Chapter 1: What are the current fears about AI in Hollywood?
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. We all knew TV was dead, but thought, why not squeeze in one last development meeting? This is a video, a kind of comedy sketch, produced by a company in the United Kingdom called Particle Six. Now, Particle Six bills itself as the world's leading AI production studio.
Commissioner said no. AI generated 100 better ideas in minutes, perfectly aligned to channel data, viewing figures, and optimized for the audience.
So everything in this video, the voices you're hearing, the words that they're saying, all of it was generated by artificial intelligence. And the star of this video is Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated scientist.
Like if a Sunday roast went to drama school and got BAFTA optimised. But can she cry on Graham Norton? Of course she can. And it'll be clipped, subtitled and monetised on TikTok by most fans.
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Chapter 2: How is AI currently being used in film and television?
I think most of us intuitively understand that TV and filmmaking have used elaborate computer-generated imagery for a very long time. Right? I mean, Avatar was a three-hour orgy of CGI. So what's actually new here? What are we actually talking about?
So AI is an umbrella term. What people really mean are two things under that. One is non-generative AI, tools that assist. They don't create new content from scratch. So think about tools that help editors cut movies, tools that help sound designers isolate dialogue on a noisy set. Digital de-aging.
If you saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford appears to be 30 or 40 for chunks of that film. He's really in his 80s. That's all a form of AI. Fine-tuning, tinkering. Fine-tuning, and that's under the hood in Hollywood everywhere. You know, every studio, every network, every streaming service. The new part and the controversial part is generative AI.
Tools that scrape vast amounts of information and then use that to create new content. Got it.
So this is not remotely tinkering. This is whole cloth creation from the vast... generative sea of AI.
Correct. One example is a biblical show on Amazon called The House of David. Very popular, 45 million people globally watched part of it, Amazon said. So they used AI to generate hundreds of scenes that would have been too expensive to film otherwise.
It all began in the days of the Great Rebellion.
For example, there's this sequence at the beginning of one episode about the creation of Goliath, the giant that David kills. And it's this big, visually impressive montage, a sprawling fantasy landscape. You've got mountains, you've got angels falling from the sky on fire.
But God punished the angels for their sin. and banish them into eternal darkness.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between non-generative and generative AI?
And don't forget, there's all these commercials we're seeing all over TV where you might have seen perhaps like animation in the past or you might have seen human actors and now you're seeing AI created commercials. You know, Coca-Cola kind of kicked up a little bit of a firestorm on social media over that this past holiday season. What was the ad?
Just, you know, Coke always does these little embrace and celebrate the holiday ads. And this one, they used AI. And there's... People were not thrilled about this.
It was AI coke trucks driving by what were supposed to be adorable AI penguins and adorable AI rabbits. But people really saw it as soulless and, you know, digital slop was what the critics said, which is sort of the opposite of what they were going for, which was emotional warmth.
Okay, so now that I think we can all agree that we are, in fact, awash in AI generative content in Hollywood, I want to back up for just a second and talk about how AI came to the world of film and television and has gained a foothold there. Because this story, as I recall, it begins with lots of creative types being vocally
opposed to the idea, pushing for it to be banned, trying to put restrictions on its use into union contracts. And yet, here we are. Clearly, this invasion has begun. So help us understand how that
So just a couple of years ago, AI was the absolute villain in Hollywood. It's kind of amazing the degree to which Hollywood as an entity has turned around on it. Even though that artists have said publicly, you know, how much they despise this. In my reporting, it shows that, you know, they're curious people. They're interested in tinkering with it.
In particular, directors are really interested in what this technology can do, and so they've started to experiment more.
I think there's also something that's true of Hollywood and always has been, which is that it's an art form that is married to technology. That every change that's happened in the movies for a century has been driven by the development of some new technology, whether it's lighter cameras or it's color or it's film technology.
changing to digital or anything like that and so there is a reticence among many filmmakers who often are kind of gearheads themselves to say well we're just going to never use this technology at all they want to think about well where can we use this how can we use this and not just write it off completely so those two things are definitely battling each other mm-hmm
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Chapter 4: How is AI impacting the roles of actors and filmmakers?
