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It really doesn't make sense to attribute those job losses to AI-the-technology, because if that were the case we'd be observing AI outputs displacing conventional entertainment products, and they're clearly not. Rather, the impact of AI is that AI-the-business is crowding out other investment.

In both film and video games, you see a ton of *project cancellations* and a general difficulty in funding new projects, which wouldn't be the case if AI was displacing workers in producing those products—you'd expect the opposite, in fact, if it was becoming cheaper to make a movie/game.

But the crowding out is extremely obvious to see, in particular, in video games because just Microsoft by itself is responsible for a huge proportion of the bleeding because they're explicitly divesting from Xbox to plug the gaping financial ulcer that is OpenAI.

Declines also just correlate with the rise of the AI bubble on somewhat coincidental terms. *all* at-home entertainment was overinvested in during the peak of covid, and we're experiencing a hangover crash from that, for example, which is now being compounded by AI-driven misinvestment.

What is happening is not that AI-generated cultural goods are replacing human-made cultural goods; what is happening is that capital is flowing out of the production of cultural goods *entirely,* making us all poorer for it.

And you might think "well they're replacing film workers with AI", except how the fuck is AI supposed to replace a gaffer? Movie budgets have not meaningfully dropped; they're not shooting fewer days to make a movie.

It's also important to understand the current moment in the entertainment industries as one in which the large corporations that run these sectors are engaged in disciplining their labor forces through mass unemployment, using the investment crunch as a window of opportunity to do so.

Video games' cycle of consolidation has exploded this year, but in film consolidation is still going and consolidation, of course, leads to mass unemployment. That it does is almost the point of consolidation.

FUCKING THANK YOU.