The Bitchiest Celeb Interview Of All Time

0:00This episode is presented by EE. Marina, are you hosting or guesting for Christmas this year? normally every other year i am a very grateful guest but i'm now a slightly trepidatious host yes it is me in the apron having a meltdown over all the cooking no i don't think i'll have a meltdown i it's a lot isn't it yeah but you have to just keep saying to yourself it's just a big chicken just a really big chicken it's just a really enormous chicken we are also hosting this you're looking forward to it very much if you are hosting and e has the best broadband technology if you are guesting then e has the best mobile technology and my goodness you need it at christmas right yes the third babysitter the distractor just when the family walk into the house is hello grandma hello granddad what's the wi-fi password i might need that yeah get the best connectivity for your home and your phone with ee and if you're guesting lucky you ee has the best mobile network to keep you connected to music, maps and backseat streaming for the kids when you're traveling.

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2:08Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. Hello, everybody. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very, very well. Are you excited about Christmas? I am hugely excited about Christmas. I'm very excited about Christmas. There does seem, as always at this point in the year, quite a few things that need to happen before Christmas is coming. It's now in the turbo busy phase, but I'm very excited about it. I guess so, but imagine being Santa. Yeah. That's even worse. I always think of this time of year, however much there is to do, you've got to decorate the tree and so on.

2:38At least you're not Santa. Yeah, I have respect for the work. That's a huge amount of work that he's got to do. One of the great distributors of our era. I would have thought that he would be perfect for celebrity traitors because early next year, his time frees up a bit. He doesn't have like a hot breakfast show or anything to do. But secondly... Can I shock you? Yeah. They film it in May. No, I'm sure that's what I'm saying. I'm saying so it's like in his time... I think it's ramped up again by May. No, I think he would be fine. But also imagine two things. Firstly, amazing traitor. I mean, mind-bogglingly amazing trader, but also an incredible faithful.

3:20And imagine if you've got Father Christmas. Okay, the double threat. Book him. If they've got a spot that they're saving for something really amazing, then book him. Don't you think so? Yes. What are we talking about this week? We are talking about maybe the biggest AI news in entertainment that has been slightly snuck out this week, but is a huge game changer. Disney have signed a deal with OpenAI. I think this is the beginning of everything that is about to happen with AI. And there are upsides and downsides. We will talk about it. But it's the biggest AI story, I think, since we've been on air.

3:59And I don't just mean in the last five minutes. Yeah. we're also going to talk about, you will have seen Quentin Tarantino's disparaging comments about a few actors. The furore is ongoing. Seeming everyone has piled in and said it's the most outrageous thing that this opinion was voiced. Yeah, so why does no one ever slug off anyone in Hollywood? Yeah, and so I've got a tour through some of the great sluggings of recent years. Oh my God, I knew you would. We're also going to talk about what is happening with podcasts. They're going to Netflix. The rest is footballer doing a Netflix thing at the World Cup.

4:30are podcasts becoming television by the back door? And what does that mean? Let us begin then. AI. The genie, I think, is out of the bottle. And that genie is the genie from Aladdin. But you're not allowed to use Robin Williams' voice. But it will look exactly like the genie from Aladdin. And if you want to do an impression of Robin Williams, you can. So Disney has signed the... Let's rewind. Yes, rewind. Disney has signed a deal with OpenAI, Harbingers of Doom, or, you know, great innovators, Delete is applicable, to license, I think, 200 of their characters for use in Sora 2, which is a second generation of their AI video generation platform.

5:13It's like ChatGPT, you type in some prompts and it makes videos rather than text. I mean, it's a little bit like when, you know, when Steamboat Willie, that version of Mickey Mouse, went out of copyright. This is now like, apparently everything else is out of copyright. Well, not literally everything else, because there are certain things, as you say, you can't use talent voices or talent likenesses. Yeah, you can use all of the animated characters, essentially, all the big ones. Yeah. And you can use Darth Vader, because Darth Vader wears a mask. You can use Deadpool. So anything that they own that essentially doesn't look like an actor currently living, you can use to your own ends to make short films with, which is exactly what people are going to be doing.

