One of the kick-off speakers at today’s Axios AI conference in New York today was former DreamWorks and Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg now runs the venture fund WndrCo. He talked about the similarities between the arrival of AI technologies in the business world today and the arrival of computer-generated animation technologies in Hollywood in the 1990s, led by Pixar.
At Disney, he said, “traditional hand-drawn animation was the foundation of the company, was the heart and soul of the company. And [for movies like] The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, these movies had 125,000 to 135,000 hand-drawn [animation] cels…” When Pixar introduced computer-generated, three-dimensional animation with Toy Story in 1995, Katzenberg said it was “breathtaking to some and very, very, very scary to others. …If you go back to that time, the resistance to [shifting Disney and its animators to the computer-generated approach] was huge, and the people most scared of it were the ones that were going to be disrupted by it.”
Instead, the industry continued to grow, he said: “Animation has never, ever been bigger than it is today. And there have never been more jobs, [but] there are different jobs.”
Katzenberg quoted NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: “AI isn’t going to replace people. It’s going to replace people that don’t use AI.” In Hollywood, he said, “talent that went and learned how to use the computer as a new pencil and a new paintbrush, they thrived and prospered, and there was extraordinary growth in the whole industry.”
Will the AI transition play out exactly the same way? Probably not, Katzenberg said. The new technologies could present threats to entertainment companies that produce (and try to maintain control over) stories and characters, as well as new opportunities for creating AI-powered immersive digital worlds that consumers could spend time in.
But Katzenberg said that learning and adaptability are essential at moments like these: “I would say that if change is uncomfortable, irrelevance is going to be a whole lot harder.”
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