Borkowski Media Trends: Creatives vs AI, 'Trump Gaza' & MORE
PLUS: Does Crisis PR need more Drama? | Harsh Reality for the Baldwins
Creatives take on Generative AI Laws
Coming from a country that also top the charts for self-deprecation it’s worth remembering that the UK’s creative industries are some of the world’s finest and so it’s unsurprising that the country has become the focal point of global backlash against proposed government policies that would allow AI companies to use copyrighted content without permission (and therefore without paying for it).
The nuclear components of Generative AI content are not original but the synthetic aggregation of existing content it scrapes from other sources. Put more simply without human creativity Generative AI would be, at best, a load of synthetic rubbish, as even industry giants like Open AI admit.
The backlash has been extensive and well-organised. 48,000 creatives including Kate Bush and Bjorn Ulvaes have signed an open letter, a thousand musicians have released a ‘silent album’ in protest, and almost every UK newspaper front page united in protest.
It’s a powerful gambit and an effective piece of lobbying that puts the government in a tricky position. The Labour government does not shy away from unpopular decisions but with dwindling polling figures, shorn a second-in-command as of this morning, and fighting criticism on numerous fronts may find the wrath of the international creative communities a battle too far.
Public backlash, meanwhile, should not detract from the strength of the AI companies’ position here; they are clearly in an advantageous position in the theatre of public affairs, and big tech, free market evangelism and corporate dirty tricks are currently powering the White House. Don’t expect Open AI et al to come crawling to the artistic community with a generous licensing deal any time soon. Their battle against European transparency laws is instructive as to their approach. For the creatives to win this battle they are going to have to be as relentless and ruthless as their corporate counterparts.
Trump Gaza rewrites rules of communications once again
Many in the creative industries will point to a video posted by President Trump this week as an example of why AI should not be above copyright laws.
Complete with a catchy alt-pop score (also AI generated) ‘Trump Gaza’ presents a vision of Gaza as a garish Vegas-Monte Carlo mashup complete with golden Trump statue, Elon Musk clones, topless Trump and Netanyahu, skyscraping hotel casinos and bearded ladies, following Trump’s glib comments about the ‘Riviera’ of the Middle East.
It is, to step outside our usual flimsy guise of disinterest, an utter abomination; for the elected President of the world’s most powerful country to be sharing a joke at the expense of tens of thousands of dead and displaced people would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but the most striking thing about Trump Gaza is that, whilst people are shocked, outraged, nobody is surprised.
In most large corporations and NGOs, every external communication is painstakingly crafted through (sometimes too many) layers of iteration and approval. Government and political communications are generally a bit scrappier and less polished but pumping out a mutant CGI parody of a policy announcement that itself was probably made up on the hoof to outrage enemies and leverage self-serving deals, is another level entirely.
As we theorised during the US presidential election, Trump’s PR strategy in its most basic terms is to concern himself with volume of publicity rather than the sentiment of the publicity. It doesn’t matter if 70% of people find what he does utterly evil as long as he reaches enough of the other 30% to get his own way.
Unfortunately for his detractors Trump Gaza appears to have been a successful example of what the BBC’s Marianna Spring characterised as “rage bait” generating millions of views, thousands of headlines, and even responses from politicians in the Middle East. Trump characterises himself as a rule breaker, but when it comes to communications he seems to be just making it up as he goes along, with the rest of us, baffled, trying desperately to keep up.
Who PRs the PRs?
Despite the conventional wisdom that crisis PR is the shadowiest of dark arts, the ceaseless onslaught of television’s Golden Age has turned to it as the subject of a new streaming series, announced in Deadline this week. The as yet untitled drama, said to star Lizzy Caplan and based on a profile of New York PR maven Risa Heller (who counts pre-scandal Harvey Weinstein and Jared Kushner amongst her rogues’ gallery of past clients), is allegedly the subject of a bidding war between Hulu, Netflix and Amazon.
In the midst of Melissa Nathan’s newfound fame as the crisis PR of choice for Justin Baldoni, the proposed series raises the question of how “behind the scenes” reputation management can be in a world that values transparency above all else. While crisis PR has been a curiosity for as long as it has been a practice, it also has a long history as a staple of film and TV – one can point to the BBC sitcom Absolute Power, Josh Brolin as OG Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix in Hail, Caesar!, or even Fred MacMurray playing both journalist and proto-spin doctor in the 1935 film The Gilded Lily. But the timeliness of this one, not just in the mire of the Lively/Baldoni drama but the aftermath of other high-profile PR dramas like Johnny Depp’s trial, and to say nothing of Heller’s own involvement with Weinstein, makes it interesting.
With cancellation only ever a click away, crisis management is perhaps a larger part of our daily media diet than ever. The difference, however, is now that most people know it – with the armies of armchair analysts on TikTok and Instagram piecing together and tearing apart any given statement, a dramatisation of the work that goes into generating them seems somehow inevitable. And when everyone has an opinion as to whether any given job is a job well done, it doesn’t hurt to have a little PR for the PR. Maybe that is Heller’s true masterstroke.
Baldwins face Harsh Reality
The Baldwins, a reality TV style show following actor Alec Baldwin and (questionably Spanish) wife Hilaria, during the trying times following the tragic death on the Rust set of Halyna Hutchins, met a cascade of criticism when it debuted this week. The first episode was met with negative reviews calling it a “crisis communications project” including a scathing New York Times article.
Aired on the family network TLC, The Baldwins was supposed to show the couple and their family in a new light, and perhaps, in doing so, to tackle the recent reputational downfall head on and spin a new (family oriented) narrative around the Baldwin family.
The strategy of the Reality TV Relaunch has successful case studies; the most famous example is Keeping up with the Kardashians, which, many now forget, followed the scandal surrounding the release of Kim Kardashian’s adult film. More recently in the UK Phillip Schofield’s Cast Away was widely perceived as an attempt to revive his television career following his own scandal.
The Baldwins, however, and aside from the quality (or lack thereof) of the show, face the same challenge as Schofield; that the golden age of reality television was fifteen years ago.
One reason for the negative reviews is because the public can smell the desperate cynicism behind the attempt to repair the reputational damage. For example In Vulture, the critic Kathryn VanArendonk writes that “contextualizing a woman’s death by embedding it into a show about how happy but also stressed the Baldwins are as a result of her death is … grim.” It will be interesting how the show will continue to unfold, given the scale of the backlash against just one episode.
One thing for certain is that the public is more than wide to the kind of stage-managed ‘behind the scenes’ celebrity access that had its heyday in the noughties.