Key Takeaways

  • Production shoot days in Los Angeles dropped by more than half between 2016 and 2024, squeezed by out-of-state tax credits and streaming mini rooms.
  • Creative circles in Los Angeles maintain a strict social stigma against generative tools, slowing studio adoption for screenwriting.
  • Below-the-line crew members, such as hair stylists, makeup artists, set designers, and grips, face the most immediate risk of replacement by automated visuals.
  • Studios now bypass traditional literary outlets like Harper's to buy intellectual property directly from Reddit threads and unpublished anonymous web fiction.
  • Hollywood writers already spend their careers competing against zero-cost, algorithmically targeted human media, making cheap synthetic text a secondary threat.

The Real Replacement Risk Sits on the Set

Speaking live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood, TV writer Hayes Davenport described an entertainment economy already dealing with severe contraction. Shoot days in Los Angeles have dropped by more than 50 percent since 2016. Tax incentives pulled productions to other states and countries, while studio mini rooms stripped writers of on-set production experience.

Against this backdrop, panic about generative software dominates industry headlines. Davenport noted that peer pressure keeps writers from adopting automated software openly: “I think this is one of the least AI-friendly cities in the country, I would guess, when it comes to generative AI.”

Writing and acting carry strong social defenses, but physical production crew members have fewer protections. Digital backgrounds, synthetic lighting adjustments, and simulated extras remove the need for physical labor on set. As Davenport put it: “They're like anyone who works on the production side, really. And so hair and makeup, people like set design, grips, things like that, like that is sort of on an immediate precipice when it comes to AI.”

Why Cheap Synthetic Media Cannot Beat Free Content

Tech founders often pitch generative media as a way to slash production costs from millions of dollars down to pennies. Davenport argued that this pitch misunderstands the competitive reality of entertainment. Studios and writers do not compete against expensive peers alone; they compete against an infinite supply of free human work published directly to feeds.

At his publication LA Material, Davenport tracked how Hollywood acquisition habits changed. Studios increasingly buy IP from open forums instead of prestigious publications. “Short stories are very popular IP now, and not like Harper's-type short stories, like things that are posted on Reddit, or in some cases like totally unpublished short stories by anonymous writers,” he explained.

Because anyone with an internet connection can publish a story that reaches millions for zero dollars, lowering the production cost of synthetic scripts solves the wrong problem. “In fiction, in TV and film, we have already been competing for years against the sum of all human creativity produced and distributed for free, algorithmically sorted exactly to your specifications. You can't really scare us with AI compared to that,” Davenport said. “You talk about AI being cheaper, it is not as cheap as free. And like the free content that we all produce for everyone else's consumption all day long.”

What to Do With This

Audit your product's competitive moat against zero-cost alternatives before investing in automated content pipelines. If your software merely makes marginal text or video creation cheaper, recognize that your real competitor is free social media feeds that users already prefer. Shift your development focus to tasks that replace expensive physical coordination, where labor savings create immediate, defensible margins.