Eric Jason Martin
Appearances
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
What was billed as an industry earthquake has been more like a slow leeching into the topsoil, AI in Hollywood right now is like AI in here. It's everywhere and it's nowhere. It's invisible and it's all over the screen.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
There's too many people in Hollywood today who think that if you type movie and press enter, you get a movie, says Cristobal Valenzuela, the co-founder and chief executive of Runway, whose AI video generation engines are among the most widely used.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The moment you start using it, you understand, oh, it actually doesn't really work that well yet, and it's full of flaws, and it doesn't actually do what I want. The critical limitation with generative AI tools for now is the absence of control. CGI requires a factory line of hundreds of artists working one frame at a time, but you control every freaking pixel.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
You control every character, says Oded Granote, a visual effects artist at a generative AI video startup called Hour One, who worked on the Oscar-winning team behind Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse 2018. Making images with AI, Grenote explains, is like Russian roulette or a slot machine. The front end requires just a simple prompt.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
You write, I want Spider-Man hanging from a building, and it generates it. But that still leaves countless decisions up to the machine, and you're stuck with the output. What does the building look like? How is he hanging? Upside down? Sideways? And that's a single still image, not a full sequence, let alone a feature-length film.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
You can't expect James Cameron to prompt an avatar scene, says Yo Plata, Metaphysics' chief innovation officer and the lead architect of the AI tools used in here. It's just not going to work. or with Bob Zemeckis or Steven Spielberg, if you've ever made a movie with one of these guys, you know that they will want to change every pixel if they can.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Rather than play wait and see and have AI thrust upon them in ways they couldn't control, Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of the previous two Avengers movies for Marvel Studios, hired a machine learning scientist away from Apple to help guide how their production company, Agbo, would use it. There's a lot of ways that we are experimenting with AI right now, Anthony Russo told me.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
We're not quite sure what's going to work and what's not going to work. But he is sure that AI will figure somehow into how he and his brother make the next two Avengers movies, both currently scheduled for 2026, even if it's only to help with brainstorming ideas and working through them faster. Over several months of talking to people around Hollywood about AI, I noticed a pattern.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The people who knew the least about its potential uses in the filmmaking process feared it the most, and the people who understood it best, who had actually worked with it, harbored the most faith in the resilience of human creativity, as well as the most skepticism about generative AIs ever supplanting it. There was a broad consensus about the urgency of confronting its many potential misuses.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Tech companies skirting copyright laws and scraping proprietary content to train their machine learning models. Actors' likenesses being appropriated without their permission. Studios circumventing contractual terms designed to ensure that everything we see on screen gets written by an actual human being. I must have heard the phrase proper guardrails at least a dozen times.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
But as the prolific Emmy-winning television director Paris Barclay, who has six episodes of multiple shows airing this fall alone, put it, that's what unions are for.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The twilight sun over the Aegean Sea behind Tom Hanks was so golden and incandescent and lit his profile with such cinematic flair that the composition was almost too perfect, as though it could only be the product of advanced machine learning and not, say, Zeus. One week after my visit to Metaphysic, I was once again staring into a camera, and Hanks was again staring back at me,
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Only this time it was the real Tom Hanks, enjoying the last few days of a sailing trip in the Greek islands. He was tanned and relaxed in a dark open-collar polo, and unlike the last time I saw him, he looked like a man in his late 60s, with clear-frame glasses, tufts of short gray hair barely peeking over the top of his head, and a tight white beard.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The nameplate at the bottom of his Zoom window read H-A-N-X. I asked Hanks if it gave him any pause making a movie so reliant on AI tools at a moment when so many of his colleagues in Hollywood were anxious about it. He rejected the premise and characterized the work on here as being in the grand tradition of Lon Chaney and monster movie magic.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
This was not AI creating content out of whole cloth, he said. This is just a tool for cinema. That's all. No different than having better film stock or a more realistic rear-screen projection for somebody driving a car. For someone like Hanks, AI could enable him to take on roles for which he had long assumed he was too old.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
If it's possible for me to play a younger person than I am, I read stuff all the time and I think, oh man, I'd kill to play this role, but I'm 68. I'd kill to play Iago, but I can't because Iago's in his 20s. I would do it in a heartbeat. Though pity the poor 20-something actors shut out from playing Iago by an ageless Tom Hanks.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
When AI evangelists talk about its capacity to empower artists, this is the kind of thing they mean, though Hanks' experiences have compelled him to contemplate some morbid implications. They can go off and make movies starring me for the next 122 years if they want, he acknowledged. Should they legally be allowed to? What happens to my estate?
