An Audience of One Conundrum

Brian (0:01)

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm Brian, one of the co-hosts of The Daily AI Show, and I'm coming to you from a chilly Saturday morning in Tampa. It's 49 degrees, which I know a lot of you in the world are going to laugh at as being chilly, but it is actually chilly here in Tampa. It's a nice little reprieve from the otherwise usually warmer weather we still have in November, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today. Today, we're talking about storytelling, one of my favorite favorite things to talk about. We've touched on this topic before like personalized entertainment. And what today's conundrum, which is called an audience of one, what it's really talking about is we have a debate. And it hinges, obviously it's a debate, right? It's a conundrum. It hinges on whether these technology or AI advancements expand creative commerce by giving more money to like more overlook preferences. Or does it really just erode the high end entertainment that we've come to love over the decades, because it dissolves shared cultural moments. So it's looking at both sides of it. And it's a really, I think, fascinating debate. And what I think you guys are going to enjoy. I will say before I get into the intro and conundrum, sneakily, you know, the two co-hosts, the two AI co-hosts that follow this from Gemini Notebook, have gotten a little better week after week. And I think it's like small, minute changes, but I heard a change today that I don't think I've heard previously. In other words, I think there was an improvement to how these two AI co-hosts interact with each other. And I'm curious if you guys pick up on that as you listen to this. Now, that would only really sort of work if you've listened to a lot of other conundrum episodes in the past. So you sort of have a baseline. But I'm curious. I'm curious if you guys pick up on it, because there was something that was subtle, but different about the interaction of these two AI co-hosts. I think that's really interesting because the idea of these conundrum episodes is not only to have fun conversations about AI, but it's always been about the merging in its own way, in its own form of entertainment, in a very meta, not company, but meta way. It's a merging of me with a human, just me riffing on a microphone clearly for the intro, compared with or combined with two AI co-hosts that I set up for success, hopefully, and I reviewed or I edited, but ultimately I did not record, right? It's just two AI co-hosts. And that's that merging of that into this sort of newish form of entertainment. So in a way, this conundrum episode is part of this entire discussion. So I think you guys are going to really enjoy this one. And this one is called The Audience of One. A television drama brings together people who wanted different things from their evening. One came from a lead actor, another for a historical setting, another because friends kept recommending it. Their combined attention pays for the writers, performers, sets and the next season. That gathering also determines whose stories get told.

A creator with a passionate but scattered audience can struggle to attract financing because enthusiasm alone will not cover a production bill. AI is changing that calculation.

Tools already generate video, synthesize voices and translate dialogue, obviously, as we know from this doing the Conundrum episodes. And as these tools improve, smaller teams can attend productions that previously required substantial backing. And frankly, we've already seen some of these pretty amazing storytelling videos or short form movies or otherwise that are nearly or almost AI generated.

And so personalization can take that really a lot farther. Creator might offer branching to branch stories, different perspectives or ongoing adventures shaped around individual subscribers. Think more Patreon or Kickstarter.

Someone fascinated by maritime archaeology or multi-general rural families could become a paying audience rather than an overlooked sliver of somebody else's market. That's hyper niche right there. The uncertainty concerns how those new audiences affect the business supporting everyone's stories. Personalized entertainment might turn neglected interest into additional spending, sustaining creators who previously had no viable audience. It could also absorb the subscriptions and attention that helped larger productions recover their costs. Keeping both kinds of entertainment available does not determine where enough people will gather around a common release or to finance a successor.

Think of your big budget shows or movies that you really enjoy and how that gets financed. That's what we're sort of talking about on the other side of the conundrum.