Ben Affleck just sold his AI company to Netflix for half a billion dollars.

You’ll read a lot of think pieces about it over the next month, but the TLDR is that the product isn’t an AGI-chasing text prompt seeking to benefit all of humanity. It’s a film production tool that runs locally on your shots-in-progress to create a model of the aesthetic characteristics of your project, identifies post production inconsistencies like lighting and mixing issues, and helps you fix them.

It’s not attempting to replace film making with a oneshot prompt. It’s a tool built by an expert in the field, who understands where the artistry and value in filmmaking is, and has identified where AI can reduce the background overhead that adds cost and effort to every project (and everyone hates doing).

It’s the shape most of the AI I actually use in my life. Claude Code is like this. Music tools, image processing tools. A few others too. Narrow, local, built by someone who does the work and understands where the wasted effort lies. Apart from Claude Code (which is a text tool) none of them even have text prompts.

I’ve been advocating this approach to AI for years but it’s a tough sell. We’re a decade into ubiquitous platform logic. One company, one database, capture the whole category, profit from it indefinitely. Or at least raise funding indefinitely. It’s what all the big players are racing towards with AI.

I’m not convinced it reflects the grain of the technology.

When I was at art school, Nic Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics was the core text our teaching revolved around. To sum it up extremely crudely, he argues that the quality of an artwork isn’t inherently based on the artwork itself, but the context in which you experience the artwork. It explores why Duchamp’s Fountain was transformed from a urinal into an artwork when it was put into an art gallery, but also why every other urinal in an art gallery doesn’t automatically become a priceless artwork. It’s a framework for understanding taste, curation, and a philosophy that explains why the Watching The Way Nolan Intended meme makes you laugh.

It’s also impenetrably-enough written that it kept hundreds of art students arguing over what it meant for years at a time.

Not long after I started working in technology Bourriaud curated the fourth Tate Triennial around his new idea Altermodern. Altermodern is a theory about progress informed by the internet and being online.

Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible to think of human history as multiple temporalities running at once… neither a petrified kind of time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear vision of history (modernism) but a positive experience of disorientation.”

Nicolas Bourriaud, The Figure in the Carpet

LLMs definitionally work this way. They have no map, no big picture, no overall understanding of anything. They drop into the disorientation and make superhuman leaps using the context they have available. I think this is closer to the grain.

(All images in this post by M/M Paris, taken from the catalogue they designed for Altermodern)

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