5:53So they've got into bed with open AI. Weirdly, they haven't even, they haven't really paid OpenAI. They've been allowed to invest in OpenAI. So they've sort of paid$1 billion to sign this deal. It's a three-year licensing deal for these things. It allows them to have stock in OpenAI. Which is currently worth about, maybe it's worth$500 billion. No one really knows because it's such a tissue of deals, but maybe it's$500 billion, maybe it's more. But certainly if you were heavily invested in animation, this is a pretty good hedge to have, which is to invest in the technology, which is going to destroy the business you're currently in, which seems to be what they're doing.

6:31They're licensing those things for three years, at which point there are options on both sides to increase that. But it's the thing that people have talked about for a while, which is AI are going to scrape everything we do anyway. So why don't we, as Disney, make some money out of it? The people not making money out of it, by the way, are the Disney animators and the people who work at Disney, the people who will make money out of it, are the people who run Disney and the people who own large bits of Disney because this is a hedge against the future and investing in a stock they hope goes up and up and up and up.

7:06But what it does, it opens the floodgates for anyone really to do anything with any of those Disney characters. To me, it is so fascinating because of all the studios, this is the most gate-kept, most sort of litigated, you know, they've always commercially ring-fenced their things. And, you know, it's a hundred years of history. It's this whole prestige thing. And, you know, now you're going to be able to see Elsa fight Princess Leia and then kiss. And by the way, I'm going to come on to some examples of things that already, but as you say, things are already out there. You know, there's loads of stuff, kind of fake Pixar, because remember Disney owned their own legacy black brand.

7:47They own Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel. So there's a whole, you know, they got all those marks underneath there. And essentially anyone in those universes who is unidentifiable is now fair game. Yeah, I mean, you're not getting anyone from Avatar because I don't think they would like to do that to James Cameron. No, that has been sliced out of the deal. Yeah, that's not included in this initial tranche. Let's put it that way. But Bob Igo, who's Disney CEO, said, I mean, I find it really amazing the way they talk about it. He said, you know, we're putting technology and imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in a way we've never seen before.

8:23And Sam Altman, of whom I'm not a fan, the OpenAI boss, says it shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to promote innovation that benefits society. I mean, really. Respect the importance of creativity and help works reach vast new audiences. It does not do, by the way, any of those things. What it does is return investment to the bosses at Disney and the bosses of OpenAI. And that's all. The more in the last couple of years, the stuff that's happening, the more I think, my God, if Marx came back today, he'd be like, I told you. He said, look, this is literally, it's been hidden away so much, but you couldn't have a better example of how capital just absolutely builds on itself and consolidates and everyone else is thrown onto the pile.

9:14All this is, is the consolidation of money into the hands of fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer people. And you can see, you know, those three things you just said, Sam said, go one by one. What was the first one? They can work together responsibly to promote innovation that benefits society, respect the importance of creativity and help works reach vast new audiences. It doesn't do any of those things. It literally does not. All of those things are currently doable. We've been doing those for years. People have been making a living out of those things for years and years and years. People have loved Disney for years and years and years.

9:44There's no one out there who's going to be introduced to Mickey Mouse via this. Exactly that. The people who are making... Bob Iger will make money from this. Sam Altman will make money from this. Nobody else is going to make money from this. Nobody else is going... Bob Iger hopes he will, and we'll get to that in a minute. I do think that there is an element of this. This is just a tiny little side note, but there's something about the timing of this where everyone is losing their minds about... maybe rightly so, about Netflix buying Warners or maybe now Paramount coming in with a hostile, but we talked about this last week, as we know.

10:15And it's almost, as that sort of forgotten civil servant once said, you know, this is a very good day to bury bad news. There's an element of like, well, you're all quite busy with that. We're just going to make every creator's worst nightmare come true by saying, yeah, no, we're just giving them this stuff and they can do what they like. Yes, because also, by the way, this is a two-way street. So as well as, you know, saying anyone can use this, it opens so it says and in return for that OpenAI give Disney absolute power to use OpenAI and Sora in any way they wish they're going to specifically build tools for Disney okay here we go so who's gaining there well I mean Disney's budgets will be lower will the product be different that you're watching at home no so you're not gaining at all the product will be exactly the same but will they say that there are going to be I mean say that there are going to be fan created works on Disney Plus which is like, oh my God, you know, finally the fans will be in charge of Star Wars.

