Evolving with Creators
· The Brown Dog · The Worst Children’s Library · The Creator Trajectory · Meta & Books of No Value · Gaming in real life ·
On this day, April 23, 2005, the first ever video was uploaded to Youtube. A riveting 19 second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim's visit to the San Diego Zoo, which included this absolute gem on elephants, “they have really, really long trunks”. It was remarkably unremarkable, yet opened a portal to an unprecedented content and media world, one that is still evolving and befuddling and inspiring.
Approximately a year on, the site had in the region of 100 million videos. Today, twenty years later, most humans over the age of two know Youtube, it has over 5 Billion videos, 500+ hours are uploaded every minute, it is incredibly powerful for masses of humanity on every continent, and elephants still have long trunks.
Appropriately, today, we look at how the creator economy (almost entirely = Youtube) is playing out - and where it’s headed.
Elsewhere, there is incredulity at Meta’s cold take that books have no inherent value, amidst its brazen, torrent-led sourcing of books for training data. The cold corporate view and the passionate reactions to it encapsulate much of the creative/ethical debates around Gen AI.
In ▶️ Curated/Cuts an actor no longer with us still evocatively brings alive a story; in New Zealand we see an exhibition you would not want to go for, but you must ; and we see how there is more to a pint than beer.
➕ ➕ Also: what is Game Transfer Phenomenon, a photography sim, a study about how people are really using Gen AI, and ‘minimalist-maximalism’. Yes, really.
This is the Colour Bar- where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide.
The Creator Economy is the Studio economy
I came across an excellent outline of what the creator economy landscape is like now, and how it is most likely to change: digital studios will take over. For anyone who’s ever worked in TV, this might all sound terribly familiar. But it’s very on-point.
It articulates something that has been unfolding for a while now: Youtube dynamics are so much more about ‘indie TV’, scaled up teams, recurring series and connected TV interfaces to mimic streaming services. The ‘creator economy’ is evolving into something much bigger, more structured. Matt Gielen pushes back on the assumption that individual creators will continue to be the central force driving this space. Instead, he asserts- convincingly- that the next phase will be led by ‘digital media studios’, entities that think and operate less like personal brands.
There is no belittling of individual creators here; the piece actually does a great job breaking down the different kinds— classic influencers, celebrity-tier names with massive reach, the entrepreneurs quietly building businesses that happen to be powered by content. The key proposition is that this third group—the entrepreneurs—is where the future lies.
...the entire history of entertainment, every single major media brand has been built on the backs of characters or personalities. However, when the talent is the entirety of the brand (ie – the ONLY reason someone is a fan) there is a ceiling. This is not a critique of these businesses or types of creators. It’s just the reality of the success of a business being tied solely to an individual. There are very few creators or influencers that can carry an audience for many years on their personality alone as the value proposition to the audience.
There’s also a bit of a takedown of personality-driven content, as a business model; that it can be powerful, but is inherently limited (this seems logical but is lost in the halo we tend to shape around individual creators). Individual appeal doesn’t always scale, longevity can be challenging, audiences can be fickle. In contrast, digital studios are built around ideas, IP, and repeatable formats; roots that can hep them grow in less volatile ways. They’re structured, diversified, and better positioned to compete with traditional entertainment companies.
For those of us paying attention to how the digital media landscape is evolving, the piece offers a lens that feels both clarifying and necessary.
Creators won’t dominate the next phase of the creator economy by Matt Gielen.
Talking of creators, here are some selected creations I enjoyed.
🎬 Curated/Cuts.
1. The Brown Dog
A short film about isolation and the search for human connection. Commissioned by the consistently creative WeTransfer team, and starring Michael K. Williams in his final role, The Brown Dog was executive produced by Steve Buscemi, Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It has wonderful, sparse but soulful animation, drawing you in to Nobody’s world, a night time desolation of streets and doors and roads and a security booth. The words are evocative, indulgent even, searching for meaning. Yet, it is Michael K William’s voice that really owns this; that texture of understanding with an edge, holding you to the last moment.
