AI is hitting entertainment like a sledgehammer … from algorithmic gatekeepers and AI-written scripts to digital actors and entire movies generated from a prompt.
In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment Television and chairman of the World Film Institute, to unpack what AI really means for Hollywood, creators, and the global media economy.
Larry explains why AI is best understood as a productivity amplifier rather than a creativity killer, collapsing months of work into hours while freeing creators to focus on what only humans can do. He shares how AI is lowering barriers to entry, enabling underserved niches, and accelerating new formats like vertical drama, interactive storytelling, and global-first content.
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And, watch our conversation here:
The conversation also dives into:
- Why AI-generated actors still lack true human empathy
- How studios and IP owners will be forced to license their content to AI companies
- The future of deepfakes, guardrails, and regulation
- Why market fragmentation isn’t a threat — it’s an opportunity
- How China, Korea, and global platforms are shaping what comes next • Why writers and storytellers may be entering their best era yet
Transcript: generative Hollywood … AI and entertainment with Larry Namer
Note: this is a partially AI-generated transcript. It may not be 100% correct. Check the video for exact quotations.
John Koetsier
Are the machines in charge of culture now? Hello and welcome to TechFirst. My name is John Koetsier. AI is hitting entertainment like a sledgehammer. If it’s not the algorithmic gatekeepers deciding what content you’ll see from billions of creators, it’s digital actors, AI-written scripts, movies that maybe someday you can prompt. Studios are scrambling to adapt and to buy each other to build the biggest moats. What’s that future going to look like?
We have the founder of E! Entertainment Television, the first global 24-hour entertainment news network. He’s also the creator of the Metan Global Entertainment Group, Chairman of the World Film Institute, and a lifelong builder of global media ecosystems. His name is Larry Namer. Welcome, Larry. How are you doing?
Larry Namer
All right. Good. All good. Good. Thanks for having me here.
John Koetsier
Awesome. Super grateful that we could move it from tomorrow to today. I appreciate that and am looking forward to diving into this. So much happening. I wanted to say, you know, what’s happening in entertainment today, but I’ve got to say, what’s not happening? I mean, it’s a crazy world, right? You just mentioned Disney’s license with Sora. We’re talking about Warner Brothers and Paramount and Netflix. The world’s crazy.
Larry Namer
Yeah, it is. But it’s fun. It’s exciting times. It’s fun to try and figure it out. I always had this thing: if it was easy, big guys would be doing everything and there’d be no room for folks like me.
John Koetsier
Well, I guess the big question is, is AI the future of everything that’s happening in entertainment?
Larry Namer
AI is a big part of it. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen so many doomsdays: cable is going to replace regular television, then pay TV is going to replace the movie theaters, and on and on and on. And it really is part of the mix.
I try to explain to people: if you go way back, if I had to do a script, I would have a typewriter and this little bottle of white-out. It used to take me about three months to get that script to the point where somebody could actually read it. Then all of a sudden, laptops and word processing came around, and what used to take me three months was now taking me five days. And now with AI, people ask me, “Larry, can you do an analysis of starting a TV service based on whatever the subject is?” It used to take me five days to do the research, to do a little PowerPoint, to do rough budgeting. Now it takes me 30 seconds to get that done. Then I still have to spend two or three hours putting the human element into it.
So now in three hours, I’m getting done what used to take me five days, which used to take me three months. As long as there’s a system in place where I can still get paid the same amount for that work, how could I not love that? I get more time. I could even do more of them and make more money. I could spend more time with my little grandbaby. I can learn how to speak Spanish. You reclaim the most valuable thing that we as human beings have, which is our time on this planet.
So I think there are guardrails that need to be put in place. Right now, I think our regulators have their heads in the sand. They say, “We don’t understand this, so if we just make believe it doesn’t exist, it’ll go away.” It’s not going away. There need to be deterrents so that bad people know that if they do bad things, there are consequences for that. We just don’t have that now. Some of the states are beginning to take that part really seriously. I think California is probably a little bit ahead of the rest of the country.
