A group of Hollywood filmmakers, executives and actors has spent the last three years secretly meeting with Silicon Valley executives to try to address a simmering issue in the industry: how to define where AI is useful in the context of a human-controlled creative process.
The meetings were first convened in November 2023 by LucasFilm pioneer Kathleen Kennedy and American Film Institute dean Susan Ruskin. After a meeting last weekend of about 120 participants, the coalition landed on a framework that outlines how AI is already present in the film industry and defines ways humans can maintain control of other use cases — and potentially use AI to produce copyrightable work.
The group’s framework was first published in the Ankler. Page Six Hollywood reported that attendees included actor and InterPositive co-founder Ben Affleck; A24 partner Scott Belsky; CAA agent Greg Siegel, Paramount+ Originals executive Chris Parnell; “Stutz” producer Diane Becker; 30 Ninjas CEO Jed Weintrob; and director Jon Avnet.
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The convening of Hollywood leaders to reshape the conversation around AI comes as the industry grapples with how the transformational technology can be additive to the filmmaking process while recognizing the fear that generative AI has struck into the creative community over everything from how models are trained to the rise of AI-generated deepfakes. The initiative indicates that industry execs and creative professionals are more eager to publicly discuss AI’s place within Hollywood, even if attendees are selectively going public about it.
The “Human Generative Workflows” document is intended to “stimulate industry discussion and provide a common vocabulary for thinking about authorship in an era of generative AI,” the group said in its first public statement. The group acknowledged that the document wasn’t intended to address some of the more pressing issues surrounding AI, such as how models are trained and the potential impact on jobs.
“This conversation is bigger than AI,” the group said about the framework. “It is about bringing the entertainment community together to shape a shared approach to the future of the creative process. The future of entertainment will be shaped not by AI alone, but by the choices we make about how AI is integrated into the creative process.”
The framework outlines several issues with how the conversation around AI is framed within the industry, including that the acronym “AI” is “used in the same breath to mean a color grading assist in DaVinci Resolve and a prompted synthetic performance that replaces an actor.” Instead, the group suggests the industry develop a classification system around the different variations of AI in place to aid productions and, in the future, audiences.
It also outlines how certain tools within the industry that are built on machine learning are already producing copyrightable work, publishing a list of definitions of industry workflows that are generally assisted by AI such as “upscaling and sharpening” and “markerless mocap.”
The distinction comes down to AI-generated assets such as voices and likenesses, which it defines as items that “substitute for human creative work” and “the difference between a set of tools and processes that serve human creative vision and a prompt-based generative tool that replaces it.” Those are not copyrightable, the group says.
The group hopes that publishing its framework will provoke a conversation within the film industry — and, too, creatives focused on music, sound and writing — that helps shape the various use cases for AI, including conversations about how artists can consent and be compensated for the use of their likenesses for generative purposes.
“The future of entertainment will be shaped not by AI alone, but by the choices we make about how AI is integrated into the creative process,” it writes.