytellers. Promise recently raised a seed round of funding from investors led by Peter Chernin of North Road Co. and Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz.
Promise Advanced Imagination 是一家本周成立的初创公司，旨在实现这一目标。该公司由 YouTube 多频道网络 Fullscreen 的创始人 George Strompolos、前 YouTube 导演 Jamie Byrne 和 AI 电影制作人 Dave Clark 领导，将与生成式 AI 艺术家和讲故事者合作制作电影和系列。Promise 最近从以 Peter Chernin（北路公司）和 Andrew Chen（安德森·霍洛维茨）为首的投资者那里筹集了一轮种子资金。

Stevenson believes established studios also will try innovative approaches with their intellectual property, potentially handing some to a smaller studio to produce content, while charging a licensing fee and collecting a share of the revenue.
史蒂文森认为，成熟的工作室也会尝试对其知识产权采取创新的方法，可能会将一些知识产权交给较小的工作室制作内容，同时收取许可费并收取一部分收入。

He pointed to Disney’s recent original science-fiction animation series “Iwájú” as a big step toward this model. For the first time in its 100-year history, Disney partnered with an outside studio—Kugali Media, a U.K.-based studio founded by African artists to tell African stories—to produce the series. The series also was notable because it’s not based on existing Disney intellectual property. Kugali basically oversaw production, and Disney trained the studio on how to produce Disney-quality 3D animation.
他指出迪士尼最近的原创科幻动画系列“Iwájú”是朝这一模式迈出的重要一步。在其 100 年的历史中，迪士尼首次与外部工作室合作——Kugali Media，这是一家由非洲艺术家创办的总部位于英国的工作室，旨在讲述非洲故事——共同制作该系列。该系列还值得注意的是，它并不是基于现有的迪士尼知识产权。Kugali 基本上负责制作，迪士尼则对该工作室进行了如何制作迪士尼质量 3D 动画的培训。

Stevenson’s vision of the future sounds a lot like the one Gavin Purcell—a producer and host of the podcast “AI for Humans”—outlined in May’s “How Generative AI Threatens Hollywood’s Walled Gardens.”
史蒂文森对未来的愿景听起来与加文·珀塞尔（“为人类而设的人工智能”播客的制作人和主持人）在五月的“生成性人工智能如何威胁好莱坞的围墙花园”中概述的愿景非常相似。

The future of the Hollywood studio is a portfolio of small businesses promoting their content on Meta’s platforms, YouTube, TikTok and elsewhere, and monetizing it via smaller, more exclusive relationships with paying audiences and/or goods and services attached to the content.
好莱坞制片厂的未来是一个小型企业组合，通过 Meta 的平台、YouTube、TikTok 等推广其内容，并通过与付费观众和/或与内容相关的商品和服务建立更小、更独特的关系来实现货币化。

After Meta’s Connect, there’s no business like small business.
在 Meta 的 Connect 之后，没有什么生意像小型企业一样。