11:09And by the way, all of this is, listen, we have technology, things change, culture changes, creative people react against what the, you know, the prevalent technology is. All of that is fine. But every single time somebody says to you, oh, this is great news for consumers. You have to say, okay, just walk me through. Walk me through how this is great news for consumers. Walk me through how this is great news for the industry. Walk me through how this is great news for creativity. It's not. Right. Just be open. Just say, this is great news for how much money I'm going to have in five years time.

11:40It's not great news for how much money you're going to have in five years time. But oh, my God, as I say, if Marx came back, he would be like, whenever I see any conspiracy theorists, I'm always from the right from wherever I just say, you know, this is all Marx. You know, you know, he said this like hundreds of years ago, you know, if he came back, he'd go, yeah, yeah, no, I know. I know that everything's being, you know, run for the benefit of a small group of people. But I told you who that was, it's the bosses, the people who own all of this stuff. and everything they do, every decision they make is to increase their revenue.

12:08And if that's at the expense of your revenue, that's all well done good. It's always been the case. No one's winning here apart from the people who've already got the money. I agree. And what I think is sort of slightly tragic about all of this is I'm not even sure whether Bob Iger and Disney are even in the little group of people anymore because the big tech is the little group of people. There is a counterpoint to this, which I'm just going to put in the interest of fairness. It's not all marks. Yeah, it's not all marks. Disney has rapaciously licensed every one of those characters a million times onto everything from, obviously, lunchboxes, duvet covers, just whatever.

12:43Also, what can you do with something that's trying to eat your face other than try and get on its back, which is probably their argument. ChatGPT, don't forget, OpenAI said, oh, all of you studios, in fact, not even you studios, every individual creator is going to have to opt out. Otherwise, we're just going to assume that we can train Sora too on this. And so trying to manage it, there was a line in Bob Iger's statement, which was, we'd rather participate, which I felt was like, oh, because Disney are a particular case. I mean, everyone's a particular case, but their particular circumstances are that they entered the streaming wars late.

13:21They felt, it doesn't matter, we can enter the streaming wars when we like because we're Disney and we've got all the stuff. Well, ever since they bought Star Wars and Marvel, they thought we have absolutely future-proofed ourselves in every way possible. and within three years it's like, oh, we haven't. We haven't at all. We've got all this stuff. We spent unbelievable billions actually trying to compete with Netflix and it didn't work. They also don't have anything in user-generated content, and a lot of people don't, but they don't have anything in user-generated content. So you're thinking they don't want to be caught napping or caught being arrogant again.

13:54So they are really selling all of this stuff down the river to say, well, at least we were there at the start, or they're not there at the start, But at least we're leading the frenzy. I mean, I don't disagree. I don't know what else they can do because this is coming down the pipe at them. I just think you have to be open about it. You have to be honest about it. And you do have to try and spread the benefits of it if you can. And I don't think they will do that. But yeah, if you're Disney, then you are in certainly the content side of Disney, the animation side of Disney, which is what a lot of people think of when they think of classic Disney, is it takes a really, really long time to make.

14:29if you have a flop, you've got another three years to wait until your next one comes along. And suddenly Disney is an always-on company. They've got these cast of characters, they've got this IP, and suddenly there's going to be content just on tap constantly. Because they've got OpenAI building the tools for them. And that's the other thing, because OpenAI are doing the tools, the product that they are making themselves is going to be quicker and quicker and quicker. So for Disney, it makes absolute sense. But, you know, for again... And also the level of sort of, the idea that, you know, really interesting things are going to be produced by this.

