Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Jason Koebler at 404 Media went a TCL event and published his coverage of it today. It’s grim stuff.

I am watching films that were made for TCL, the largest TV manufacturer on Earth as part of a pilot program designed to normalize AI movies and TV shows for an audience that it plans to monetize explicitly with targeted advertising and whose internal data suggests that the people who watch its free television streaming network are too lazy to change the channel. I know this is the plan because TCL’s executives just told the audience that this is the plan.

This is, of course, related to what I wrote about yesterday. TCL is not using Sora and Veo to achieve their goals, but a mix of generative AI tools piped through other generative AI tools by people to achieve a final output.

You can check out the credits on the YouTube videos to see how many people worked on it, and their roles. Times are tough, and I know we all have to find work where we can, even if it’s this stuff.

As Jason notes, the level and degree of involvement of human beings is not guaranteed, and this must be the bare minimum TCL execs felt they could get away with. The shorts largely contain mostly static or movement that I would describe as sliding/warping. They take advantage of output that is generic, mushed together from other imagery. Like when that disturbing girl in “Sun Day” looks at her swole father slowly drift towards her and only his mouth warps to give the semblance of a lip-synced performance.

I will not mince words in my thoughts about the final pieces produced: They’re vile, lifeless things. They illustrate exactly the shortcomings of this approach, and the bankrupt motivations behind it.

Not to get too personal, but based solely on Chris Regina’s words in this piece, I’m not a big fan of Chris Regina.

A few weeks after the screening, I called Chris Regina, TCL’s chief content officer for North America to talk more about TCL’s plan. I told him specifically that I felt a lot of the continuity errors were distracting, and I wondered how TCL is navigating the AI backlash in Hollywood and among the public more broadly.

“There is definitely a hyper focused critical eye that goes to AI for a variety of different reasons where some people are just averse to it because they don’t want to embrace the technology and they don’t like potentially where it’s going or how it might impact the [movie] business,” he said. “But there are just as many continuity errors in major live action film productions as there are in AI, and it’s probably easier to fix in AI than live action … whether you’re making AI or doing live action, you still have to have enough eyeballs on it to catch the errors and to think through it and make those corrections. Whether it’s an AI mistake or a human mistake, the continuity issues become laughter for social media.”

Chris, and his fellow TCL employees, are aligned in what I can only describe as career motivated delusion. They believe people want the TCL TV to be on, producing motion and sound of indeterminate quality or meaning. They picked some numbers that show that. There’s no commitment to make anything good, as much as there is to make the minimum viable product they can use with advertising. Many advertisers, of course, would like to pay for placement in things that have personal appeal to a specific audience, so I don’t understand why TCL execs are so excited that their TVs are used so indiscriminately.

As for the obviously terrible quality, Jason brings up the ol’ “this is the worst it will ever be” chestnut, and Chris agrees, and elaborates. What’s left unsaid with TCL’s approach is that this is the best the TCL Channel will ever be, because it’s optimizing for this quality level. They’re setting this as the bar. If Chris is to be believed, and that TCL will always employ roughly this same number of people to make something, then that would indicate to me that they’ll simply be able to make more videos of this quality, not the same number of videos at a higher quality.

We’ll have to check back in on this prediction of mine, but nothing TCL is putting out there tells me that their ambition exceeds the minimum effort.