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Forbes
16-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Survival Guide for Creatives in The AI Era
We can all feel it. We constantly hear about it. AI is coming for us. The news media marvels at AI's mind-blowing advances, and the VC market is burying AI platforms in gobs of money, telling the rest of us that if you're not AI, just sit down. We need a survival guide for creatives. In this tidal wave of technological revolution, remember that we possess a mind, while AI does not. This is the magnificent distinction of being human and an advantage not to be wasted. AI is expanding everywhere and improving many areas; however, it can be easy to feel pushed aside, and all the brilliance and hard work can seem forgotten. While what AI solves or creates can be surprisingly good, it is often only good enough. Enough so that the thinkers, creatives, ideators, and strategists fade into the background. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, defeated, and worried about the future. A David against the AI Goliath. To survive this disruptive period, I humbly submit the following three steps to stay sane, creating, and employed. AI is here to stay. Stay open-minded and adopt a 'know thy enemy' mindset. A friend, colleague, and live-streamer, Kyle Shannon, said, 'Get hyper-curious about generative AI,' along with a lot of helpful info about AI. He's right. Ask your friends for tips on how they utilize AI. Seek out experts who can explain how AI works and its ongoing evolution. There are numerous resources for learning for every type of expertise. Coursera, Greenbook, and InsightPlatforms are just a few that offer courses to support this endeavor. That's the only way to peacefully coexist with AI. Knowledge is power. Innovate and collaborate with AI. Integrate AI into your work while upholding copyright and ethical standards. Look for ways to enhance and streamline your efforts rather than replace them. Backgrounds, storyboards, or outlines generated by AI leave the thinking and ideating to you. Acknowledge AI's power but emphasize that you can transform raw materials into meaningful, insightful, or surprising results. Develop a unique style, methodology, strategy, or framework to set yourself apart. Bacardi has done just that. AI has infiltrated the bar scene with machines that mix drinks and tell jokes. It's simply not the same bar experience. So, Bacardi will bypass the AI barkeeps with a new free program called Shake Your Future to keep bartenders manning the shakers and beer taps, aiming to train 10,000 new bartenders by 2030. AI is amazing, but you can think, and it can't- at least not yet. Use AI to generate ideas, not answers, and experiment to understand what AI users might be getting when they could instead rely on your talent. Showing the difference between what AI can do and what you can do is proof. Image generation has been an area of remarkable innovation, along with big conflicts involving copyright infringement lawsuits, widespread frustration, and loss of business. The recent dustup over the 'starter pack' action figure trend is a good example of demonstrating your superior abilities. Artists joined an AI meme cycle to highlight the difference between AI-generated action figures and those produced by artists. When shown side by side, the difference in quality is obvious. It's really tempting to use what AI spits out. It's fast and cheap. But it's not always all that. AI will do what you ask it to do. You can feed it different items and ask AI to combine those things to generate something new; however, it is more challenging for AI to pluck wildly disparate things from the universe that it has not been trained on and come up with a solution that your client will appreciate, creating something exceptional. Cultivate skills, seek support, and foster community in your own survival guide for creatives in the transformative era.