15:04Okay. Some will. Some will, but amongst the slop, the hit rate will be obviously wildly diminished. Yeah. And there is already lots of sort of fake Disney stuff on Sora. Lots of Disney and Pixar stuff. Just remember, it's not supposed to be anything at all. There's nothing. But I saw, I've seen so many of these. You know, there's a trailer about this guy, and he's got a really strong arm. How does his arm get so strong? A really overdeveloped right arm. You know, meet Master Beta. And it's all like done as Pixar. And then there's a team of little girl gymnasts, and they call themselves Predator.

15:43And I was like, oh, this is so, like, it always ends, you know. I actually stopped watching these after that. What are you putting into the search boxes? I've just watched a montage of fake Pixar trailers that are available now on Sora. Yeah, and by the way, Disney don't own any of that. And they haven't released every single sort of the back end of this entire deal. But Disney will own a large proportion of anyone who does. It'll be user-generated, but it will be Disney IP owned. Well, they've sent a cease and desist immediately to Google to say, you can't do this anymore to Gemini. You can't do it.

16:18Good luck with that. And if Disney sue you, they've got a chance of you paying them back, whereas if an individual writer whose work has been scraped wants to sue them, very, very difficult to do. But I do think, you know, Disney have done it, as you say, they've hidden it in a good week to hide things. It does mean that Genie is out of the bottle. It does mean that all of the other companies, it would be beholden on them to do the same thing. and so it means that all of this stuff, this stuff we talked about a couple of years ago, which is, you know, that anything that you love, any franchise that you love, you will be able to create your own version of it.

16:52You'll be able to put yourself in it. You'll be able to put whoever you want in it and that's the thing that starts now is that everything is everything all the time. All of this particular period reminds me on a much more enormous scale of what happened with print publishers, newspapers we used to call them, when Google turned up. And none of them, like they just gave everything free to Google because they wanted to seem modern and they didn't want to be left behind and they didn't understand. And they believed, you know, all of this stuff that the Google founders and people like that said to them, which is like, oh, information wants to be free.

17:24It's like, no, no, you want our stuff for free. That's different. And actually look at them now. You know, it's a business that's completely sort of destroyed itself. Not completely, but it's massively, massively devalued itself. And I believe that this is just a devaluation of all of the, because people wanted eyeballs, you see. They're not so much in the eyeballs game now, Disney. They're not worried about that so much, but they're worried about just like losing influence or, you know, not having anything in user generated. But you can only get it by devaluing your own creations. To give an example, if your experience of Donald Duck in the next 20 years is a series of 30-second long user-generated videos, then it is…

18:10In which he does quite unspeakable things. Yeah, it is absolutely indistinguishable from if I have David Duck and I do something that, you know, it's indistinguishable. The fact that it's Donald Duck becomes meaningless within a couple of years when there's so much of it because you haven't created something… Nevertheless, people will sit and have a month-long meeting in Burbank saying, I just don't think he'd do that. Whereas nobody is sitting in their bedroom on their computer just thinking, well, first of all, that's disgusting. And no, I don't think he'd do that. Everyone's just like, I'm just going to make him do that.

18:41There's an amazing piece by Corey Doctorow, who's a guy who came up with the term in shittification, which I sent to you this week about AI. Oh, it's brilliant. It's really interesting. It's ahead of a book that he's writing, which is called The Reverse Centaur. And basically, The Reverse Centaur, the image of that is, if you are a human head with the body of AI, then it's quite useful because it's your brain and something is carrying you. Whereas actually what we're going to have is an AI head and you're the body who's going to have to carry it around. You're going to do all the work. You work for it.

19:09Yeah, he talks about radiology. He said, well, look, if you have 10 radiologists and their work is checked by AI, then that's great. That really works. However, if you sac nine of your radiologists and everything is looked at by AI and there's one radiologist who has to just double check AI, then that person has all the responsibility. Whatever AI hallucinates, it's going to be his fault. So that's his basic principle. But one of the really interesting things I thought in that essay was he talks about how insignificant the entertainment industry is to AI. All it is is a shop window. If you looked at the noise around AI, so much of it is books, music, film, TV, and AI doesn't care.