So, you know, documentaries are a little different from a scripted movie or TV show in that we assume when we watch a documentary that the things we're looking at actually happens and existed in the world. And if we're looking at archival video, for instance, which is just video of old stuff, we assume that the old stuff happened.
I do. That's what makes a documentary a documentary.
That is essential for documentary. So one thing that has happened that I have heard of happening is the speed at which particularly streaming platforms need to turn out documentaries to kind of feed the content pipeline has led to producers being asked to create content. quote unquote, generated archival footage, for instance.
So then you, the viewer, are actually watching something that's, you know, it looks like something that could be real. And it wasn't real. And this has many different ways that it could be a problem. But one of them is that, you know, in the future, we may end up with a world where we have a bunch of little clips of videos that we can't discern which ones were real and which ones weren't.
And do the documentarians who do this work? Do they disclose this or they just don't think it's actually all that meaningful to the audience?
So the filmmakers that I've talked to hate this. Like they think this is very frustrating and bad. And so the push in the documentary world is to whenever you use generative AI to disclose it on screen so that the, you know, the viewer knows.
So one example that does pop up a lot and people may have seen is sometimes the subject of a documentary, for instance, may be deceased and you can generate their voice.
This happened with Anthony Bourdain.
This happened with Anthony Bourdain. There's been a number of other documentaries where this has been used. And, you know, there may be instances in which people do use generated visual material as well. But the idea is we want to make sure that the audience can trust what they're seeing on screen.
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Chapter 5: What are the ethical concerns surrounding AI in documentaries?
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I want to talk about the creative possibilities that AI presents. And I want to begin with a mega deal that was announced just a couple of weeks ago between a major movie studio, Disney, and the biggest AI company, OpenAI. They're wrapping their arms around each other. And it's Disney clearly saying that the future of their brands, which are many, are going to have to live in the world of
user-generated artificial intelligence. And I wonder how much that means that regular people like me and my two kids get to start playing with this suite of Disney characters, that Elsa is no longer some distant figure on screen, but, you know, someone that we can literally, like, help us do the dishes.
You're right. This was a watershed deal, a moment. It hasn't gone into effect yet. They said early this year, which I would take to mean by the end of April, people are going to be able to use Sora, which is OpenAI's video creation tool, to make their own 30-second movies, shorts, using 200 Disney characters, Yoda, Cinderella, Iron Man.
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Chapter 6: How does the Disney and OpenAI deal signify a shift in the industry?
They had stood up for something a little bit. I wish that... What do you mean? I feel like they had the opportunity as the largest entertainment company in the world, which they are. They still own well over half the box office, to say, actually... we don't want to see this incursion on our own craftspeople's work.
On the animators, on the drawers.
Certainly. So if your children, who I'm sure are wonderful creative people, but if they can make 30-second videos with Elsa, then the people who made Elsa, suddenly their work... is, you know, it's not the same, right? And the future of Disney movies, I don't think is going to be the same either.
I mean, one part of this deal was that some of, I don't understand how this is going to work, but some of this fan creative material will end up on Disney+, which could be cool. But are those people going to be compensated for their work? I don't know. But I'm sure they won't be compensated at whatever rate the people who created the originals would be
So there's just something going on here that feels smushy to me in a way that I don't love. And I think that Disney had the opportunity to set a pace for the entertainment industry that they kind of just decided not to take.
Well, isn't the pace perhaps that they've set one where... A company like Disney makes sure that they are going to be compensated at all for this stuff rather than it being just a vast, dark web of pirated use.
I think what they've basically said is we believe that what we create is content, not art. And to me, that seems like the end point of all of this. And, you know, as a person who cares deeply about this. You're an art critic of a kind. I'm an arts critic. I believe this is art. I believe that we're looking at human creativity kind of given as a gift to the audience.
