What’s My Priority in a World Now Dominated by AI in 2026:
The year of the horse is definitely living up to its name as every aspect of the world’s economies, politics and technologies has hit an exponentially rapid state of change. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (of which many-many people seem to be) AI has already changed the way we consume news, media & advertisement. From online catfishing on a mass scale to middle-aged idiots replacing all their social profile pics with cheap youthful AI “upgrades” of themselves; this is only the beginning of human stupidity. I wouldn’t doubt that the wars & conflicts currently going on in the world is caused by a bunch of imbeciles in charged who are emboldened by asking ChatGPT about foreign policy implementation.
Even with the moderate $2,000 USD PC setup that I have, I’m now capable of generating ultra-realistic AI videos from just a photo of someone; in-house aka offline aka without a subscription to a web service. The results look much better than most of the AI slop you see on YouTube. If I was to use a web service like Seedance 2.0 the results would almost be cinema quality. So yeah, even with the massive consolidation of the large film studios happening as we speak… we in the entertainment industry should be crapping our pants right about now. With that said, I guess it’s ok to post my portrait… AI’s gonna find it one day soon, everybody’s info will be out there one day soon. I’m gonna create a one-to-one AI avatar of myself anyway… he-he, I actually look decent in real life.
So, let’s get to the important subject of what a below-the-line film worker (such as myself) can do in the meantime. First of foremost we must take care of our health regardless of what the situation is. Film work ages a person, terribly. Yet, if you take very good care of yourself with regular exercise, good eating habits and try to get as much sleep as possible (rare) then you can maintain your youthful appearance… maybe. Secondly, you absolutely need to reassess your finances unless you’ve been in the industry for a long-long time, and you’ve already made all your money. The cost of living is insane and the availability of work has decreased… you might want to downgrade your lifestyle or move further away.
The most important thing you can do right now is to future-proof yourself. Learn how to use AI, build your own AI agents, practice how to edit/create art, audio, images, music & video with AI. Then move onto more complicated tasks like data analysis and the automation of your finances. It’s a ton of fun and addictive as well. YouTube seems to be clamping down on AI slop now but there’s nothing stopping you from using AI to help you create real, genuine content. Time saved is money earned… you’ll find an average of 10x increase in your productivity. One side benefit of using AI correctly is the opening of opportunities for other careers outside of film AND it will open doors to a world of abundance… one you never would have thought existed.
Knowledge is power and your time is scarce. Google now gives its main search results with Gemini AI… it literally gives “almost” uncensored/unrestricted answers to all your deepest questions. AI can also be used to filter out other AI scams/slop so you will be able to attain goods & experiences only the wealthiest of elites could access in the past. This is because what & who you want is also using AI to connect to YOU. No other time in history has everything been so accessible for the public. By accessible I mean the 80/20 rule… just be relatively successful and you can be the 1 out of 5 people to enjoy some of the best things in life. In the past you’d literally have to be the top 1 or 2%.
Take good care of your personal appearance as well as your finances, have good communication skills and travel more. Find a cause/charity and donate some of your time & money… you’re gonna need to earn good karma so you can feel worthy of what is to come. Some of this “abundance” will seem unreal… you’ll have experiences you’d never think you could possibly have in a million years. Everything was there before the internet & social media… it’s just that AI has made it possible for anyone to know about it instead of a select few. None of this requires you to do anything unethical with AI like scraping websites for private info, creating deepfakes, doing bot-scams, etc. In fact, just the process of learning how to use AI correctly will help you detect what is fake and what is real. Your MAIN goal is to be at your very best… mentally, physically & financially.
Right now, there are hordes of morons giving their time & resources to AI generated content farms… everything looks real, but it’s not. The only fair warning I can give you is that you WILL get scammed one way or another initially. That’s because even the “legit” goods & services providers of whatever the heck you want to shop for uses AI to advertise, and the AI is literally crated to “catfish” you into making your first purchase. Sometimes you just have to lose some money to parse out the bad from the good… and believe me there are an insane amount of good out there. That’s because at the end of the day, a business is still a business and they want repeat customers.
There’s pretty much no escape from what is coming our way tech wise. The world is turning to digital payment systems and if you only bring cash/credit cards to many of the places I recently traveled to then you’d experience a lot of frustration. AI & biometrics are now used in all ports of travel giving travelers an express pathway to their destinations. Unless you stay home and go nowhere, your face and other physical info is already saved & shared within data centers all over the world. All this means is that the quality of life is going to be great/much better for those who can stay above water and earn a decent living while being smart about their spending habits… AND are willing to adapt to new technologies. Sadly, it also means life is going to be much tougher for those who fall behind… which more & more looks like the majority of the world
At the end of the day, I’m extremely grateful for almost 15yrs years that I have in the film industry. The discipline, work ethic and almost Herculean physical effort to last this long in my career has helped me immensely outside of work. The high cyclical nature of the industry also taught me to be versatile, adaptable and independent of outcomes. I go to work for the brothers & sisters alongside me, and we don’t let personal tribulations get in the way of our tasks. If I let myself down, I let everyone else down as well. This stoic resilience will continue to aid me for the rest of my life, but film work really doesn’t allow you to have a life (social or private). So yeah, maybe it’s time to move on… like go looksmax, aura farm & up my rizz or whatever terms the youth uses today.
Edit: I suppose I should give some pointers on where you can start using AI in the simplest way possible (beyond the basic Chatbots). Install ComfyUI on your PC and have a go at creating audio, images & videos. It’s node-based visual workflow is very similar to the DAWs I use edit sound & music. It’s super-easy to learn. I would then move onto platforms with similar user interfaces that deal with other concentrations/fields such as KNIME for machine learning and statistical analysis. There’s LabVIEW for complex mathematical modeling AND Alteryx that performs quantitative analysis for finance… and the list goes on and on.
