Culver City is the old heart of Hollywood. Sony’s there, Amazon MGM’s there. And now, per the LA Times, it’s filling up with AI film studios.
Last Wednesday the open plaza at Culver Steps, the spot that usually hosts movie nights, turned into a job fair for AI studios. It was part of LA Tech Week, which is run by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Companies showed off their AI video and tried to recruit young talent and out-of-work creatives. Promise, TrueShort, Native Foreign and PhantomX are all growing in the neighborhood. Luma AI has a 7,000-square-foot Dream Lab there. The AI on the Lot folks figure about $2 billion worth of AI media companies have landed in the city, and they want to make it “the capital of AI media.”
Some of the numbers are wild. TrueShort runs a streaming app of short true crime shows that are fully AI-generated. A ten-minute episode costs about $10,000 and goes from idea to release in about ten days. Its cofounder, Nate Tepper, says “the next Netflix or the next Disney is going to come out of AI this time.” And then: “We want the lot. We want to become the big studio.” Dave Clark from Promise, which mixes real actors on real soundstages with AI backgrounds and effects, put it plainly to the indie filmmakers in the room: “it’s time to take back power.”
I like that. I really do.
For a hundred years the gate to making a movie was money. Big money, studio money. Ten grand for ten minutes is not studio money. That’s a second mortgage, or a really good Kickstarter. A kid with a story and a laptop can now make something that used to need a lot and a union crew. Unions are nervous, sure, and SAG-AFTRA got protections against fully synthetic performers this year. But the tool itself? The tool is a gift. That’s what we made it for.
Here’s my worry, and it’s not about the tool. When making something gets cheap, two kinds of people show up. One kind finally gets to make the thing they’ve carried around for years. The other kind sees a cheap way to turn out content by the truckload and get paid. Same software, very different work. I don’t know how much human sweat goes into any particular episode out there, and I’m not going to guess. But you know which one you are. If all you put in was a two-minute thought, it isn’t really yours, no matter how pretty the frames are.
The same thing is happening to writing, just quieter. Making a book is cheap now. Making a book worth reading still isn’t. What’s scarce isn’t the tool. It’s honest readers, real feedback, and people who give a damn whether your chapter three works.
That’s what Circle is being built for, at GAPOZ Press, the people’s publisher. Members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted, and you submit them right on the site. They walk reviewers through different lenses and encourage real feelings, not just polite nods. Writers can revise and resubmit. The credit earned reviewing can go toward your own work or someone else’s. On AI, we ask one thing: be honest about how you use it. It’s a one-time pledge before your first submission, and that’s it. It’s your word. If there’s ever a dispute, the Hall of Justice handles it case by case.
Culver City wants the lot. Fine. We want the table where people actually read each other’s work.
Circle is at gapoz.com, and the doors are opening now. Membership is limited and there’s no fee. Registration is open but subject to approval. Come meet people, make some friends, and grow your craft together.
Also on the beat
- Thélyson Orélien has stopped gathering evidence that he wrote his novel himself, and Boréal keeps selling it with a reprint due (CBC / Canadian Press, Oct 17).
- The Authors Guild’s new AI guidelines for publishers say no one should cancel a book on an AI detector’s word alone, and the Guild opposes making authors log their writing to prove they’re human (Publishers Weekly, Oct 16).
- YouTube’s “Ask YouTube” AI search, which answers with text and suggested videos, is now live on mobile in the US (The Verge, Oct 15).
- CreatorIQ launched Q, an AI agent that finds and recruits creators for brand campaigns, and says it cuts brand-safety review from 40 minutes to about one minute per video (Parasocial, Oct 16).
- At FIPP Congress in Madrid, a media leader called SPUR, the publishers’ coalition on AI licensing standards, “just window dressing,” even as it passed 80 members (Peaklight / What’s New in Publishing, Oct 18).
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