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What's the greatest year in Oscar history? A statistical analysis
No matter what The Oscars do, they always seem to disappoint. Sometimes, the Academy Awards are too commercial, honouring crowd-pleasers like Crash and Greenbook — movies derided by critics as unworthy of prestige. Sometimes, The Oscars are too artsy-fartsy, celebrating films like The Artist and The Hurt Locker — works unappealing to mainstream moviegoers. And sometimes, The Oscars become a spectacle onto themselves, generating buzz and controversy utterly unrelated to the film industry, like Will Smith's "The Slap" and John Travolta's epic butchering of Idina Menzel's name. The Oscars' stated purpose is to showcase Hollywood's finest offerings. Unfortunately, how the Academy and its voting blocs define "finest" is ever-shifting, with voters continually recalibrating their choices based on insular groupthink, social signalling, and sociopolitical machinations. Meanwhile, Oscar viewership has steadily declined over the last decade. Each year people care a little bit less about cinema's biggest night. At some point in the last ten years, a prevailing consensus emerged regarding the ceremony's obsolescence, framing the awards as a once-prestigious institution whose best days have long passed. According to this narrative, The Oscars once stood as a reflection of popular culture and artistic excellence, and, over time, Hollywood and its biggest night have gone astray. So, we'll evaluate ninty-five years of Academy history to understand when The Oscars thrived as well as the periods that appealed to various demographics. To assess the quality of different Oscar years, we'll employ a diverse set of perspectives, highlighting memorable nominees based on the selections of various groups, including: Rankings from online databases: the people's choice. "Best of" lists from movie critics: the intelligentsia's choice. Box office success: the choices of The Invisible Hand. We'll deconstruct the preferences of each constituency before pinpointing a consensus selection. Perhaps we'll find that The Oscars' best days are over. Maybe we'll see that each decade simply has highs and lows—that the show has experienced no discernible rise or fall. Or possibly, like The Oscars themselves, everyone will be mildly disappointed with the output of this analysis, no matter the conclusion. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) presents a unique intersection of moviegoer taste and large-scale data capture. Users express viewing preferences as free-form text reviews and star ratings, and the platform parses, catalogs, and aggregates this user-generated content to facilitate movie discovery. Through IMDb's massive dataset of consumer preference, we can discern a movie's long-term legacy absent Hollywood marketing campaigns and highfalutin critic reviews. We'll analyse the overlap between Best Picture nominees and IMDB's top 250 movies to understand how Oscar selections compare to online consensus. Examining our overlapping films, we find a high concentration of movie selections at the turn of the century and the late 2010s. IMDB's nascency (relative to film history) heavily influences this distribution, as the platform has only existed since 1990. At the same time, our list of years with the most significant overlap showcases a variety of eras. Each year on this list can be traced to a distinct era in cinema history. 1939, whose nominees are highlighted by Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, encapsulates the high point of 'Old Hollywood' — a time when the studio system reigned supreme. 1976, whose Best Picture candidates include Rocky, Network, and Taxi Driver, represents the peak of "New Hollywood" — a period driven by auteur filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg, who deviated from the traditional studio mould. 1994 and 1999 were illustrious years within a 90s landscape that saw an explosion of indie films, like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, and a plethora of highbrow, high-budget adult-oriented prestige pictures released by mainstream studios like The Green Mile, American Beauty, and The Shawshank Redemption. Film critics typically serve two distinct functions: appraising recent releases and curating a distinguished selection of film classics. The role of the film critic has changed since the days of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, as pundit influence over film box office has waned. There is a high probability that Gen Z best understands film criticism as the input to a Rotten Tomatoes score. At the same time, film critics still command cultural influence through curation, identifying titles of outstanding artistic merit and documenting these films for posterity. Google "Best films of all time," and you'll find a myriad of publications pushing similar incarnations of the same rankings. For our purposes, we'll focus on three recent lists of above-average prestige: Sight and Sound's Top 100 Films - Critics' Choice Sight and Sound's Top 100 Films - Directors' Choice Variety's 100 Greatest Films - Critics Survey Reviewing the overlap between Best Picture nominees and critic 'Top Movie' lists reveals a preponderance of titles from the 1970s. The