Will artificial intelligence “eat” cinema and television as we know them?
The conflict between actors, screenwriters and other professionals and the big film and television studios represents a high point in the radical transformation that is shaking the entertainment industry. The ongoing strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were sparked in part by artificial intelligence and its use in the film industry.
Both actors and screenwriters fear that the big studios will use generative AI to exploit them. Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that learns from text and images to automatically produce new written and visual works.
He is ChatGPT. she is barbie
So what exactly are the writers and actors afraid of? I am a film teacher and I have done a short exercise that illustrates the answer.
I wrote the following sentence in ChatGPT: “Create a script for a five minute movie featuring Barbie and Ken.” Within seconds a script appeared.
Next, I asked for a breakdown of all the camera shots required for the film. Again, a response appeared almost instantly, including not only a “montage of fun activities” but also a fancy flashback. The closing suggested a long shot showing “Barbie and Ken walking away from the beach together, hand in hand.”
Next, on a text-to-video platform, I typed these words: “Cinematic shot of Margot Robbie as Barbie walking near the beach, early morning light, pink sunbeams illuminating the screen, tall grass and green, photographic detail, film grain”.
About a minute later, a three-second video appeared. It showed a slender blonde woman walking on the beach. Is it Margot Robbie? Barbie? Hard to tell. I decided to add my own face instead of Robbie’s just for fun and within seconds the change was done.
Now I have a moving image clip on my desktop that I can add to the script and shot list, and I’m closer to creating a short film starring someone like Margot Robbie as Barbie.
The fear of cinema and television to artificial intelligence
None of this stuff is especially good. The script lacks tension and grace. The blueprint list is uninspired. And the video is just weird.
However, the ability for anyone – hobbyist or professional – to create a script and use the image of an existing actor means that the skills that were previously unique to screenwriters and the image an actor could call their own are now available – with a questionable quality, by the way – for anyone who has access to these free online tools.
Given the pace of technological change, the quality of all this generative AI-created stuff is bound to improve visually, not just for people like me and social media creatives around the world, but possibly for studios, who probably have access to much more powerful computers. Furthermore, these separate steps—pre-production, script, production, post-production—could be absorbed into a single, streamlined system that had almost nothing to do with the actual craft of filmmaking.
Scriptwriters are afraid that, at best, they will be hired to edit AI-written scripts. They fear their creative work will be turned into databases that feed writing tools. And they fear that their specific knowledge will be relegated to the background in favor of experts in working with AI tools.
And actors fear being forced to sell their image for studios to use over and over again. They fear that technologies deepfake become the norm and that real actors are not needed. And they worry that not only their bodies, but also their voices will be taken, synthesized and reused without ongoing compensation. And all of this adds up to declining incomes for the vast majority of performers.
On the way to the future of AI
Are your fears justified? More or less. In June 2023, Marvel presented the opening credits of the series on Disney+ secret invasion partly created with AI tools. The use of AI by a large study aroused controversy due to its timing and fears that AI would displace people from their jobs.
On July 26, developer Nicholas Neubert posted a 48 second trailer from a sci-fi movie made with two AIs: Midjourney footage and Gen-2 movement from Runway. It has a great look. No scriptwriter was hired. No actors were used.
Also, earlier this month, a company called Fable released Showrunner AI. Users send images and voices, along with a short prompt, and the tool responds by creating full episodes that integrate the user.
The creators have used South Park as an example, and have featured episodes that include viewers as characters in the story. The idea is to create a new form of audience participation. For writers and actors alike, Showrunner’s AI must be a truly chilling thing.
Finally, Volkswagen has just produced an advertisement featuring an AI reincarnation of the Brazilian singer Elis Regina, who died in 1982. Directed by Dulcidio Caldeira, it shows Regina singing a duet with her daughter. For some, the song created a touching reunion between mother and daughter.
However, for others, the AI regeneration of someone who has died raises concerns about how their image might be used after death. What happens if one is morally opposed to a certain film project, television program or commercial? How will the actors maintain control?
Keep the actors and writers in the credits
The fears of writers and actors could be assuaged if the entertainment industry developed an inclusive vision that recognized advances in AI, but included writers and actors, not to mention cinematographers, directors, art designers and others.
At the moment, developers are rapidly creating and improving AI tools. Production companies are likely to use them to drastically cut costs, contributing to a massive shift towards a gig-oriented economy. If the dismissive attitude towards writers and actors of many of the major studios is maintained, not only will the needs of writers and actors be given little consideration, but technological development will drive the conversation.
However, what if the tools were designed with the participation of actors and scriptwriters? What kind of tool would an actor create? How would a writer do it? What would be the conditions regarding intellectual property, copyright and creativity that developers would take into account? And what kind of inclusive, forward-thinking and creative film ecosystem could emerge? Answering these questions could give actors and screenwriters the reassurance they seek and help the industry adapt to the AI era.
Do you think that artificial intelligence will “ruin” cinema and television?
Holly Willis, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.