Doug Shapiro: Are You a Skeuomorph or Neumorph?

Theme

Doug Shapiro breaks down how every anxiety roiling the media business right now is a lagging indicator of a disruption that started fifty years ago, when digitization made distribution abundant and cheap. Now the same thing is happening to creation itself. Generative AI adds a layer of meaning on top of the digital layer, and just as the internet collapsed the cost of moving content, this collapses the cost of making it. Finite attention is about to meet infinite supply – one of the themes guiding our LA Summit.

Signal

The dominant narrative says AI is about doing the same thing for less, but history tells us that's the boring part. Every new medium begins by imitating the old one until creatives discover what only the new medium can do. The killer app of generative AI won't be cheaper content, but new formats - participatory media, emergent storytelling, adaptive worlds, and experiences we don't have names for yet.

Session

Doug Shapiro's session from the Artist and the Machine Summit in New York offers a map of this shift. He traces the collapsing cost of distribution to six tectonic trends, then asks what happens when creation follows - pricing converges on free, quality gets redefined, and the future belongs to the “Neumorphs,” using AI to make media better, not just cheaper. His closing line doubles as our thesis for December, “The people in this room hold the fate of the media business in their hands.”

Summit

This December in LA, we're bringing together those shaping AI in Hollywood, immersive entertainment, gaming, music, and physical AI. The focus is on what creatives are doing with AI now - the big bets leaders are taking, new models and tools, and how creativity itself is evolving alongside tech. We'll also take on the questions moving through culture, from smart venues and creator business models to policy, legal frameworks, and the rise of mobile-first content. Programming details coming soon.

Pulse

• China Has the World Hooked on Two-Minute Microdramas: Bloomberg reports on how the bite-sized shows are now an $11 billion industry, attracting growing interest from major studios.

• Cloudflare Launches Kitesurf, a Browser Built For AI agents: TechCrunch details how with Kitesurf, AI developers will be able to build software that can navigate websites, fill out forms, and complete other browser-based tasks, without having to build their own browser software.

• A New Tool Aimed at Solving Synthetic Filmmaking Is Being Unwrapped at Autodesk: The Hollywood Reporter covers that one of the Hollywood’s preferred AI studios is launching a set of tools it says can give directors a new level of control over shots in AI.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at [email protected].

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx