A music video made with an AI tool called Slopcannon drew bigger laughs this week from a veteran technology columnist than the Saturday Night Live sketch that mocked the same target, and he wrote that the comparison should worry Hollywood.
NBC’s Saturday Night Live aired a sketch last weekend mocking Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic. A day earlier, an AI-generated music video had taken a similar swipe, with a fake Amodei singing “Hit the Breaks Except for Me.” “I laughed harder at the AI version,” Alistair Barr wrote in his AI Insider column for Business Insider.
The economics explain why. The Slopcannon video needed little more than an audio file, a few images and an idea. The SNL sketch, Barr noted, took “a team of highly paid professional writers, actors, and a major TV studio.”
Barr framed the moment as both an opportunity and a threat for Hollywood: AI can help studios make films and shows faster and cheaper, but it also lets individuals produce videos that compete for the same viewers. He has watched the Slopcannon video more than the SNL sketch, he wrote. Yes, plenty of AI-generated videos are still terrible, he added — but so is a surprising amount of human-made content on social media, and even on Netflix. The quality gap is closing.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks, argued this week that Hollywood should embrace AI the way it embraced earlier technology. “As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer,” he wrote on X, predicting that studios would take more risks and that “very soon entirely new forms of storytelling” would arrive.
Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.
After what Barr called the extreme AI warnings of the past few weeks, he wrote, it was “a relief to read something sensible.”