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Far from being appalled by the notion, though, he sounded ready to sign all the necessary paperwork. Listen, let's figure out the language right now.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
metaphysics handiwork has already appeared in two major theatrical releases this year furiosa a mad max saga and alien romulus and in both cases the assignment was to resurrect a fan favorite figure from an earlier film in the franchise who had been played by a since deceased actor in furiosa metaphysic enabled the director george miller to bring back the bullet farmer
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
by putting the face of Richard Carter from Mad Max Fury Road onto the body of a living actor. In Alien Romulus, the android from Ridley Scott's 1979 original Alien, played by Ian Holm, who died in 2020, returns in updated form for several scenes. Even though Holm's family blessed the use of his likeness, public response was divided.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The movie was a hit, but some viewers posted ethical critiques on social media. Then, in late August, the California State Senate passed long-gestating SAG-supported legislation requiring estate consent for AI-generated replicas of dead performers. When I asked one writer-director about the practice, he didn't even let me finish the question.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Nope, nope, nope, nope, said Billy Ray, who wrote Captain Phillips, 2013, and co-wrote the 2012 big-screen adaptation of The Hunger Games, and who spent his time during the strike hosting a studio-lambasting podcast. It's completely insincere, dishonest filmmaking. It's a lie.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The counter-argument I kept hearing from artists and from technologists is that filmmaking is a grand illusion at its core, and we all consent to being tricked. We're paying to be tricked when we walk into the theater or turn our phone sideways.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
When your movies require visiting multiple fantasy worlds, dreaming up new superpowers and nastier villains, you need to come up with lots of ideas, knowing that a vast majority of them will be bad. This is the grunt work of making popular art, the failing part, and AI could prove to be a godsend for artists who need to fail fast and at minimal expense.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
It's a bit like you have 5,000 phenomenally smart interns at your disposal 24-7 in all time zones, says Dominic Hughes, the Oxford University-educated AI whisperer who left Apple to join the Russo brothers. Hughes switched industries, he told me, in part because he came to believe Silicon Valley was getting AI all wrong. Generative AI tools are unruly and imprecise. Sloppy, he said.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
But too many companies were trying to use them for tasks where they couldn't afford to be wrong. like self-driving cars or robot surgeries or whatever, he says, and we've been struggling with that for years. Because if you don't want to run over seven-year-olds in Kansas, you've got to be 99.999999% precise.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Whereas in a creative context, if I generate a bunch of elves and they have seven fingers, hallucinations in the parlance of the medium, It doesn't matter, because they're part of my iterative creative process of brainstorming what elves could look like. Generative AI, he has come to believe, is best suited for tasks where hallucination is a feature, not a bug.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The sum of Hollywood's collective fears, says Bennett Miller, the Oscar-nominated director of Moneyball and Foxcatcher, is automation, robots replacing humans, just as in the movies. Miller spent five years making a documentary about the dawn of AI that he describes as a time capsule about a moment before a real loss of innocence in Silicon Valley. The untitled film is currently in legal limbo.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
In the course of making it, he got to know the original leadership team at OpenAI, including Sam Altman. A few years ago, they offered him access to a beta version of their forthcoming text-to-image tool, Dolly. It was astounding, Miller told me. From the moment that I had an account set up to literally ten minutes ago, I've just been all in.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
This January, at Gagosian's Paris gallery, Peeble opened his third show of ghostly, surreal images that evoke the grainy early days of photography, but were created with Dali. In one of them, a silhouetted man looks up from the floor of a century-old theater at a massive sea creature on stage, its body so large that it extends beyond the frame.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
It's like realizing that you had locked-in syndrome, because you really can navigate to extraordinary places. He fell in love with getting lost. The mistakes, the wrong turns, the model's peculiar way of comprehending the human world, a bit Louis Bunuel, a bit Diane Arbus, led to all of his breakthroughs, which is how the best art often gets made, by accident.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
It's not just a change in degree of what's been possible before. It's really like a change in kind. And yet, as much as Miller's creative practice has been transformed by AI, it's still merely a tool to him. And the tool doesn't make you an artist, he says. I just don't see it as a threat the same way others see it.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