But as a storyteller, it’s a great tool. It takes down the cost of entry. It puts a tool in the hands of creative people anywhere on the planet to be able to create stuff. So I think long term we’ll see prices come down, but we’ll also see more people creating more content, particularly niche content for folks that are not really being served by big media because the costs are too high. We’re going to be able to change that.
John Koetsier
That’s really interesting, actually, right? Because on the one hand you think, okay, it’s easier to do stuff, it’s quicker to do stuff, there will be fewer jobs. On the other hand, you think, well, there are underserved niches, underserved segments. There will be more stuff to create for more people that is more diverse. Okay, great.
But that also means that you’re dividing the same pot of money, potentially, over more elements. You’re sort of fragmenting your economics, correct? Instead of making a thousand movies a year, we’re making 20,000. Let’s just put a number out there. Instead of each movie making on average 50 or 100 million, now it’s making two, 10, or 50 or something like that.
Larry Namer
Yeah, I guess that’s going to happen, but that’s happened over and over and over again. Every new media has fragmented the market. But you know what? We’re still here. The business is thriving. It’s never been bigger. It’s never been better.
Everybody goes, “Streaming is going to kill television.” As a creator, there’s nothing that’s come along in the last decade that’s better than the opportunities that streaming has given writers. When you get to serial dramas and miniseries, you really have the opportunity to create characters that are deep and rich and wonderful. So yeah, it fragments the audience, but for those people who are not really being served well, it’s a gift.
John Koetsier
You mentioned Disney and Sora as we were prepping for this call. Talk about that and how you feel about that.
Larry Namer
Well, I thought it was inevitable. It happened a little bit sooner than I thought. All of the people who own IP are going to need to make deals with the AI folks. You can’t take my book and train your language model without compensating me in some way. All that stuff needs to catch up.
People are going, “Oh, you’re going to make a movie with an actor and then you’ll use it in another movie.” No. There are laws against that. We sign a contract with an actor for a specific program. If you have a good lawyer, they write in a clause that says you can’t use this in any other form without the express permission of the actor. So our laws need to catch up. Our lawyers need to catch up.
It’s coming whether we like it or not. I give people the simple example: you go back to the late 1800s. We had a country of basically horse ranchers, and they wanted to see everybody with a horse and buggy. Then when the car came around, they were like, “We’ve got to stop that. We can’t let it happen.” I take people over to the window and say, “Look outside and tell me how many cars you see versus how many horse and buggies.” We have to put things in place so that it’s fair economically and that it protects people against deep fakes.
The technology can conquer a lot of that stuff. When people look at deep fakes, there are ways of predicting the reliability of whether something is real versus fake. It just has to become part of everything we do.
John Koetsier
It’s super interesting when you consider deep fakes and AI avatars. I’m not sure if it was The Rock or somebody, but there was some major celebrity. It was about a year ago. Some company in China made an AI avatar of them, and you could basically get a message from The Rock that was personalized to you, your name and everything. That was all AI-driven. That’s going to happen more and more. Disney’s licensing its characters with Sora so they can be used in a lot of cases.
That’s one thing, licensing that way. The other thing is creating an actor entirely out of nothing and having an AI actor in movies and films. How do you see that reality?
Larry Namer
Well, I think we’ve seen the start of that in the UK. They created this female actress who is doing really well. We’ll see more of that. I think we need to identify that something was generated by AI versus real actors.
To me, ultimately, these AI twins are like psychopaths. They’re born without emotion, without empathy, without feelings to react. Even when I look at the actress coming out of there, I can tell the difference. I think as we go along, the general population will become much more familiar with this stuff. Your eye and your brain will be able to filter out a lot of the nonsense.