That doesn't mean that the audience can't then remix and create their own art out of it. But it just feels like they're indicating the way that they're thinking about their, you know, intellectual property going into the next century.
The Writers Guild of America, the Animation Guild, they're right there with you. I would point out at the same time, Disney was careful in that in timing the announcement of the deal, they also sent cease and desist letters to Google. to take down copyright-infringing videos from YouTube.
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Chapter 7: What creative potentials does AI present for filmmakers?
It's the Wizard of Oz experience. The movie was adapted, I would say, for the space, heavily using AI. So it was upscaled. Munchkins were added because, of course, the movie got much, much wider.
It's a lot of screen to fill.
It's a lot of screen to fill. So, of course, everyone who played a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz, I assume, is no longer with us. But performances were created for them. Legs were added to Dorothy for some of the shots because— Yes. I mean, we all really needed to know what Judy Garland's legs looked like in that scene.
And it's not just the legs. It's arms, legs, torsos, the whole... It's a whole character that AI is putting into a scene where you didn't see it before. So in some scenes where you know a character is present, but in the original version, because of the, you know, camera ratio is not on screen, that... character is added in.
So like the Cowardly Lion is now seen or the Tin Man or Uncle Henry early on the farm was recreated. So they didn't create new characters, but the poppy field goes on and on and on and on now.
Well, let's bring this all together. I mean, as critic, did you notice it? Did you like it? Did it detract? Did you feel like the contract was being honored or violated between you and the original makers of The Wizard of Oz.
I actually went in to see it expecting to hate it entirely. Because I hated the idea of taking AI and throwing it at the Wizard of Oz. And I came out with very mixed feelings, actually. Because while I didn't like the Wizard of Oz manipulated by AI, it actually felt like the AI tools... did not pull off what they were hoping for.
For instance, the munchkins look kind of dead-eyed and scary that they generated.
All that warmth was just... It just doesn't work.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for AI and Hollywood?
But then comes Craigslist. And yes, and I'm going to be very newspaper-centric for a moment. you know, entire newspapers go away, other online news organizations adapt and thrive. And eventually an equilibrium of a certain kind takes hold. And isn't that inevitably the story of AI and Hollywood?
I mean, it's definitely one way to think about it. I think that the metaphor is imperfect in some ways, though, because AI is not a platform, right? It's a tool. It's a tool to accomplish certain kinds of tasks. And the idea there is to cut out labor and to cut people out of the industry. So really, ultimately, the idea is to take the human out of an art form. Right.
And to take human out of an art form, I think, is inevitably going to shrink the art form. It is true. We keep talking about the democratization of the art form, and I definitely think that it will make it possible for more people to make things. But I also think that it will make it less possible for people to have those things be seen.
And that has always been true every time we talk about democratization in things like filmmaking. So that's tough. And then the other thing that's inherent to AI tools, at least as they stand right now, is that they are trained on existing stuff. And when we talk about Hollywood, we're talking about an industry that's already profoundly risk averse when it comes to what they put out in the world.
Right. And AI tools make it more possible, not less possible, to continue to only turn out the same material slightly remixed over and over again because there's less risk in that. But when we think about a movie like, for instance, Sinners, which finishes in the top 10 last year... It's not the kind of movie that makes sense on paper, right? You need a human to dream up that kind of a film.
And it's that friction, it's that weirdness that humans bring to art that AI just hasn't got to it. It can do some interesting stuff. It can help people think. But in a profit investor driven industry like Hollywood, the inclination is always going to be to run to the safest, most kind of risk averse edge. And AI makes that very easy.
Brooks, I'm gonna give you the final word.
Don't laugh, but one of the positive ways that companies spin this is that the studios, that if AI reduces costs, makes it easier, cheaper for us to make these movies, We can justify taking bolder creative risks if it's not so expensive. It's a little rich to hear studio executives talk like that, right? Like, okay, I believe you.
But there is something in it that if the cost of a movie goes down, they are more willing to let it be a little more unusual. Not all the time, but sometimes. And so that is a possibility here if we're looking for rays of sunlight.
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