I'm not saying that there aren't going to be huge problems that emerge, but here's the thing that I cannot comprehend. human artists being replaced. The great wildcard of AI is that it learns and gets better, and we can only guess at its full capabilities.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Its performance so far, though, has also highlighted the gap still to be closed, especially with text generation tools like ChatGPT, a lowest common denominator regurgitation machine whose countless practical uses don't appear to include writing screenplays.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Tom Graham, a Metaphysic co-founder and its chief executive, says he can see AI tools summarizing news articles and doing great explainer videos for corporate work. I can see them creating generic or derivative stories that just kind of seem like other stories. But, he adds, amazing storytelling is very, very difficult.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Of course, Hollywood is very much in the business of generic and derivative stories, in which case why not completely outsource the hack work to AI? The Writers Guild of America's labor deal forbids that, though count on studios to use it for anything in the script development process that can save them money.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
And some creative guilds are bound to be hit hard by the adoption of AI, especially in digital animation, with its battalions of entry-level artists who spend an entire year tweaking pixels on two minutes of film. Many of those people could be working in AI soon, and fortunately for them, AI firms are hiring.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
We need to double our size really quickly just to keep up with the demand, says Alejandro Lopez, the chief marketing officer at Metaphysic, which currently has about 120 employees working remotely in more than 20 countries. We are so behind.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
But as anxious as the guilds are, Hollywood's history with paradigm-shifting technology suggests that the folks on the studio side, the agentic side, have just as much to fear. We went from renting movies to streaming them, and it's not filmmakers that go away.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Blockbuster goes away, says Bryn Mooser, a filmmaker and a co-founder of the streaming channel Documentary Plus, whose new company, Asteria, is an independent movie studio bidding to be the Pixar of AI. Or think about the switch from film to digital. Polaroid is the one that's got to figure it out. Kodak has to figure it out. Photographers are still there.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Filmmaking is often described as the most collaborative art form, and metaphysic was just one among many creative contributors to the trickiest scenes of Hanks and Wright as young lovebirds in here. The actors performed in full period costume, not in green suits covered with ping-pong balls.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The makeup department taped back the loose skin around Hanks' neck and pulled up his droopy ears so Hanks' AI-generated young face would match Hanks' real-life old head. And, of course, they had award-winning actors to deliver all the lines. You still need the warmth of the human performance, Zemeckis told me.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The illusion only works because my actors are using the tool just like they use their wardrobe, just like they'd use a bald skullcap. It was the future of Hollywood, and it looked uncannily like its past.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The Los Angeles headquarters of Metaphysic, a Hollywood visual effects startup that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, were much cooler in my imagination, if I'm being honest. I came here to get my mind blown by AI, and this dim three-room warren overlooking Sunset Boulevard felt more like the slouchy offices of a middling law firm.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Ed Ulbrich, Metaphysics' chief content officer, steered me into a room that looked set to host a deposition, then sat me down in a leather desk chair with a camera pointed at it. I stared at myself on a large flat-screen TV, waiting to be sworn in. But then, Ulbricht clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. "'Smile,' he said to me.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
"'Do you recognize that face?' I did, right away. But I can't disclose its owner, because the actor's project won't come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret." Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. Smile again, Albrecht said. I complied. Those aren't your teeth. Indeed, the teeth belonged to famous actor.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions with almost no lag time.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Ulbricht is the former chief executive of Digital Domain, James Cameron's visual effects company, and over the course of his three-decade career, he has led the VFX teams on several movies that are considered milestones in the field of computer-generated imagery, including Titanic, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Top Gun Maverick.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