mid-1970s saw a cavalcade of auteur-driven masterpieces, including Coppola's Godfather Part II and The Conversation (released in the same year), Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Spielberg's Jaws, Robert Altman's Nashville, and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Critics often fixate on the visionary directors of "New Hollywood," a group of filmmakers who famously broke free of studio control to reinvigorate American cinema. There is an intense nostalgia for this period— an era when creative and commercial interests briefly aligned to provide imaginative artists with ample funding. Ultimately, the 1980s would replace director-centric projects with studio-driven big-budget blockbusters (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cops, Die Hard, etc.) — movies purposefully crafted for outsized returns. Separately, 1939 also makes this list, elevated by two undeniable classics in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. These films have demonstrated remarkable longevity, given so many elements of their production could now be considered anachronistic. The immediate reward for making a good movie is money (pretty profound, I know). The Oscars supplement this economic incentive by rewarding films in the form of prestige. At the same time, the Academy Awards make money by garnering the largest possible television audience, which leaves them forever walking a tightrope between honouring commercially successful blockbusters and artistically inclined pictures. If too many high-grossing films are nominated, then the show is not highlighting underrepresented work. If too few commercial works are nominated, then The Oscars are accused of elitism, heavily disconnected from the tastes of everyday moviegoers. We'll use the average adjusted box office amongst a given year's nominees to evaluate commercial success for Best Picture contenders. It's important to note the primacy of outliers in this analysis. In assessing Oscar nominees by average gross, we index heavily on mega-earning blockbusters like Titanic and Gone with the Wind, which racked in billions while winning Best Picture. We want to highlight years in which The Oscars recognised works of impeccable mainstream success, instances where widespread popularity and Oscar pedigree converged. When looking at the decades with the highest average gross amongst Oscar nominees, we see upticks in commercial success in the 1970s and 1990s. The 1970s brought us the modern blockbuster in the form of Jaws, Star Wars, and The Godfather, all films that captured Best Picture nominations and Oscar recognition. The 1990s saw global box office smashes like Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Beauty and the Beast garner global box office acclaim in addition to Academy nods. Our Oscar years with exceptional commercial success are usually driven by one or two blockbuster hits. 1997 has Titanic, 1939 has Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, 1977 has Star Wars, and 1975 has Jaws. Most of the nominees from these years performed exceptionally well at the box office, regularly clearing $200M in adjusted gross. Still, this ranking is mainly defined by outliers — as are studio bottom lines. Merging our three datasets and calculating the average rank for each year across these groups, we find 1939 to be our consensus choice, beating out a handful of nominees from the 1970s and 1990s. 1939, the 1970s, and the 1990s were periods where commercial, artistic, and critical incentives aligned, marked by Hollywood classics produced by the studio system, new Hollywood, and the growing global film market of the 1990s. It's important to note that these years fall within discrete eras twenty or thirty years apart. There is no one period where cinema's finest were best recognised by the Academy Awards, but rather a few periods. Said differently, The Oscars and Hollywood have experienced ebbs and flows. Maybe the 2030s will see a revival in the film industry, producing an influx of Oscar nominees that stand the test of time. Broadly speaking, the Oscars cater to three distinct demographics: entertainment professionals, cinephiles, and mainstream audiences. Actors, directors, cinematographers, and other industry workers care about the awards for what they say about value in their industry — what works receive prestige and whether that prestige can be converted into career capital. Movie lovers care about the purity of cinematic superlatives — whether films worthy of awards are produced and whether these "worthy" films are honoured by award shows. The Oscars' third demographic is pretty much 99% of the population — people with no inherent interest or connection to The Oscars. In theory, the Academy Awards are meant to represent industry professionals and cinephiles, but their perceived success is heavily dictated by this last 99% of humans. At a certain point, The Oscars became an entertainment product, judged on their ratings and their ability to amuse the masses. As such, the Academy is constantly juggling the needs of mainstream moviegoers, Oscarphiles, and its voting base, reacting to backlash, over-correcting, and then correcting for these over-corrections. The result of this twelve-dimensional calculus is a product mildly