Sorry, Leo: The Jobs That Need to Die First Are Yours: Why Hollywood’s Panic Over AI Is the Best News Creative People Have Heard in Decades! By Chris Knight (Florida)
Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off another yacht summer and another sermon about carbon footprints, has declared that AI can never be art because it lacks "humanity." Without a soul, he says, it just "dissipates into the ether of other internet junk."
Translation: Please don't make my $30 million salary obsolete.
He's not wrong that a lot of AI art slop is forgettable. But the irony is thicker than the smog over L.A.: the very industry that's spent thirty years churning out soulless franchise sequels, diversity-quota screenplays, and CGI explosions, now discovers the sacred importance of the human soul the moment a machine can do their job cheaper and faster.
Let's be brutally honest. The jobs AI is coming for first aren't the noble ones. It's not the indie screenwriter grinding in a studio apartment, the concept artist who spent 2,000 hours learning light and form, or the composer who still writes for real orchestras. No. The first casualties are the gilded mediocrities at the top of the Hollywood food chain: the A-listers who phone in performances for eight-figure paycheques, the nepotism hires, the "creative executives" who green-light another Marvel slopfest because the algorithm told them to.
These are not artists defending craft. These are rentiers defending a cartel.
Think about it:
- Leonardo DiCaprio made $40 million for Don't Look Up, a two-hour Netflix lecture about climate change that looked like it was shot on an iPhone and written by a Reddit thread.
- Chris Hemsworth got $20 million to show up, flex, and say "Thor hungry" in yet another Avengers entry.
- The average big-studio screenplay credit now goes to eight writers because every executive needs a "pass" to justify their salary.
Meanwhile, the background actor who used to make $50k a year driving to set at 4 a.m. has already been replaced by an AI extra that costs $0 and never asks for a trailer. The junior concept artist who could once feed a family painting matte shots now competes with Midjourney. Those are real losses. But the idea that Leo's ability to cry on cue while a green screen explodes behind him is some irreplaceable pinnacle of human expression? Spare me.
Hollywood has spent two decades proving that "humanity" is negotiable. They replaced practical effects with weightless CGI. They replaced original scores with temp-track needle-drops. They replaced risk with four-quadrant focus-group slop. And now that the machine can write the slop faster and act the slop more convincingly, suddenly they discover the soul was there all along?
The beautiful part is that AI is the great equaliser. It doesn't care about your Oscar count or how many times you've been on the cover of Vanity Fair. It just asks: can you add value that a prompt and a few seconds of compute can't replicate better, faster, and for pennies?
The answer, for most of the chattering class in Beverly Hills, is no.
Good.
Let the bloat die. Let the eight-figure quote for a cameo evaporate. Let the studios discover that audiences will happily watch a tight, original $5 million movie made by hungry kids with an AI co-pilot instead of another $350 million committee-approved corpse.
The real artists, the ones who actually have something to say, will adapt. They'll use the tools to tell stories that matter instead of whining that the tools exist. The rest? They can go learn to code, or weld like the rest of us when the gig economy came for our jobs.
So, cry your crocodile tears, Leo. The rest of us are too busy making the future to mourn the past.
And honestly? The future looks a lot more interesting when the gatekeepers are the ones standing in the unemployment line for once.
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