But in Ulbricht's line of work, in the quest for photorealism, the face is the final frontier. I've spent so much time in Uncanny Valley, he likes to joke, that I own real estate there In the spring of 2023, Ulbricht had a series of meetings with the founders of Metaphysic.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
One of them, Chris Umi, was the visual effects artist behind a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that went viral on TikTok in early 2021, a moment many in Hollywood cite as the warning shot that AI's hostile takeover had commenced. But in parts of the VFX industry, those deepfake videos were greeted with far less misgiving.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
They hinted, tantalizingly, at what AI could soon accomplish at IMAX resolutions and at a fraction of the production cost. That's what Metaphysic wanted to do, and its founders wanted Albrecht's help. So when they met him, they showed him an early version of the demonstration I was getting.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Ulbricht's own career began during the previous seismic shift in the visual effects field, from practical effects to CGI, and it was plain to him that another disruption was underway. "'I saw my career flash before my eyes,' Ulbricht recalled. "'I could take my entire team from my former places of employment.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
I could put them on for eternity using the best CGI tools money can buy, and you can't deliver what we're showing you here.' And it's happening in milliseconds. He knew it was time to leave CGI behind. As he put it, how could I go back in good conscience and use horses and buggies and rocks and sticks to make images when this exists in the world?
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Back on Sunset Boulevard, Ulbricht pecked some more at his laptop. Now I was Tom Hanks, specifically a young Tom Hanks, he of the bulging green eyes and the look of gathering alarm on his face in Splash when he first discovers that Daryl Hannah's character is a mermaid.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
I can divulge Hanks' name because his AI debut arrived in theaters nationally on November 1st in a movie called Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, a reunion of the creative team behind Forrest Gump, and co-starring Robin Wright, Here is based on a 2014 graphic novel that takes place at a single spot in the world, primarily a suburban New Jersey living room, over several centuries.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The story skips back and forth through time, but focuses on a baby boomer couple played by Hanks and Wright at various stages of their lives, from age 18 into their 80s, from post-World War II to the present day. You couldn't have made this movie three years ago, Zemeckis told me. He could have used multiple actors for each character, but the audience would get lost trying to keep track.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Conventional makeup could have taken a decade off Hanks, who is now 68, but not half a century. The crux with CGI is time and money. Persuading us that we're watching Hanks and Wright in their 20s would have required hundreds of VFX artists, tens of millions of dollars, and months of post-production work. Doable, in theory, but major studios don't spend that kind of money on movies like here.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
There's no capes or explosions or aliens or superheroes or creatures, Ulbricht explained. It's people talking. It's families. It's their loves and their joys and their sorrows. It's their life. AI software, though, changes all the accounting.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
By using every available frame of Hanks' movie career to capture his facial movements and the look of his skin under countless lighting conditions, physical environments, camera angles, and lenses, metaphysics artists can generate a digital Tom Hanks mask with the click of a few keystrokes. And what we see on screen is just one factor in AI's ascendancy.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
It's the quality, and it's the speed, and it's the cost, Albrecht said. No six-month production lag. No fortune spent.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
During the filming of Here, Metaphysic devised a setup that enabled Zemeckis and his crew to follow the shooting of scenes on two different monitors, one showing the raw feed from the camera of the actors as they appear in reality, and one filtered through its AI tools showing the actors at whatever age the scene required.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Zemeckis has a long history of pouncing on new technologies to help him tell stories, from Forrest Gump to the Polar Express, and Hanks has often come along for the ride. In this case, the production breakthrough mattered as much as the image quality. It was crucial that the cast could see it, because then they could adjust their performance, Zemeckis told me.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
They could say, oh, I see, I've got to make sure I'm moving like I was when I was 17 years old. No one had to imagine it. They got a chance to see it in real time. And despite the technical ambition, HERE only cost about $50 million, less than a quarter of some Marvel movie budgets.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
