1520: Film & Commentary 1: Cameron, Tarantino, and Watchable Slop
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/04
How could “AI lava lamps” — endlessly generated, loosely coherent video — transform entertainment, from Cameron’s tech to YouTube’s watchable slop?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner sketch a fast-turnaround “Film and Commentary” series, springboarding from James Cameron’s tech genius (and clunky dialogue) and a hypothetical Cameron-Tarantino mash-up. They riff on The Boys/Gen V as grotesque political satire and the rise of watchable “AI slop” on YouTube. Rosner tracks the arc from AI stills to MidJourney’s short clips, then proposes “AI lava lamps”: endlessly generated, loosely coherent streams. His demo concept — “Bob Who Lives on the Lot” — follows a handsome squatter drifting through productions and eras, half mystery, half vibe. It is narrative as ambience: fragments, continuities, and the future of screen attention.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else do you suggest? We could talk about complaints from your life and politics, or we could go into math, which covers most of what I think about. We could even talk about regrets, but we’ve covered that before.
Rick Rosner: James Cameron comes to mind. He’s a genius in terms of technology — he’s revolutionized filmmaking more than once and even pioneered deep-sea submersibles that reached the Titanic without disaster. But he’s not great at dialogue or plot. If he brought in someone like Tarantino, who excels at sharp, fun dialogue, the Avatar films would be less ponderous.
That connects to the idea of fun in serious productions — like The Boys and its spinoff Gen V. They’re grotesque, over-the-top superhero stories, but also satirical takes on politics. Someone even called them ham-fisted satires, but they’re entertaining.
Jacobsen: We could do something like “Film and Commentary” as a quick turnaround series.
Rosner: That could work. We’ve been talking about AI slop a little bit, you and I. It shows up in things like YouTube videos generated by AI in response to prompts. They’re largely nonsense, but they’re highly watchable, and the people who make them earn a lot of money.
The progression has been interesting. First, AI generated still images. Then short video clips. Right now, MidJourney — at least with the basic subscription — can generate clips about 5.2 seconds long. I assume if you pay for a premium membership on some AI generator, you can stretch that to 10 or 15 seconds. Then, of course, you can edit those into something longer.
I’m writing this book about the near future, and I’ve been coming up with things that will probably exist. One is something I call AI lava lamps.
Think about The Sims. If you let them go, they walk around and interact at random for quite a while. If you set up a party, it keeps going without much input. I imagine an AI system that sets up a world where the elements just continue — not entirely nonsensical, but inconsistent, fascinating to watch. The way stoners in the 60s and 70s stared at lava lamps.
Here’s one idea: Bob Who Lives on the Lot. Bob is a handsome, middle-aged guy — think Clooney or Jon Hamm. He wakes up in a house that looks normal outside, but inside it’s unfinished, bare, just a cot and a few belongings. He walks out the door, and you realize the house is only a movie set. Bob has been squatting in it.
As the AI story unfolds, he wanders the studio lot. Sometimes he wears a security guard uniform. Sometimes he’s pulled in as an extra, maybe dressed as a Roman soldier. Over time, you learn Bob has lived on the lot for years. Maybe he’s the son of a movie mogul from decades ago. Maybe he’s a ghost.
The point is, he can slide into different productions — sometimes solving mysteries, sometimes just drifting, maybe even falling in love. The setting could shift from present day to the 1940s. A sufficiently advanced AI could keep generating random, loosely connected episodes of Bob’s life for hours or days.
That’s what I mean by an AI lava lamp. It’s not really a story, not logical enough to be a narrative. It’s just endless fragments, endlessly watchable.
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