After the 2023 strike, when actors and writers raised concerns about the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on their jobs and livelihood, you would think that Hollywood might be nervous about upsetting the people it relies on to create its products. Industry bigwigs haven’t given up on using new technology in other areas, however.
California governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that rules that using an AI-generated digital replica to replace the contribution of an actor or their voice or likeness — living or dead — is against the law in California, a move that many actors have welcomed and is seen as demonstrating the industry’s commitment to protecting the sector.
But not everyone in Tinsel Town is so AI-averse and there are other applications of the technology that studios are considering in an effort to save time, money and reduce risk in a business that’s still governed by big-bet gambling.
This week, veteran blockbuster director James Cameron whose Terminator franchise gave the movies one of its most memorable AI villains — the Skynet system — announced that he’s joining the board of industry disrupter Stability AI, which is at the forefront of developing powerful text-to-image tools that it hopes will transform visual effects. Though some have noted that it’s ironic that the creator of an AI villain would jump into bed with an AI company, Cameron has pointed out that he’s always been at the forefront computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology, which has featured heavily in his Avatar franchise.
He said: “The intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave. The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined. Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation.”
Stability CEO Prem Akkaraju welcomed Cameron’s support and hailed the director as a man “who lives in the future and waits for the rest of us to catch up”. The company’s mission was “to transform visual media for the next century by giving creators a full stack AI pipeline to bring their ideas to life. We have an unmatched advantage to achieve this goal with a technological and creative visionary like James at the highest levels of our company,” he said.
Detractors may feel that Cameron’s recruitment to the dark side is a bad sign for the future of the industry, but he is not the only one who’s looking for new ways to harness the power of AI technology to make the business of moviemaking more efficient, less time consuming and lighter on the wallet.
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) announced this week that it had partnered Google Cloud to use AI technology to help streamline the production of captions for its content platforms. Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, the company will be able to create captions faster and more cost effectively for its content, beginning with its reality and sports content.
The company claims that while it will still employ people to oversee the captioning process, the use of this tool will reduce the time needed to create captions by 80% and reduce the overall cost of the process by 50%.
Avi Saxena, WBD chief technology officer for direct to consumer business, said that “providing viewers with high-quality captions is incredibly important to Warner Bros Discovery. Working with Google Cloud to utilise Vertex AI within Warner Bros Discovery’s caption AI workflow has not only helped to accelerate our captioning process, but also has improved our efficiency and speed, while reducing costs”.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted that “AI has the potential to transform a variety of processes across the media and entertainment industry that deliver real business impact. With its captioning solution, Warner Bros Discovery is seeing an incredible example of how AI agents can save organisations time and money.”
These moves may be in line with many studios’ commitments to not misuse AI, but not all of them are playing ball. This week Lionsgate announced that it had signed a deal with video-focused AI company Runway that would allow the company to use Lionsgate’s archive of content to train a new generative AI model to produce future film and TV projects.
Details are sketchy but in a statement the company said the AI model would be “customised to Lionsgate’s proprietary portfolio of film and TV content” and be exclusively for the use of the studio to help “its filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work”.
For AI fearmongers, the Lionsgate deal is a first step in sounding the death knell of the moviemaking business as we know it, with one industry insider tweeting that “this is the first step in trying to replace artists and filmmakers”. Though Runway’s tools are video and not text based, meaning that the model could not be used for the generation of script-based content, there are other potentially groundbreaking ways in which it could change the moviemaking business.
An unnamed source with knowledge of the deal was quoted in a report by IndieWire as explaining that the new tool would probably be most used in the pre-production process, where Lionsgate, which owns the John Wick franchise and its spin-offs could, for example, use these to train the new AI text-to-video model to determine what a new film in the franchise might look and play like. This would provide greater certainty for studio executives before taking the decision whether to greenlight a new John Wick film.
That sounds like a useful way to reduce risk in a business that is notoriously expensive and where outcomes are difficult to predict but there’s less clarity on what would happen next.
Would the AI-generated storyboard become a blueprint for the production of the film that would tie creators to it, and if such a digitally generated blueprint used Keanu Reeves’ likeness, would that place it in contravention of California’s new laws around the use of actors’ material in AI? What would happen if Lionsgate decided to make the model public and let fans use it to make their own John Wick films without the consent or participation of actors, thus changing the filmmaking process from a top-down model to a user-generated, interactive social media one?
As with all technological advances in the moviemaking business it seems that AI may have productive applications even as the development of these throws other areas of the industry into fear and confusion.
Whatever happens, though, it’s certain that AI has arrived in Hollywood and is there to stay.
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