In Swifties, Netflix trusts.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during Tuesday’s earnings call that the company isn’t worried about vying for more eyeballs in the age of AI-generated content, drawing an analogy to music and Taylor Swift’s popularity.
“If music is a leading indicator of all this — AI-generated music has been around for a long time, and there’s a lot of it, and it’s a pretty small part of total listening,” Sarandos said. “And established artists like Taylor Swift continue to be more popular than ever. So even in a world filled with AI music, AI seems to be mostly a tool for musicians to take their sound in new directions.”
Netflix co-CEOs Sarandos and Greg Peters were asked how the streaming platform plans to leverage artificial intelligence and whether they were concerned with increased competition for engagement with the arrival of AI video-producing tools such as OpenAI’s Sora 2.
Recent apps like Sora or Meta AI’s Vibes have made AI-generated content easy to create with just a single prompt.
Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, who has been testing AI video tools, described her Sora 2 experience as an endless “general slop feed.”
For Sarandos, that’s what separates AI content from the work of rare artists like Swift.
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The co-CEO said that while AI could have a near-term impact on the viewership of user-generated content, it can’t replace the library Netflix wants.
“For what we do: It takes a great artist to make something great,” Sarandos said during the earnings call. “Writing and making shows well is a rare commodity, and it’s only done successfully by very few people.”
Instead, Sarandos said AI will be a tool for the company’s creative partners to tell stories “better, faster, and in new ways.”
Peters also said during the call that Netflix’s approach to AI has remained unchanged for over a decade and a half. Part of Netflix’s future investment in AI, he said, could include advertising and “content production.”
In a letter to shareholders on Tuesday, Netflix said that some of its filmmakers have already used generative AI to “achieve their visions,” including in “Happy Gilmore 2,” starring Adam Sandler, to de-age characters.
“We’re not worried about AI replacing creativity,” Sarandos said, “but we’re very excited about AI creating tools help creativity.”