From Metaphysics' office in Hollywood, I drove 30 minutes south to Sony Pictures' studio lot in Culver City to watch a screening of HERE in the basement of the Irving Thalberg building. And for me at least, the AI-driven scenes passed the baseline test of any ambitious movie illusion. I didn't notice it.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
But reactions are bound to vary, especially when it comes to a face as familiar as that of young Tom Hanks. A high bar for a big screen visual effect. And when an illusion doesn't work, it can be hard to focus on anything else. Maybe it will turn out to be impossible to escape Uncanny Valley after all, even with the help of AI.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Then again, the whole fuss over the Tom Cruise deepfakes was propelled by how convincing they were. And that was three years and three Nvidia chips ago. It seems like only a matter of time before they fool us all. The history of Hollywood can be told as a series of technological leaps, beginning with the invention of the camera itself.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
And each time something new comes along, jobs are lost, jobs are created, the industry reorganizes itself. Everyone in town of a certain age has seen this movie before. Past leaps, though, have tended to have narrower impacts. Home video changed movie distribution. Digital cameras changed movie production. CGI changed visual effects.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The difference here is that AI has the potential to disrupt many, many places in our pipeline, says Laurie McCreary, the chief executive of Revelations Entertainment, a production company she owns with Morgan Freeman, and a board member of the Producers Guild of America. This one feels like it could be an entire industry disruptor.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
AI is evolving so rapidly, though, and remains so poorly understood by so many people in Hollywood that it's difficult to predict how it will wind up proving most beneficial and which aspects of the filmmaking process it will disrupt first. Everyone's nervous, says Susan Sprung, the producer's guild's chief executive, and yet no one's quite sure what to be nervous about.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
The use of AI in here is a critical element in its broader illusion, but it's also a small one in a movie full of old-fashioned visual invention. And aging and de-aging actors is just one way that filmmakers are tinkering with AI-driven facial replacement. It's also being used in stunt photography, foreign language dubbing, and increasingly in lieu of reshoots.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
AI applications are often divided into two broader categories. The first is generative AI, which helps artists and studios create things. Then there is agentic AI, which helps them get things done.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
A new AI tool called Kalea, for instance, reads scripts and generates 35-page coverage reports, along with historical comparisons and suggested theatrical release patterns, the core duty of countless junior studio executives' daily work life, though perhaps not for long.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
gen ai is depending on your vantage point either the fun kind or the dystopic kind it's either going to empower artists or replace them or do both but gen ai is also the category where all the creative exploration is happening and where filmmakers are learning on the fly how it can help them tell new stories and they believe make better movies
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Shortly after here wrapped up principal photography in April 2023, Hollywood shut down for several months because of overlapping strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. Among the central issues in both labor disputes was how to protect the livelihoods of union members from AI encroachment.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
Even a year before the strikes, AI was still just a plot device for sci-fi thrillers for most people in the movie industry, not a pressing real-world threat. Then, OpenAI unveiled its first public version of ChatGPT in November 2022. Suddenly, AI was an asteroid hurtling toward Los Angeles. Any day, studio executives would start using ChatGPT to spit out screenplays,
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
eliminating all those pesky writers, and using text-to-video programs like Runway's Gen 1 to auto-generate all the filmmaking elements that professional artists get paid to create now. Costumes, set design, cinematography. And even though the guilds managed to extract strict limitations on AI use in their ratified labor agreements, their victories felt pyrrhic.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
I spoke with more than two dozen people across the industry for this article and discovered that while there's no shortage of AI optimists in the movie industry, they're often reluctant to share that sentiment out loud for fear of seeming to side with the machines or appearing too sanguine about a technology that everyone agrees will cost some people their jobs.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’
There were also a couple of occasions when an eager early adopter scheduled an interview only to cancel at the last minute at the behest of skittish corporate overseers. And yet, the reality of AI's adoption within Hollywood so far has been more muted and incremental and considerably less dystopic than the nightmare scenarios.