The history I've heard didn't involve celebrities... The movie industry began in the East coast. Movie producers began to use a variety of cameras, and Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company tried to stamp that out by sending gangs of thugs to beat people up and destroy equipment on productions that didn't comply. Plus a move to the West Coast meant better light for productions as well as cheaper land and labour (as Hollywood was just farmland at the time).
The Master Switch by Tim Wu touches on what the Trust did to stifle celebrity/stardom and acting as an artform in order to maintain a low-cost monopoly over film watching. This is in contrast to a high-cost monopoly the article above is advocating for.
I would suggest having some empathy for those affected. It’s not just gatekeeping, it’s people reacting to being told that the meaning they put into what they make doesn’t actually add any value.
In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt outlines three parts of the Vita Activa. The first is labour, at the bottom of the pyramid. It is by definition consumable and has limited meaning in itself. The second is work, through which we build a world (i.e. something bigger than just the cyclical and physical properties of the ecosystem). The third is action, or politics, which ripples through the world and inspires linear change. Put together, these three parts make up what it is to be a living human. Giving meaning-making away, by replacing it with mere imitation, is tantamount to revoking those qualities which make us human.
I suspect a lot of art lovers like not knowing that an artist's work has very exact beginnings and egoistic motivations al a marvel movies. Rather prefer the altruistic mystery that muses were involved curating the work out of nothing for the enjoyment of all. Maybe when you know the AI has exact origins it ruins the illusion of art for you because maybe deep down you liked to be tricked by human creativity.
Are you only going to watch certified AI/CGI free movies going forward?
Art being made purely for the enjoyment of all is purely commercial, and so it is in some ways equivalent to toil: it is something whose sole purpose is to be consumed.
Yes, being “tricked”, in your words, by human creativity is precisely the appeal. If art were simply an equation, it wouldn’t have any meaning to it - it would simply be fact.
I’m sorry, but I think we’re talking about two diametrically opposite conceptions of art here.
The film industry of today got started because of misfits refusing to toe the line of the anti-celebrity industry bigwigs, it's why hollywood exists where it does (easy to skip over the border to film). And this round of creative destruction is no different.
I would like to know where this luddite outrage was when CGI took over practical F/X? noise and sound? where is their 75c on the dollar per explosion? Creatives emulate what's emulatable all down the line. But you can try to jerry rig artificial backstops in where they no longer fit.
The TV shows and movies thought they made it through the User Generated Content onslaught of the past two decades. This is just technology catching up to them and they are rehashing all the same arguments of that time: monopolies on expertise are good, false content rampant, loss of centralized cultural control bad.