I see it as the other way round. Film production is already the preserve of the wealthy. AI opens up access to creativity for the lower orders.
Few points on that...
1: GAI is massively exploitative of workers. Pretty much every publicised instance of it is built on stolen content and beyond that is reliant on low paid workers, often in the Global South, facing shitty conditions to categorise data. Something like Amazon's MTurk for example isn't just exploitative, it's a whole new model of dehumanisation for labour which isolates and eradicates agency for workers both through algorithmic management and the removal of basic human identity within the production process. That's a model that's ubiquitously replicated in building training models. And that's before you get to the exploitation and destruction in the material supply chains to build the infrastructure necessary for AI to function.
2: Sooner or later we will see a surge in copyright claims against GAI models for their blatant theft, those claims will come from corporate media platforms and a minority of wealthier artists, not from your average working creator. Already companies are both expanding their training base and getting ahead of those claims by striking details with platform operators and institutions which completely bypass any notion of consent (or even awareness) to inclusion in these datasets. Reddit is the most recent one to sell off its user's work en masse but within the last few weeks universities have been signing up for it too and there was a whole SAG strike about the potential for Hollywood to sell of artists work without consent or recompense.
3: GAI isn't emerging as a free and open system of tools, it's being built by companies (OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft (through OpenAI) & Google) whose sole purpose is profit. While there's value in offering free iterations to generate investment and popular interest they're still going to monetise those tools ultimately, especially when it comes to robust implementations for commercial use. The cost barriers as well as the access to tech and (to a lesser degree) training will all be barriers to the 'lower orders' getting involved.
4: Even where it does allow access on a fairly open level both the companies supporting GAI and the corporate environment they exist in are built on platform capitalism. Any liberatory quality to these tools (which I'm cynical about anyway) will be usurped by the realities of distribution and the attention economy. Anyone(ish) can make music on their laptop but the Creative Commons/free/indy music models were all still gutted by Spotify and YouTube. The culture of corporate centralisation is as present with GAI as it is with everything else (OpenAI has deals with numerous tech companies, hence stuff like Google Copilot).
5: AI in general, including GAI, is absolutely atrocious at dealing with inclusivity and bias. It's built on oblique training data which is held as corporate secrets and uses algorithms which, even where visible, are usually incomprehensible to the layman. The recent stuff over Gemini is a case in point on that one, it was railroaded into a model of corporate diversity which lead to some pretty absurd results. It was in no way representative, the industry generally isn't, but it did offer plenty of fodder to racists insisting that AI is 'woke'. And even if that was a fairly daft little scandal (of sorts) it still reflects how ill considered GAI generally is.
6: It's wish fulfillment above all else. GAI doesn't enable 'creativity', it enables exploitative requests. It has no creative process or craft, just a demand for immediate gratification fed by underpaid, invisible, largely unpaid labour. It's a glorified version of typing 'big tits' into Google.
7: GAI actively undermines real human creativity. One of the big claims of GAI evangelists is always 'now anyone can be an artist!', which basically translates as 'now everyone can create content which we feel matches up with a commercial defintion of 'proper', which is to say profitable'. GAIs with built in house styles and processes built on theft inevitably narrow the scope of potential by having no space for the originality that emerges in learning about art and crafts as well as demeaning and denying the more universal forms of creativity that genuinely are liberatory. If you're just starting to paint for example you might experiment and discover some new and personal way to do it or you might just look at the GAI and go 'well, shit, I can be a master tomorrow, why bother being bad?'
yes there is that too....AGI created technological breakthroughs in areas like renewable green energy, water desalination, god knows what else, could have massively empowering impacts for normal people. That's what I'm saying about potentially breaking away from "scarcity and obsolescence", things that are currently the preserves of the elite could become mass-accessible - be that the ability to make a film or to access clean water
AGI doesn't exist and there's no sign at all that it will any time soon. Even with that said though - abundance doesn't negate scarcity. We don't have as much poverty/hunger/homelessness as we do because we're incapable of increasing the supply of and more fairly distributing resources/food/homes, we have it because there's less profit in doing so. AI models built by some of the most predatory companies on earth and shilled by some of the most delusional crackpots (Thiel, Altman, Musk, Bezos etc.) on it isn't going to go in any utopian direction.