dissatisfying to all constituencies. Like Saturday Night Live, there is a perception that the Academy Awards are in a perpetual state of decline. According to this logic, The Oscars meant something when we were younger, and now they're a farce. But what if The Oscars never made sense? What if they've always been a farce? In 1948, The Atlantic published a dispatch from famed novelist Raymond Chandler on the author's experience at that year's Academy Awards, an essay where Chandler ruthlessly highlights the show's unabashed absurdity and self-aggrandisement. On the voting process and inter-industry politics, Chandler quipped: "It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time. The psychological effect is very great on minds conditioned to thinking of merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo." Chandler then dissects Hollywood's use of The Oscars for self-mythologising: "To those who know Hollywood, all that went on was the secure knowledge and awareness that the Oscars exist for and by Hollywood, their purpose is to maintain the supremacy of Hollywood, their standards and problems are the standards and problems of Hollywood, and their phoniness is the phoniness of Hollywood." Perhaps The Oscars never made sense, doomed by the subjective act of evaluating art and then commodifying that process as a bastion of prestige. Maybe their premise and presentation have always been absurd—a popularity contest dressed up as a cultural event of the utmost sophistication. At the same time, there is an intangible staying power to this dressed-up popularity contest. Much like high school, acknowledging popularity's pointlessness is still an acknowledgment of that thing's existence. When people write take-downs of the Academy Awards or tweet about its obscurity, they're justifying the show's significance by way of recognition. Nobody cares about the SAG awards, DGA awards, Producers Guild awards, or Golden Globes — as such, nobody thinks to critique these shows. The Oscars justify outrage, which is better than indifference, and their network effects are strong enough to support an entire class of movies we deem as "Oscar-bait," like The Holdovers, Poor Things, Maestro, and 50% of A24 films. If The Oscars die, so does a mini-economy of artistically-minded projects. The Oscars are flawed for so many reasons, but they still sit near the centre of western culture, whether you love them or love to hate them. Perhaps one day, everyone will lose interest in the Academy Awards and simply stop talking about them, but today is not that day. So, if you're at an Oscar party and you're discussing the show's cultural relevance, you can tell your friends the ceremony peaked in 1939, and you can show them the data to back it up. The Oscars are taking place on Sunday, 2 March and will air in the UK on ITV1 and ITVX from 10:30pm.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
3 Ways the Definition of ‘East Coast Rich' Differs From ‘West Coast Rich'
Americans often stereotype the country's East and West coasts, portraying the East Coast as uptight and stressed and the West Coast as laid back and maybe a little flaky. That's according to psychographic profiles from Greenbook, a blog published by the American Marketing Association. But as a trending social media feud demonstrates, East Coast versus West Coast rivalry doesn't end there. Content creators are making challenge videos comparing East and West on everything from weather to real estate to wealth. Here are three ways East Coast rich and West Coast rich differ, according to one TikTok user who weighed in on the topic. Check Out: Read Next: 5 Subtly Genius Moves All Wealthy People Make With Their Money The term 'nouveau riche' has been around for over 200 years, but it's a fitting term for how many Americans see today's West Coast rich — wealth recently earned (probably in the tech industry) and unapologetically on display, as the TikTok account @indyanna.a noted in a recent video. East Coast rich, on the other hand, is associated with old money. It's not surprising, considering the East Coast's role in the founding of America and New York's position as the seat of finance. See More: In her video, @indyanna.a said that East Coast wealth didn't just happen — it was curated through inheritances and trust funds. 'These people are aware of what money can and cannot do,' she said. 'And they continue to pass down that knowledge in their families.' Not so on the West Coast, @indyanna.a said. Ushered in by the tech boom, money has just recently become a thing there. That means the people who have it, earned it. East Coast rich conjures thoughts of an elitist aristocracy where wealth determines an individual's position in the social hierarchy. Although @indyanna.a argued that West Coast rich has no social hierarchy, that could be changing. Despite their self-made wealth and populist appeal, it's difficult to argue against the possibility that a new ruling class of tech elite is narrowing the gap between East Coast and West Coast rich. More From GOBankingRates5 Subtly Genius Moves All Wealthy People Make With Their Money 4 Reasons All Retirees Should Have a Safety Deposit BoxThis article originally appeared on 3 Ways the Definition of 'East Coast Rich' Differs From 'West Coast Rich'
