AI Is Definitely Changing (But Not Destroying) Hollywood

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The current consensus appears to be that generative video is not yet a Hollywood-killer and perhaps never will be. While AI is creeping into production, it is doing so to augment certain workflows or make specific alterations with no sign of it being used to auto-generate entire feature films or push creatives out of a job. But it’s still the early days.

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“It’s a fraught time because the messaging that’s out there is not being led by creators,” said producer Diana Williams, a former Lucasfilm executive now CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment at the 2024 SXSW panel, “Visual (R)evolution: How AI is Impacting Creative Industries.”

Certainly, AI is a disruptive technology, but M&E of all industries should be used to taking tech change on board.

Julien Brami, a creative director and VFX supervisor at Zoic Studios, spoke on the panel with Williams, as Chris O’Falt reports at IndieWire. Brami said the common thread with each tech disruption is that filmmakers adopt new tools to tell stories. “I started understanding [with AI] that a computer can help me create way faster, iterate faster, and get there faster.”

Speed. That’s what you hear, over and over again, as the real benefit of Gen AI imaging, writes O’Falt who spoke to numerous filmmakers about the topic.

“Few see a viable path for Gen AI video to make its way to the movies we watch. Using AI is currently the equivalent of showing up on set in a MAGA hat.”

Finding actual artists who are willing to use AI tools with some kind of intention is tough, agrees Fast Company’s Ryan Broderick. Most major art-sharing platforms have faced tremendous user backlash for allowing AI art, and there’s even a new technology called Nightshade that artists are using to block their images from training generative AI.

Graphic designer and digital art pioneer Rob Sheridan tells Fast Company that the backlash against AI tech in Hollywood is directly caused by both tech companies and studios claiming that it will eventually be able to spit out a movie from a single prompt. Instead, Sheridan says it’s already obvious that AI technology will never work without people who know how to integrate it into existing forms of art, whether it’s a poster or a feature film.

“The thing that is hurting that progress — for this to kind of fold into the tool kit of creators seamlessly — is this obnoxious tech bubble shit that’s going on,” he says. “They’re trying to con a bunch of people with a lot of money to invest in this dream and presenting this very crass image to people of how eager these companies are, apparently, to just ditch all their craftspeople and try out this thing that everyone can see isn’t going to work without craftspeople.”

Media consultant Doug Shapiro tells Fast Company that AI usage will increase in Hollywood as studios grow more comfortable with the tech. He also suspects the current backlash against using AI is likely temporary.

“There’s this kind of natural backlash that tends to ease over time,” he says. “It’s going to get harder and harder to tell where the effects of humans stopped, and AI starts.”

Generative AI is cropping up most commonly in relatively small-stakes instances during pre- and post-production.  “Rather than spend a ton of money on storyboarding and animatics and paying very skilled artists to spend 12 weeks to come up with a concept,” Shapiro adds, “now you can actually walk into the pitch with the concept art in place because you did it overnight.”

Studios have also begun using AI to touch up an actor’s laugh lines or clean up imperfections on their face that might not be caught until after shooting has wrapped. In both cases, viewers might not necessarily even know they’re looking at something that has been altered by an AI model.

David Raskino, co-founder and CTO of AI developer Irreverent Labs, suggests to Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Technology Review that GenAI could be used to generate short scene-setting shots of the type that occur all the time in feature-length movies.

“Most are just a few seconds long, but they can take hours to film,” Raskino says. “Generative video models could soon be used to produce those in-between shots for a fraction of the cost. This could also be done on the fly in later stages of production, without requiring a reshoot.”

AI is putting filmmaking tools in the hands of more people than ever and who can argue that’s not a good thing?

Somme Requiem, for example, is a short film about World War I made by Los Angeles production company Myles. It was generated entirely using Runway’s Gen 2 model then stitched together, color-corrected, and set to music by human video editors.

As Douglas Heaven points out, “Myles picked the period wartime setting to make a point. It didn’t cost anywhere near the $250 million of Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air, nor take anywhere like as long as the four years Peter Jackson took to produce World War I doc They Shall Not Grow from archive video.”

“Most filmmakers can only dream of ever having an opportunity to tell a story in this genre,” Myles’ founder and CEO, Josh Kahn, says to MIT Technology Review. “Independent filmmaking has been kind of dying. I think this will create an incredible resurgence.”

However, he says, he believes “the future of storytelling will be a hybrid workflow,” in which humans make the craft decisions using an array of AI tools to get to the end result faster and cheaper.

Michal Pechoucek, CTO at Gen Digital, agrees. “I think this is where the technology is headed,” he says. “We’ll see many different models, each specifically trained in a certain domain of movie production. These will just be tools used by talented video production teams.”

A big problem with current versions of generative video is the lack of control users have over the output. Producing still images can be hit and miss; producing a few seconds of video is even more risky. Its why humans will need to be involved. But, of course, as you read this OpenAI’s Sora just got better and better.

“Right now, it’s still fun, you get a-ha moments,” says Yishu Miao, CEO of UK-based AI startup Haiper. “But generating video that is exactly what you want is a very hard technical problem. We are some way off generating long, consistent videos from a single prompt.”