Steve Jennings/Getty Images
AI is already providing us with some answers, but venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes it may also soon be able to give us a laugh.
The cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz said in an interview with Substack CEO Chris Best that the tech could be a revival that comedy requires.
"Comedy needs a Renaissance very badly," he said. "It's basically died. So it could be the way the story gets told as, like, AI saves comedy."
Andreessen said that as video generation tools like Luma AI continue to advance, animators will be able to produce shows at a much faster pace.
"You'll be able to come up with jokes and render a cartoon in basically half an hour that is as good as those guys that, 20 years ago, needed a complete production facility," he said.
AI-generated videos have already been making a controversial splash among artists, with developers beginning to trial various text-to-speech tools like Open AI's Sora or Google's VEO. While some artists have denounced these models as "artistwashing," Hollywood is already being pitched for AI productions.
"The explosion of comedy and animation from here, I think, ought to be just amazing," he said.
While live comedy has arguably never been bigger, with ticket sales topping just over $900 million last year, according to Bloomberg, animations are not quite seeing the same boom.
After losing 200,000 subscribers in 2022, Netflix began pulling animated shows and induced a cascade of layoffs to cut costs, the Los Angeles Times reported. Max, formerly HBO Max, also slashed dozens of animated titles that year.
Whether AI is the spark animation needs is still up in the air, but studios, including Pixar and Disney, have already started experimenting cautiously. Pixar's 2023 film "Elementals" used neural style transfer, an AI software that can manipulate digital images or videos, to help create a unique animated flame, Wired reported.
"Anybody who's a creative in any professional field all of a sudden has a new superpower, which is this technology," Andreessen said.
