On Thursday, I sat in a small theater in Santa Monica among hundreds of other viewers and had the distinct realization that Hollywood doesn't know what's about to hit it.
The Deep View was invited to Runway's fourth annual AI Festival, showing off the ten best AI-generated films from hundreds of submissions. The short films spanned a wide range, some animated, some stop-motion, some realistic (because I hesitate to use the phrase "live action"), ranging from body horror to emotionally pensive to just plain outlandish.
There were, of course, some of the usual giveaways. Mouth movements that didn't line up quite right, over-smoothness of skin and motion, and a consistent inability to generate legible text. But walking out of the theater, I realized just how far we've come from Will Smith eating spaghetti.
"It's just been incredible to see how fantastic the tools I've gotten that actually are usable," Dave Clark, cofounder of AI film studio Promise and creator of Tairell Isn't Real, one of the films shown at the festival, told The Deep View. "Now I can actually cut in a 4K generative AI shot against something I shoot on a camera."
Hollywood has long been at war with itself over AI. Many artists and creatives have fiercely rallied against it, and major awards institutions are navigating how the tech affects eligibility for the industry's most prestigious honors. Some are trying to come up with solutions, such as the "Human Consent Standard," to give actors more control over how their likeness is used by AI.
However, AI's use in entertainment has gone far beyond fringe technoevangelists. Runway, for instance, has a partnership with Lionsgate, which the companies expanded last week to create a joint development program to roll out a "slate of co-developed projects blending AI and content." Other high-profile Hollywood voices have also taken an interest in the tech, including Martin Scorsese's highly contentious decision to become an adviser to Black Forest Labs.
The argument often made by companies like Runway is that AI is meant to raise the floor. Those that didn't have access to the tools needed to manifest their ideas now have the ability to create something out of nothing, Jamie Umpherson, chief creative officer at Runway, told The Deep View. Meanwhile, those who are already established in their careers have an entirely new arsenal of tools at their disposal.
"It's really opening the door to a lot more creatives and filmmakers to get their first chance to get a project off the ground that might have been sitting there for 10 years," said Umpherson.
And despite the fears that AI will put creatives out of work, in a panel with Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela before the screening, Roger Avary, award-winning screenwriter and partner in the production company General Cinema Dynamics, said, "The only people who are really going to lose their jobs are the gatekeepers."
"I think we're seeing a resurgence right now in the cinemas of indie filmmaking, and I think using AI tools ... people that come together to make something that is just the glimmer in their eye," said Gala Avary, a partner in General Cinema Dynamics, on the panel. "Suddenly, things that weren't possible, like locations and permitting, all of a sudden you're able to do those things with these AI tools."
Our Deeper View #
As major Hollywood studios take fewer risks, smaller indie films are gaining traction among audiences, as evidenced by the massive popularity of films like "Obsession" and "Backrooms" compared to big-budget, blockbuster Disney and Amazon movies that came out around the same time. It's entirely possible that, in the best-case scenario, AI will enable more of those ideas to come to life. At the same time, money is money, and if these major studios can save some of it by replacing creatives with AI, they will likely do so. Still, Runway's AI film festival left me brimming with even bigger questions than the economics of it all, wondering, as a creative myself, what it means to be an artist when a machine can do the creating for you. The biggest of them: If AI tools make everyone good from the jump, will virtuosity become obsolete? Is it still important to be bad at something in order to appreciate how hard it is to get good at something?