AI in film and TV

[Guy Rowland]

This is a really interesting article from Cannes, with filmmakers hugely divided:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... nes-cannes

I ended up agreeing with almost every point made - by both sides.

AI is hugely complex. Those two letters cover everything from denoising a microphone to making an entirely automated film. So my starting point is that to say AI is simply good or bad as a bald statement can be pretty swiftly discarded.

Seth Rogen said "“If your instinct is to use AI, you shouldn’t be a writer”. As a writer, I completely agree. The thought of AI writing a single word for me is horrifying. But Stephen Soderbergh said "It’s essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology”. People said CG was soulless for years. And, as a tool, AI can take things further. There are practical applications - there are circumstances when filming, say, an animal or a baby would be essentially impossible conventionally, and AI can give new storytelling possibilities. I'm working on a film right now which is partly set in the past, and we're discussing AI being used to augment real footage in a real place with real people by making a background period-accurate. That sounds bloody brilliant to me.

It's 100% true that AI can enable stories to be told on a realistic budget that simply wouldn't be possible any other way. It's equally true that it's easy to generate soulless crap by the bucket load. Peter Jackson said "“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool. But like anything, it’s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person feeding the instructions into the AI program. Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative?”

There remain legitimate concerns of copyright theft and power usage, but broadly I feel that's where I am with AI in filmmaking. People will do great stuff with it, and I'd hate good, imaginative work at the behest of creative minds to be dismissed as "AI slop" just because it uses AI as a tool. But in no way does that mean I want to watch a movie on Netflix whose story and script were generated by AI and then turned into a video with AI characters and AI locations.