A screenwriter friend once told me about a young assistant whose boss gave him a script and told him to drive it across town, to Bel Air, to the stately home of one of the world’s most famous directors. gender. He walked down the long driveway, past the manicured gardens, before handing over the script. When the director inspected it, the assistant nervously said, “I must say, your house is wonderful.” Without hesitation, the director replied: “Yes, no one is happy living there” and then slammed the door. When I asked why the director was so miserable, my friend replied: “Probably because he works in Hollywood.”
One reason the industry is taxed more than other creative fields is because producing anything is expensive. According to producers and studios I spoke with, TV show budgets currently range from $6 million to $25 million per episode, not including marketing costs. Most mainstream movies today cost around $100 million to $250 million to make. Years ago, you could make a blockbuster for a fraction of that amount. Firstly Top gunman (1986) cost $15 million to make. The 2022 sequel cost $170 million.
But all this is about to change thanks to AI. Last month, OpenAI announced Sora, which can take text and turn it into amazingly realistic video, in the same way that the company’s other products, like ChatGPT, can turn text into text, or Dall- E can convert text into images. A few days after Sora’s announcement, media mogul Tyler Perry said he is halting an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta film and television studio. “I had been receiving information for the last year or so that this was going to happen, but I didn’t know until recently I saw demonstrations of what it could do,” Perry said. Hollywood Reporter. “It shocked me.” (Perry admitted in the same interview that he has used AI in two upcoming films.)
There are also platforms like Pika, Runway, and Google-made VideoPoet, which offer competitive text-to-video AI software that can create short clips in any style you want. These technologies can create videos from text or images, capture still images, and animate them in a way that makes it look like a scene from a $170 million production. Check out the demo reel from Wonder Studio, an AI special effects company that uses drag and drop to turn an actor into a robot or alien, to see how quickly these advances are happening any.
Not only visual effects can be implemented using drag and drop algorithms. That’s everything. Text-only LLMs, like Squibler, Jasper, and ChatGPT, can already write trivial scripts. The same is true for startups that allow you to score a film using a full symphony orchestra of brass, woodwinds, percussion and strings. Then there are AI editing platforms that can bring it all together. All of this suggests a not-so-distant future when a film or TV series could be made by a single person, although sadly that person won’t be able to do it. Mike White.
While most people working in Hollywood — certainly including 90 percent of those struggling to make ends meet — do not view these developments as desirable, at least one group sees them as an inevitable addition to storytelling. a day. “Creative people in every field will have to see this as a profound opportunity. They will be able to collaborate with a force that can sift through every grain of cultural capital on the planet and traverse entire historical kingdoms in less time than it takes to pour a cup of coffee,” said Allan Loeb, editor screenwriter who is currently writing a novel about creative AI in Hollywood. “An apprentice’s 10,000 hours will become 8 seconds.”
Controversial copyright issues aside, Hollywood is about to undergo a period of disruption similar to what happened more than two decades ago in the music industry, where one needed have access to an expensive recording studio to create a song (not to record it). refers to agents, managers, and distribution deals), until MP3 and inexpensive software made artists prefer Justin Bieber (who was discovered on YouTube) and Billie Eilish (who was discovered on SoundCloud) sabotaged the music star’s regular channels. Today, about 25,000 to 100,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every 24 hours, mostly created by people in their bedrooms. Your guess is as good as mine as to how many of these songs are actually good or how many people actually listen to them. But imagine when anyone can create their own Oppenheimer-a long film can be considered a product of a major studio.
“By giving everyone access to AI tools that enable individuals to make movies, music, animation, etc., we are opening up these means to entire groups of people who would otherwise never had the ability to tell their story,” said Mika Johnson, a filmmaker and documentarian who also works in the field of AI. The problem is that any idealized Cambrian approaching boom would almost certainly collapse on its own. “Every artist on the planet is having a Wile E. Coyote moment,” Loeb said. “My only advice to them is that they might not want to look down.”
Hollywood is a town in a perpetual existential crisis, dating back to the transition from silent to talkies in the ’20s, to the end of the studio system in the ’40s, to the the rise of television in the 50s. The past decade has pulled, pushed and slapped Hollywood in every possible way. Streamers disrupted those lush business models, and then COVID-19 brought the industry to a halt. And just as it was about to wrap up and get ready to release content again, the WGA and SAG went on strike.
There’s a long list of demands from unions, from residue to data, but at the heart of last year’s fight, unions wanted assurances that their members wouldn’t be replaced by AI. Studios have agreed not to use AI in place of screenwriters and actors. But three years from now, when the next negotiations begin, video and AI writing technology could be a thousand times more advanced and widespread, and that battle will be even harder to win.
Many of the people working in AI I spoke with said, like Johnson, that their goal is to democratize creativity, making filmmaking and storytelling possible for everyone. The said demo was released by Wonder Studio, whose advisory board includes industry heavyweights such as Steven Spielberg And Joe Russo, emphasizes how its tools aim to empower artists rather than replace them. And I imagine that most writers, directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers don’t believe that a machine can do what they do. But change is happening.
