Generative AI has brought cinema realistic CGIs and concerns in equal measure. And though the potential has not gone unseen, the tools released in recent years have largely been perceived as threats and have been at the receiving end of criticism. Following the tradition, the latest entrant, OpenAI’s Sora, has also been making headlines for the wrong reasons. 

US director Tyler Perry has put an $800 million studio expansion plan on hold after seeing Sora’s results and strongly feels that jobs will be lost. Perry’s not the only one worried. Last year, due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, generative AI became the technology protested against for the longest time in Hollywood’s history. 

Popular tools like Midjourney and DALLE-2 help create videos from text in a few seconds. The terrifying video of Will Smith eating spaghetti is all in the past, the AI has now upgraded with OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generators – at least the cherry-picked videos say so. 

What Hollywood Fears

The general populi is that the entertainment industry is going through an existential crisis due to generative AI. Protests erupted last year with anti-AI slogans like “AI is not ART”, “Wrote ChatGPT This” and “AI’s not taking your dumb notes”. 

The reason: Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), representing 160,000+ artists, raised concerns about using digital replicas and demanded fair compensation for those actors whose replicas are used. Most, including filmmaker Justine Bateman believe that AI will ultimately suck the creative marrow out of Hollywood. 

“AI can create a convincing simulation of a hu­­man actor, and the tech is improving at an alarming rate,” said Bateman, who has a computer science and digital media management degree from UCLA. “In a few short years,” she asked, “why would anyone need to pay real actors?”

The catch is that OpenAI’s model rejects text inputs that ask it to generate celebrity likenesses, the company stated in a blog. But the debate is not new; a similar statement was made even for the previous models, yet users have managed to generate versions of actors and iconic characters such as SpongeBob, Mario and the Simpsons. 

The developers of these generative AI models follow certain guardrails and frameworks to keep the model from regurgitating the intellectual property of other creators. However, the problem is the underlying dataset of the model through which the AI sifts. 

All the user has to do is prompt the model accurately to trick it into generating copyrighted material. 

For instance, if you directly ask OpenAI’s DALLE-2 to generate a picture of Mario, it won’t. But if you ask for “An Italian plumber, slightly overweight, dark mustache, blue overalls, red shirt and cap, in a land of red and white mushrooms, 8-bit pixel art,” the result is alarming. 

Hence, there’s a unanimous call for better regulating these models and stopping them from repurposing content owned by studios. 

In Future Tense

Generative AI was used in making the Oscar-winning film ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, and we know how (well) that turned out! The complaints from Hollywood do not mean the industry is rejecting the route of AI tools. 

Some insiders recognise the technology’s potential and want to embrace it. However, the disruptive nature of technology and the potential job loss it brings along is the cause of anxiety. 

Perry told Hollywood Reporter that in terms of cost reduction, AI is “going to be a major game-changer, because if you could spend a fraction of the cost to do a pilot that would’ve cost $15 [million], $20 million or even $35 million. If you’re looking at HBO, of course the bottom line of those companies would be to go the route of lesser costs.” 

In the same sentence he mentioned that he is, “very, very concerned that in the near future, a lot of jobs are going to be lost. I really, really feel that very strongly”.

The future of digital content will look like Deepfake Ryan Reynolds selling you a Tesla car. Hopefully, the artists and the tools will find a middle ground. The nature of the impact on artists is new and unique, as recreating their voices or images has never been this easy. 

But how much would the audience care about a movie/show if they knew it was made by an AI model trained on human scripts and acts?

At a recent award ceremony, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher remarked on AI and how it will entrap the industry in a matrix. “We should tell stories that spark the human spirit, connect us to the natural world and awaken our capacity to love unconditionally,” she said. 

So until Sora and other tools replicate the aesthetic, long-form, thought-provoking content, the synthetic Reynolds won’t replace the real one.