They’re not human beings. They lack certain human traits. It gets better and better. There’s no question that AI will continue to improve. But as a creator, I wrote a book after people went after me for 20 years to write one. I finally did it. The publisher said, “Everything’s self-published. You don’t sell millions of copies these days.” Within four days, the book hit the bestseller list. The publisher called me up and said, “Larry, did you buy all the books? What’s going on?” I said, “No. I actually used GPT-4 to create the marketing plan for it.” I followed the marketing plan, and literally in four days, we were on the bestseller list. I love that kind of stuff.
John Koetsier
That’s amazing. Okay, so all this is going on. Meanwhile, we have the multibillion-dollar giants of the industry—Netflix, Warner Brothers, Paramount—doing these dances, M&A and all this stuff. How do those worlds collide? How do those worlds connect? AI hits both sides of everything in entertainment. It hits the production side, and it hits the distribution side as well. You always want a moat, whether it’s in production or distribution. The moat in production seems to be eroding somewhat. Maybe in distribution, we’ve relinquished that, certainly on the YouTube and streaming side, to the algorithm that tailors what I want to watch to me. How do you see these big multibillion-dollar moves in light of all this technological change?
Larry Namer
We’ll continue to see consolidation, which I think we’ve already seen. The movement on Netflix and Paramount wanting to buy Warner and so on. But we’ve seen that over and over for decades. Again, it hasn’t wiped out the business. It’s changed the business, and the people involved have to be flexible.
We’re going into an era where you’re right. We’re going to have more and more lower-cost product out there. While certain jobs may be eliminated by AI, a lot of jobs are going to be created by AI because there’s going to be more stuff out there. Particularly for someone who considers themselves a storyteller, AI helps me with research, marketing, and a lot of other things, but it doesn’t replace the creativity that goes into story. So again, more stuff out there.
John Koetsier
What’s the future of the human in entertainment?
Larry Namer
It’ll create more jobs for some people. It’ll eliminate the mundane jobs. I don’t like sitting and doing research for days and days. If I can get it done in 30 seconds, why would I?
I think you’ll still see writers in a great place because we have all these new opportunities to write. There’ll be a lot more stuff out there. I love the fact that streamers have come into play. For example, I had a project about the first woman to rule China, the only woman to rule China. I brought in Ron Bass to write the screenplay. Ron won an Academy Award for Rain Man. We were thinking of it as a feature film. But when we showed it to the streamers, they said, “No, these characters are so deep and rich that you’ve got to write this as a miniseries.”
One of the things we struggled with was that this woman went into the palace at 14 and came out at 72. There were so many characters in between, but you couldn’t fit them into a two-hour movie. The opportunities are out there.
Now you’re seeing things like vertical drama. Everybody’s doing these short-form, little two-minute dramas and jumping up and down saying, “We created a new form.” No, you didn’t. Soap opera writers have been writing in two-minute arcs for 70 years. It’s applying old techniques to new media.
I do a lot in China. We’ve been doing verticals for years. Americans are jumping up and down saying, “Wow, we discovered this new thing and we’ve got to figure out the production.” No, just tell the actor to keep their hands in frame because we’re shooting vertical and not horizontal.
You’ll see, again, a good example of AI being used. People are shooting verticals and saying they’re losing out because they can’t capture the horizontal market. You’re probably less than a year away from someone figuring out how to use an AI program to look at the edges of the frame and say, “If this is in the center, what are the edges going to look like?” You’ll be able to turn verticals into horizontals. It’s all coming, and it’s coming fast.
So a lot of new opportunities.
You froze.
Hello?
John Koetsier
Sorry about that. I think something crashed, so we’ll just continue.
Larry Namer
You’re frozen. Your face is still frozen on my screen, but you’ve got a second face and you’re talking.
John Koetsier
Okay, awesome. It thinks I’m on there twice. It’s all good. We’ll figure it out in editing. We’ll use AI if we have to.
