philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The movie studios should be worried about AI

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Today, generative AI is in its infancy. The output is generally mediocre and easy to dismiss. But we dismiss it at our peril because today’s output is the worst that it will ever be. Each week it gets a little bit better. The pace of improvement is relentless.

The proverbial elephant outside the room at the WGA-AMPTP negotiations is not really a single big creature, it is more like a million mice. Together, they add up to a titanic unstoppable force. ...

No contract will shield any part of the motion picture business from the inexorably accelerating rate of AI-fueled innovation.

Consider the following from the past three weeks:

• GenAI text-to-animation
• GenAI photo-to-animation
  GenAI music
• GenAI recording artists
  GenAI podcasts
• GenAI actors
• GenAI humans
• GenAI advertising from Google and Meta
• AI movie studios that generate hyperpersonalized content on demand

These concepts range from hypothetical to awkward to amazing. Please resist the impulse to dismiss them. Remain seated with your seatbelt fastened and watch this space. Turbulence is expected. ...

A personal anecdote on a human scale. A few weeks ago, I was a judge in a one-day movie hackathon held at the University of Nebraska’s Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Art.

The students began working at 9 AM on a Saturday morning with no more than instructions to generate a script for a 3-minute film using ChatGPT. Next, they generated images to accompany their scripts, using tools like Midjourney. Then they used other AI tools to animate the characters, render motion video sequences, generate character voices with dialog and crank out soundtracks. By the 6 PM deadline, seven teams had submitted 3-minute films, complete with music and titles. Almost 100% of these films were generated by artificial intelligence. 

The films weren’t great. They were student films, after all.  But they were complete, coherent linear narratives, all original and generated by AI. ...

When they graduate, these Carson Center students will be equipped with two superpowers that neither the WGA members nor the AMPTP seem to possess: fluencyand agency in the technological vernacular that will redefine video entertainment forever. ...

See the full essay by Rob Tercek here: https://tercek.substack.com/p/the-movie-studios-should-be-worried?r=qs5c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR1eqgYDQXiOO1WVyWSE4VmQFLJ8SpkzlMUuvUt2aPaHWqV7d9rZVkaugNY