Williams, of course, was best known for his portrayal of Omar Little in The Wire. That performance was “so intense, and so specific, that many people imagined that he was an actual Baltimore desperado who had somehow wandered onto the set of a great television show. In fact, Williams was a Brooklyn native.” His death by overdose in 2021 was mourned; his voice was left behind in an old recording of this story, to bring to life thus.
· Directors: Nadia Hallgren and Jamie-James Medina · Design & Animation: Fons Schiedon · · Original Score: Tyshawn Sorey Writer: Willis Earl Beal ·
WeTransfer: · Holly Fraser · Damian Bradfield · Alex Mattinson ·
2. The Worst Library
Internet safety campaigners in Auckland have created what they say is the Worst Children’s Library . This R18 exhibition looks to create visual representations of online harm. The library shelves have been stripped of regular books. Instead, the tomes are innocent-looking, colourful and appealing to children, but the subjects are all harmful content, which children can usually access easily online.
Each of the 1,160 handcrafted books on display has something a child has actually seen or experienced online.
“Not fiction, not exaggeration. Just data made visible.”
Titles include: 100 Ways to Self Harm; People Drowning Puppies; Vids Touting Drug Use; 1,2,3 Count Calories With Me; and even Bomb Making - all material that is accessible to people of all ages.
It has been designed to shock adults and parents into action, “arm them with knowledge and demonstrate the next-level protection offered by Samsung x Safe Surfer kid-safe devices.”
by DDB Group Aotearoa · An initiative for Safe Surfer & Samsung New Zealand ·
3. A Lovely Day with Guinness in America.
In a time when truth has become entirely subjective, to say “One Truth” is timely, powerful, yet runs the risk of overreaching. I am not from the USA, but it feels like this brand communication has reached just right.
Guinness chooses not to highlight its Irish persona, instead leaning right in to being the beverage of community. It wants to belong, to feel rooted ; this messaging is as far from an imported brand as can be.
The film feels like a documentary in a 90sec montage, as the Irish beer brand and Uncommon Studio traverse all fifty states of the country, partnering with Magnum Photos to hand us a textured rendition of regular people in America. Set to Paolo Nutini’s evocative song, Iron Sky, ‘A Lovely Day for Guinness’ is meant to shine a light on the 250 year old brand’s “core belief in human goodness and the power of communion.”
The campaign has 50 original executions, one for every state.
It exudes soul and ambition.
· Andrew Tindall looks at it through the Global / Local/ Foreign lens of framing a brand · Diageo shares more on the philosophy and the communities included in this campaign.
· A stunning fourteen directors · Uncommon Creative Studio · Production- Hand of God , Birth ·
While on visual aesthetics, a word on design.
Design trends are called and culled so much more easily now. Which means? There’s a lot going on and also hey, just take it all with a pinch salt- if you’re patient (or belated ) enough, your style might be back...erm, in style. Or at least, someone somewhere on the internet will say so!
Now, after some touches of maximalism follwoing some minimalism, we are hearing that ‘minimalist maximalism’ is in. That’s right, there’s not a label we can’t make up!
A Photography Sim
Still on Visuals, Photographer and developer Matt Newell has developed a lush, realistic photography simulation game. Lushfoil Photography Sim was inspired “by the travels I did in my early 20s”, says Newell who is a self-taught developer. Take a look at it here.
The player explores the world through a first-person perspective. Armed with (only) a camera, you can explore and takes photos through your virtual viewfinder, learn to adjusting settings like shutter speed, aperture, and white balance, with challenges and missions thrown in. Here is how it works.
“I hope I’ve created something that can be seen as approachable, especially for those who don’t usually play game”
Does being a photography enthusiast make you want to play this game? Will playing this game make you want to take take real-world photos? Time to learn about GTP.
