Hollywood Fights AI In Public While Quietly Building It Into Movies (msn.com)
- Reference: 0184825066
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/08/03/0350223/hollywood-fights-ai-in-public-while-quietly-building-it-into-movies
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/hollywood-fights-ai-in-public-while-quietly-building-it-into-movies/ar-AA28IhCH
> Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it...
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> Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he [2]told a trade magazine earlier this year . "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...."
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> Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software.
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> None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors.
Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges.
Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'"
Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows."
Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content."
Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/hollywood-fights-ai-in-public-while-quietly-building-it-into-movies/ar-AA28IhCH
[2] https://a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/confessions/the-last-picture-show-a-conversation-with-george-lucas/
AI... the great equalizer (Score:3, Insightful)
If Hollywood could, they would banish every tool that would enable any creator to complete with them. This is a filthy business filled with grifters that is allowed to lie about the profits they make. The IRS, the US government and Hollywood just called it "Hollywood Accounting" and laugh about it to our faces.
Re: AI is Woke. Modern movies will be WOKE AI SLOP (Score:1)
What race is Shrek? It's astounding how many great movies would not be released into today's political theater.
Re: (Score:2)
When movies featured the Brendan Eich they were less woke!
Take a cookie and shut up.
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly do you mean by "woke" and "DEI"? Like, contains black people in more than just the background? Has two major female characters that talk to each other about something other than a male character? Has people who aren't straight cis anglo-saxon protestants?
For me, not for thee (Score:5, Insightful)
For Hollywood, the good AI Is that which lowers costs for studios. No need for extras. No need for actors. No need for writers. The bad AI is anything that copies what they own, like anybody else doing what Hollywood does on their own. And it's the workers who are getting screwed.
Re:For me, not for thee (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't be long before anyone with a bit of know-how can create blockbuster-equivalent movies at home and throw them on Youtube, and then hollywood is done.
They're just hastening their own end. As for us, we'll get buried in generic slop.
I recommend people keep buying up those old DVDs and box sets.
What did you think? (Score:3)
A technique that can save billions would go unused? The idea is like going back to special effects without computer. You may do this for some movies that then have a special extra people may appreciate, but the usual movie uses computers for that. The same way AI will become a standard tool in the box. And yes, generative AI in all forms you know it (image diffusers, LLMs, GANs for upscaling, etc.)
Yep (Score:2)
> "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future."
Yep. It's like claiming that you aren't going to use computers in the making of movies. It's just ridiculous posturing.
AI has become new boogeyman (Score:2)
But it has its uses as far as I am concerned. If it helps, it should lower costs, and that should make indie projects more likely. So there is bound to be some upside.
Which "AI" (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an extremely broad topic. There is no one singular "AI". These mentions of "AI", each one, are often referring to entirely different things. For instance, CorridorKey is an "AI" based green screening technique that supports transparency and is a hell of a lot faster and more accurate than just about any other traditional tool out there. So is this the "bad" kind of "AI"? Or is this (and similar) just new tools in the tool box to speed of particularly boring and repetitive tasks nobody actually wanted to do? Masking a green screen is hardly on the "artistic" side of things, its just technical work destined for automation.
[1]https://github.com/nikopuering... [github.com]
[1] https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
There really is no bad kind of AI here. These issues specifically are just Luddism, with which I don't mean there is no valid concern: Jobs in this sectorare definitely disappearing due to AI. The challenge is to integrate these new looms into society whilst ensuring people can continue to live comfortably. Banning or boycotting the looms is not a long-term strategy.
Re: (Score:2)
ALL forms of major disrupters in the human employment industry, can be harmful when Greed has no comfortable answer.
When AI sits down and creates a valid path to comfortable by solving for the Disease of Greed that has plagued humans for thousands of years, THEN you can say theres no “bad” AI.
Until that happens, realize we already gave AI “the” scripted answer for us annoying meatsacks. Skynet.
Rather ironic Hollywood wrote its own epitaph decades ago.
Re: (Score:2)
> There really is no bad kind of AI here.
There is most definitely "bad kinds" of AI. Specifically those which are used to replicate people in ways specifically meant to make them redundant while claiming their distinct features (voice, looks, expressions, etc).
But that is only one small part of AI.
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Your complaint is practically word for word the complaint that weavers had against the introduction of industrial looms. Should we ban machine-made clothing?
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Good or bad is irrelevant. What AI is, is inevitable, as technology advances always have been. Fighting it means you're spending your time doing that instead of preparing for it, which means . . . you're unprepared when it happens
Trying to block the road of progress will just get you steamrollered.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with that argument is, that you will lose it real fast. Currently companies may experiment with voice cloning, but future AI voices will not correspond to any existing human voice and match their purpose better than any of the human candidates. It is only a short phase in which things like cloning voices, looks, expressions, is interesting, afterward people will start creating them from scratch.