19:52I mean, there's not, that's a really, really tiny industry for AI. If you're AI, you care about healthcare, you care about energy grids, you care about supply chain automation, you know, you care about the finance industry. That's, there are trillions and trillions of dollars. Disney, all this is, is publicity. All this is, is a shop window. It's a slop window. Yeah. It's for, you know, what AI can do to make sure that every single office in every single country in the world and every single business is saying, oh my God, I mean, my kid did this on ChatGPT. I wonder if we could use this for our supply chain.

20:24I wonder if there's a way that we could use that. So entertainment for them, they don't care. You know, so Disney has signed this deal. They own a bit of open AI. Fine. It's just a loss leader. But it really, really is. Because, you know, the entertainment industry, the one thing they can do is, you know, put up a fuss. You know, they have a, they have a, you know, they have a... Oh, they can do fuss. See our next item. Yeah, they can really do fuss. But it's like, it's nothing. to them it's it's meaningless as a as a revenue stream they could set every book in the world and it would mean nothing compared to 0.1 percent of you know logistics for shipping lanes out of asia yeah i mean it's it's it's literally meaningless other than it's an amazing amazing shop window but it just makes gonna make us all culturally a bit poorer because the entertainment industry is allowing itself to be used in this way.

21:19But what can you do? I mean, genuinely, if you are, again, counterpoint, if you are Disney, what is it that you can do? I wouldn't allow it. I just think that, I just genuinely think, look at what happened to newspapers. They devalued their own, and now people are paying for things, and people are paying for expensive newsletters, and they're paying for, I don't know, websites like Puck or something like that that's actually quite expensive and has people in all different fields covering lots of different things. And they're paying a lot of money for those prestige things. They don't want to pay for newspapers anymore because those people just completely devalued everything.

21:51And they chased things at the wrong time. People in editorial creatives made business decisions and they made bad ones. And now look, there's nothing much left. And everyone is pivoting again to video and doing all sorts of things again to try and save themselves. But it's a bit late because they just got so seduced by the idea of being part of modernity and at the forefront of it. And in fact, they were just being completely used by it. And when they weren't needed anymore, then they could say, oh, sorry, we're turning off the news feed on Facebook now. We don't need it. It's just actually more of a hassle than it's worth to us.

22:22It's like, oh, my God, now no one will see our stuff anymore. Yeah, so the proposition is how do we get our quality journalism out there to a wider audience and cheaper? And it ends up how do we get our quality journalism out there to a smaller group of people and more expensive? Would valuing ourselves have actually worked better than devaluing ourselves? And that's the central question. And Disney has decided that devaluing themselves is better and then maybe they don't have a choice or it's the better choice of two not great ones. But it's not, you know, the end game for open AI, there's an amazing thing that came out this week called Non-Player Combat, which is the world's first 100 % AI reality show.

23:02You can watch it on YouTube. It's essentially a battle royale show where six contestants, AI contestants, are put in different environments and they each have to survive and then kill each other. They're dropped onto a fake island. One of them's sort of in the Arctic, one of them's in a jungle. And it looks amazing up to a point. And three of them used to be in the army. One of them goes, I had a tough upbringing. Cut to a picture of someone in front of a massive house in America. I mean, the whole thing is absolute tosh. One of them's in the army and he became a Navy SEER, which I thought was interesting.

23:30Yes, hold on a minute. but also they have a presenter a character called Clara Vos who literally does like five minutes you go no I'm so sorry the whole point of this is you don't have to do that you don't have to do that I'm going to explain what this show is just drop them in there and have them fight each other okay that's we can handle that it is so boring the interesting thing about it is it's so unsatisfying it doesn't scratch any itch at all as a viewer I mean literally none every single thing it does can be done better by television or video games There is nothing that it does. I found it unwatchable.

24:05Unwatchable. Do you remember in old video games when they were advertised on TV and you'd be like, wow, no disrespect because Call of Duty now looks amazing, but early versions of those things and you'd be like, wow, this looks amazing. And there'd be a little line on the ad saying, not actually in game footage. Yeah, not game footage. All right. Well, this, it felt to me like, even though the graphics are whatever it's called, it's amazing. Yeah, it looks absolutely fine. But it's so... It left me so cold that I felt like I was watching game footage. But unlike in gaming where I have agency, what's the point of this?