GPT. GTA. GTP.
Game Transfer Phenomenon is a condition in which the physical world and video games bleed together. It’s not common, but it can be powerful. Research around it is gaining momentum, though much remains to ensure it provides the right warnings while not unduly - and unfairly- demonising games.
At a casual level, one sees this with kids who think they are playing Brawl Stars in school corridors, or some of us who might look at random words and start making Connections. Neither of these are GTP, of course!
GTP has become a more common experience as games, especially role-playing, simulation, adventure and first-person shooter games, have become increasingly realistic and immersive. They offer sprawling environments full of detail and interaction. Essentially, gamers end up living virtual lives through such media and can find the gameplay deeply affecting.
Commodifying Books
Most leading AI companies, are involved in some manner of legal battle or the other, largely around the thorny issues of copyright, fair use and consent around their training data. Meta has been in a particularly prickly case which has revealed it torrented millions of books using pirated sources.
This flashed to some prominence again recently when we learned that Meta essentially claimed that the books have no actual value. Reasonable to say, authors think otherwise.
Revealed in a recent Vanity Fair piece the emotional tenor of a statement like this hits hard for many, where it is asserted that Meta sees no market in paying authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”
It is incredulous for many that authors work can thus be rendered of no value, stripped of meaning and the inherent place they hold in literary, entertainment, academic or other circles.
So investing a year's worth of skilled labor give or take, built on education and professional training, into composing a work that normally yields royalties and licensing fees for a lifetime -- for adaptations, translations, etc -- should be valued at ...Zero. Zero money. _Johan Cedmar-Brandstedt
Some of the evidence came to light in a mix of leaks and publicly available information earlier this year, alleging that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries”. We say alleged of course, but the actual use of LibGen, the pirated website, appears to not be a question of debate. Instead, it is being rendered irrelevant because- hey anyway, fair use and we need to hoover up everything we can and anyway the books have no value.
“(the) company has argued that its alleged scraping of over seven million books from the pirated library LibGen constituted "fair use" of the material, and was therefore not illegal.”
Mark Lemley, a former Meta lawyer who quite the case earlier this year, feels that focussing on the source (pirated or otherwise) misses the point. ““copyright law should focus on the output rather than how the AI is trained”. This, again, suggests that is it necessary to negate the intrinsic value (including economic value) of authors’ works.
The lawsuit is one of more than 16 such on Gen AI, trotting their way in US courts, spanning Authors Guild/ OpenAI, artists/ Stability AI, NYT/ Microsoft, music/ Anthropic.
The Vanity Fair piece that reveals the quote about ‘value’ is an excellent read to understand the arc of the case thus far, including the internal manoeuvrings and external takes on it.
➕Quickies
How People are using Gen-AI: Marc Zao-Sanders follows up his 2024 look at how people were really using Gen AI with this piece in the Harvard Business Review. He finds use cases split almost equally between personal and business. Top use case include Therapt, organising life, finding purpose, enhanced learning and generating code/ideas, fun & nonsense and creativity.
Deloitte and The Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLAB announced a new collaboration through which they hope to deliver “transformative technologies and processes across the full lifecycle of production”. For example, they are working on a concept for the future of Previz- production previsualsation. Studio Labs is the ‘advanced development division for innovation in creative technologies.’ · China Widener ·
A woman at the centre of Netflix documentary ‘Con Mum’ was found and charged with fraud in Singapore. “The victims only realised that they had been cheated after Hanna was featured in Con Mum, which became available on Netflix on Mar 25.”
There has been a disturbing and rapid trend of devaluing the arts, with people trying to cheat and steal from real human creatives while praising AI for churning out soulless facsimiles trained on real art, and I think it all comes down to this: in an era of hyperconsumerism, we exist in a society that wants to consume art faster and faster, and that is also willing to replace them with machines if they don't bleed cheaply enough.
_alwaysbeebooked / Nenia Campbell on Threads