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Bad AI includes AI that infringes copyrights during the training phase. If this AI has been trained (even partially) on content found on the Internet, then it's bad AI. (*)
(*) There is no fair use or implied consent for documents sitting on web servers around the world. Either there's an explicit licensing agreement by the actual copyright holder that permits you to copy the file to your computer, or you're infringing, Mr AI.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that first off, by and large, it doesn't. Some cases have but perfectly legitimate alternatives - for example, the courts found that Anthropic copying material they haven't bought is illegal but that it's perfectly legal for them to buy used/surplus books en masse for pennies on the dollar, scan them in, and train on that.
Secondly, even if you take an ultra-restrictive view on copyright and heavily strengthen copyright legislation, you're not getting rid of AI. You're just handing control o
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None of that responds to my point.
Firstly, US courts have no jurisdiction in most places, so what.
Twoly, copyright is governed by international treaties which *are* ultra-restrictive by their nature. Wishing it wasn't doesn't change the fact that stuff written online has automatic ownership unless explicitly unrestricted. And no, it doesn't need to be strengthened, it already is strong enough. Some say too strong.
Threely, not looking to get rid of AI, looking to make the pirate companies pay, because...T
Re: (Score:2)
If copyright law weren't so bad you might have a point.
Copyright is really too broad a term to have a good law, but basically any time period longer than 20 years is too long. There *are* exceptions, in unitary things with a high initial development costs, but those are edge cases, and rare.
Re: (Score:2)
If things would be as clear as you phrase them, the companies would no longer exist. There are so many court cases that would have been won if you're right, but unfortunately (for you), things aren't that clear. And up to now none of the copyright claims succeeded, the only result so far was "You can't pirate books to train on them". Yeah, who would have thought that a court rules against piracy ...
Re: (Score:2)
John Wick 4, could have been filmed entirely inside a Hollywood set. One big-ass greeen screen room.
Thry chose to use that place called Reality instead. Just as the actor chose to actually learn martial arts and shooting skills rather than let CGI handle that entirely and completely, ala Dwayne “scorpion meme” Johnson. (I’d call CorridorKey more of a CGI enhancement rather than putting it in the “AI” class of tools sold to replace entire actors rather than just enhance their
Re: (Score:2)
> Hollywood is desperate to not let you see through the obvious; no one really has a need for actors anymore.
You massively overestimate the capabilities of state of the art AI tools. They are very limited, and even that 100% AI made movie recently was very much lodged in uncanny valley territory.
Much the same as you can pick out an AI voice from a real one, AI like CG hasn't replaced humans, especially in the cinema world where high quality high resolution projection makes its short comings very apparent.
Maybe this will change in the future, but to claim no one needs actors right now is simply stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
> You massively overestimate the capabilities of state of the art AI tools.
A badly done movie by a talentless hack that got a lot of press hype does not a technology define.
First off, a lot of AI use in movies is not "generating the movie". It's special effects. Replacing backgrounds, adding in effects that look better than CGI at lower cost, "tweening", fixing filming errors, etc.
Secondly, you can do a lot better than that terrible demon movie. [1]For example. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLAZubEa6X4&pp=ygUId29vZG51dHM%3D
Re: (Score:2)
The real world locations for shooting are often a result of financial incentives. The studio gets some funding from the local government responsible for the shooting location. It's no different from paid product placement by large private companies, except the product here is the surroundings and the play is for tourism dollars.
Sloppy AI generated cities would be pointless, and quite possibly misrepresenting stakeholders.
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I won't say actors are jobless that soon. But after animated movies and then pixar style movies and CGI movies like Toy Story, we'll now also get "almost real" movies using AI as new genre. And yeah, who knows if people wouldn't have created an movie with actors if it wasn't for AI, but maybe they also would create more actor movies if it wasn't for CGI. More options can mean that older options are used less, but they still don't die out.
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Not many silent movies made anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
I see an interesting use-case for AI. Understand the video material, generate the silent movie text slides and insert them into the video and add a instrumental track matching the mood of the scene instead of the original talk. I think most building block are already there, one just needs to combine them.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think they will do much cherry picking. What's helpful will be used. Here a better green screen, there a special effect, adaptive color grading, upscaling, AI animation, whatever helps them and works for them.
Re: (Score:2)
For Disney, I'd imagine that the end game solution that they're looking for is a "Disney++" AI portal experience where the end user requests an Iron Man or Frozen sequel from an LLM prompt and the backend generates some AI slop content using their preexisting IP and shows it to the viewer. Think Sora, but with movie length content and strict content controls.
Will this movie be any good? Probably not. Will the 6 year old kid requesting "Frozen but Olaf is in space" really care? Probably not. Are any producer