How to Become a Bland Nobody with AI

(illustration: daily US box office, 2004–2025 heatmap)

Starring: The American film industry.

The right approach to life looks like this:

1. You create something useful.

2. People like it and are willing to buy it from you.

3. You sell it and enjoy the exchange.

4. You go back to step #1 and try to create something useful again, now with the new resources you gained from step #3.

The key point here is not to stall. And to keep creating something useful. Notice, we’re talking about a useful product — one that people actually want. It’s crucial to understand what people respond to. To do that, you have to go out and talk to the people who bought your product.

What did Hollywood come up with instead? Why bother talking to people when you can just replace it with non-stop data collection? First, they gathered data from focus groups, then they came up with a better way. Why not install cameras in theaters and stream the footage to an AI model that tracks every single facial expression of every viewer, closely analyzing their reaction to what’s happening on screen? Who cares whether someone says they liked the movie when you can just know what emotion they felt every second they were watching it?

And in the end, we get what you can see in the picture. This is the amount of money movies have made in theaters, day by day, over the past few years. And as you can clearly see — theaters are dying. Why?

For me, 2015 was the obvious example of this downfall. Heh, funny how it worked out — everything started with Star Wars, and everything ended with Star Wars.

I still remember going to the movies for the first time without my parents, with my own money, back in 2002. We went to see Star Wars: Episode II. At the time, the awful acting and dumbed-down plot were completely overshadowed by how cool everything looked. The CGI back then was orders of magnitude better than what we get today and felt way more impressive than even the highest-budget films now. Because back then, CGI was something new, and it was done carefully, without half-assing it.

In 2015, for some reason, I was genuinely excited for the new episode. Most likely because I was remembering the magic of childhood. And what did I find, to my horror? The CGI hadn’t changed much — it was good then, it was still good now. But the movie itself was completely disjointed. No flow, no interesting plot. Just the same images I had already seen before.

The same X-wings.

The same lightsabers.

The same villain in black.

(Adam’s an amazing actor. But the role of Darth Whatever-his-name-was? Not for him.)

Why was it so bad? Because a dataset polished to death by endless NumPy cycles showed that people express joy when they see X-wings, lightsabers, and villains in black. Nobody cared about plot or continuity. They just had to keep churning out something.

See the difference? Nobody bothered to figure out what people actually needed. Nobody set out to create a product that was actually wanted. Instead, they just reproduced whatever got a reaction before. But that “before” was 14 years ago!

People, starved for something actually interesting, are now looking for novelty in Joker, Rick and Morty, Deadpool, and other completely reckless films. They couldn’t care less if Rey dies or turns out to be the Emperor’s daughter. Everyone is already sick of it. It’s like asking when Rodriguez from the first episode of Santa Barbara will wake up or what will happen to Anakin Skywalker.

(By the way, unlike Adam, whom I consider a great actor, I’ll say this — Hayden, who left for his farm in New Zealand and lived peacefully away from humanity, made the right call.)

Any business owner knows: if something made money in the past, it will make money now. But most business owners trip over the question: what exactly made the money?

Ever heard of Robinson & Cook? They made an extremely important thing — Brougham carriages. They made a ton of money off of them. They thought the best thing to do was keep making horse-drawn carriages. And now we don’t even remember them because they vanished into oblivion.

But something about what they made was useful — otherwise, they wouldn’t have been making money. So what was the actual useful part?

It wasn’t carriages. It was “the ability to conveniently and safely transport human bodies and cargo.” That was the real product of Robinson & Cook. If they had focused on that, they’d still be thriving today.

Look at another example — Nokia.

Did you know that in the 1860s, they made amazing rubber boots? Then they switched to making high-quality boots in general. That led them to making car tires, and from there, they jumped into a new market — car radios. And from car radios, it was just a short step to mobile phones. And they made a ton of fantastic products there, too.

But in 2007, Nokia made the fatal mistake of shifting from making “high-quality consumer goods that people actually needed” to making “mobile phones with gimmicks.” Gimmicks were in demand in 2004, but by 2008, people had lost interest. And then Apple came in with the iPhone and showed everyone that nobody cared about gimmicks — people just wanted a big screen.

Nokia can run big data analysis on all their old phone models all they want, but in 2025, it’s not going to fix anything. Meanwhile, I still miss their high-quality consumer goods. Though, these days, they focus on infrastructure — so let them do that.

Final takeaway?

If you just mindlessly shove everything into Big Data and AI, you’ll end up with a perfectly smooth, gray, average nothing. If you want to become famous and successful, you need instinct, gut feeling, and sharp thinking.

Go out and figure out what’s actually missing in your market — even if that market is HR reps who don’t want to hire you.