That’s a great segue. You’re talking about China. You do a lot in China. You’ve bridged Western and Eastern markets. How is all this technology and this merger and acquisition stuff happening globally? Or is it segmented to the West and English-speaking markets, and what’s happening in the East stays in the East? Or are there more interconnections?
It was amazing what you said about that project you’re doing. It sounds like an amazing miniseries. Is that something that can go global? We’ve seen that with Netflix. We’ve seen Korean drama suddenly make it big in the States. That rarely happened before, including miniseries, not just movies.
Larry Namer
We are seeing the ability to create global content. The Koreans have done an amazing job because they really focused on it. From the central government on down, they supported that industry. They decided they wanted to grow it, and they’ve done a wonderful job. They’ve made a lot of people jealous.
If you go there, it’s such a small country. How did they do that? We’ve been in China for over a decade. Quite honestly, they are probably two years ahead in terms of use of technology. Like I said, we’ve been doing vertical stuff there for years. Now everybody in the U.S. thinks they’ve discovered this new form. For us, it’s a great learning experiment because when we come back to the U.S., we kind of know where things are going.
Take the project we’re doing about the Empress. Even though it’s a China story, we’re going to do it with American-born Chinese and Canadian-born Chinese actors so that it’s in English. We couldn’t use Australians because their accent doesn’t match well. Stories like that can travel.
Look at Game of Thrones. What we have is basically Game of Thrones set in China 1,200 years ago. There’s so much opportunity to do new stuff.
We’re playing with verticals here. My partner from E!, Alan, and I just launched a platform called Versa. We’ve already put up 80 movies that we’ve acquired from China. We’ve licensed them, and they’re all in English. We’ll see a lot more of that. You’re seeing money being thrown at it.
My big fear with the vertical thing is that Hollywood could ruin it. Look at what they did with Quibi. They figured out how to burn through over a billion dollars in a day and a half. This requires creativity, inventiveness, and entrepreneurship. You can’t just use the old Hollywood model of throwing money at it and hoping it fixes itself. It doesn’t work anymore.
John Koetsier
Yeah. It’s funny because with shorts, it’s about the platform, not just the short. It’s about the shorts, but it’s also about the platform. If the platform’s not there, what am I going to watch after this two minutes? It has to be an infinite scroll. It’s about the experience of the platform as much as the experience of the short.
If you look ahead at entertainment and AI globally, is there any predicting the future here? Is it going to be that creativity always wins and distribution wins, the same things reinterpreted with new technology? Or do you see something totally breaking the space?
Larry Namer
No, I think we’ll see a continuance of technology enabling new things. We bought up the rights for immersive entertainment in China. Things like immersive Van Gogh did amazingly well. We’ll see more interactive stuff. We’ll finally see branching content where you get to choose certain turns and twists because technology now allows those things to be done on a sane economic basis.
We’ll see a lot more experimentation. As a creative, life has never been more fun. There are all kinds of opportunities. There are no barriers to entry. And then the podcast world.
John Koetsier
And there are so many different platforms to launch on. We’re probably all going to have the sit-back experience where I want to be told a story by a great creator on the big screen on the wall. But on the little screen in our hand, I might want to choose. I might want to direct. Why did they go down that alley? Are they idiots? That sort of thing.
If something is on our eyes or on our face, that might be yet another experience. We’ll see. That hasn’t really hit yet, in spite of the tens of billions of dollars Mark Zuckerberg has thrown at it. We’re not at Ready Player One yet.
Larry Namer
No. I’ve been around for way too long. People thought reality TV was going to replace drama and sitcoms. No. It finds a place. It normalizes. It becomes part of the equation. It doesn’t replace everything that was there before it. We’ll see that again and again.
The amount of options we have as audience members, viewers, or users just keeps getting bigger. We have more choices for less price. I love it.
John Koetsier
Yeah. Awesome. Larry, this has been super interesting. Super cool. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Larry Namer
All right. Take care. Thanks for having me.