Hollywood Fights AI In Public While Quietly Building It Into Movies (msn.com) 65
Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it."
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...
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 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...."
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.
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.
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 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...."
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.
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."
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.
https://github.com/nikopuering... [github.com]
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:Which "AI" (Score:4, Interesting)
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:3)
You are right.
The movie industry is centered around having about 12 block busters a year. So two or three studios "compete" in bringing the movies into the cinemas in alternating order, so: they do not eat each others profits - by really competing.
And with the greed: they just produce the movies cheaper, instead of having more movies, more cinemas, more people going into a cinema, and: cheaper cinema experiences.
On top of that, it seems the idea that a movie should have a story: is gone.
I remember times wh
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Your complaint is practically word for word the complaint that weavers had against the introduction of industrial looms. Should we ban machine-made clothing?
Re: Which "AI" (Score:2)
Like machine looms, we should be giving a share of the profits from the improvements in productivity to all people, as The People are collectively responsible for the improvements, but while machine looms only put people out of work, LLMs are doing that plus going into systems that abuse them in lots of other ways.
Re: (Score:2)
So what you actually want is more taxes on the wealthy? If so, just say that. Don't hide behind arguments about copyright or that sort of stuff when that's not your actual motivation.
Machine looms, along with all of the other equipment of the industrial revolution, led to a massive boom of prosperity across the population as a whole. Machine looms in specific made clothing far more affordable to the average person.
One can criticize the politics of the
Re: (Score:1)
One can criticize the politics of the early industrial revolution for not doing enough to funnel the wealth down quickly enough or to regulate the robber barons, but it was overall a massive benefit to quality of life of society as a whole.
So give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt, and assume he/she/etc is expressing this criticism.
AI actors != automation + theft != improvement. (Score:3)
Your complaint is practically word for word the complaint that weavers had against the introduction of industrial looms. Should we ban machine-made clothing?
Except his complaint is not. AI can replicate an actor's every detail without his consent. AI can replicate a singer's voice quite convincingly. How would you feel about some Russian studio making a fortune using AI to "discover" lost Whitney Houston songs which are actually AI slop and earn money streaming them? How would you feel about Belarusian studios adding Heath Ledger and Jimmy Stewart into their latest movies?...or some Chinese studio using AI to recreate the voice of every actor in the Avenger
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it literally was. The main public complaint of the weavers was that they spent their entire life learning their art, and then their bosses come in with a machine that they teach to replicate the patterns that they developed, churn out cheap "slop" versions of them, and fire them.
Re: (Score:1)
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:Which "AI" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is a load of BS. Everyone gets a vote. Technology is merely a means to an end.. a tool to get shit done. What constitutes progress is both subjective and distinct from technology. They are completely different concepts and should never be confused.
For example technological means to nullify the strong force using $20 worth of materials from your local electronics store would certainly constitute "technology"... yet unless your idea of progress is randos with nothing better to do vaporizing entire cities such "technology" would constitute regression not progression.
Likewise if all AI ultimately brings is aggregation of power into ever fewer hands enabling tyranny and devaluing everyone there are likely to be many who would not consider this to be "progress". Technology does not in and of itself constitute progress.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
(*) 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
Re: (Score:2)
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)
The EU rulings thusfar have been even less restrictive - for example, the LAION ruling, which actually allowed scraping (within constraints).
And if even the US courts are ruling that training with US materials is legal, do you really expect a foreign court to ban training with US materials? And you actually expect that to do anything?
First off, this is a
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)
That is an open debate if training an AI is a copyright infringement.
I read books.
Learn the stuff, memorize concepts, or even rot memorize parts of it. I use that for my work. E.g. I learned C like that.
That is most certainly not a copyright infringement. I had years where I literally read 100 books per year. Before I moved away from Germany I had a library of perhaps 3k books.
Of course, I did not memorize all of them. I have a friend who could do that. He could even tell on which page a certain subject was
Re: (Score:2)
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. (*)
Copyright concerns only the performance or (re)production of works and derivatives. It expressly does not constrain any other use, facts, styles.. etc embodied in a work including learning by a person or machine from that work. Training AI is clearly transformative and so there is no copyright interest. While it is possible to violate copyright during training by for example making "fixed" reproductions of copyrighted material in the training workflow it is also possible to train an AI on copyrighted wor
Re: (Score:2)
UBI. Next question.
Re: (Score:3)
The parallel to the Luddites [wikipedia.org] is striking. They were labor activists who campaigned for a living wage and an end to child labor. Contrary to what some people think, they didn't object to technology. That was just a lie spread about them by their opponents. But they thought technology should be used to benefit everyone, not to enrich a few people at the expense of the many.
The situation today is remarkably similar. Few people object to AI on principle. But a lot of people object to the way it's being us
Re: (Score:2)
The parallel to the Luddites [wikipedia.org] is striking. They were labor activists who campaigned for a living wage and an end to child labor. Contrary to what some people think, they didn't object to technology. That was just a lie spread about them by their opponents. But they thought technology should be used to benefit everyone, not to enrich a few people at the expense of the many.
Thanks for this addition.
Few people object to AI on principle.
I'm afraid I am going to have to disagree here. Already, "data centers" have become "AI data centers" and many many people are waving their pitchforks around claiming that "data centers" add nothing of value and "suck up all our water" (even though golf courses and many other luxuries use and will be using orders of magnitude more water than data centers).
In a way it is surprising that classic xenophobia is still going so strong, but the blind hatred for AI simply because it is fore
Good/Bad AI vs TV Dinner @ 4-star restaurant (Score:2)
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.
From a consumer perspective, there definitely is good and bad AI. We don't want shitty slop. But most of us are fine with using AI to allow smaller crews to make a movie, one example was green screen fine tuning. AI makes the green screen image look better?...great! AI compression make the picture look sharper & more vibrant, yet still stream?...great! AI allowing storyboard artists to complete their work faster? Good! AI writing shitty dialog or adding uncanny valley details?...NO...Hell No!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
From a consumer perspective, there definitely is good and bad AI.
OK, so what is the bad kind of AI?
Image generators? Video generators? Audio generators? Text generators?
Which kind of AI is "shitty slop"?
I think you're making a category mistake.
Bad AI = deception + fraud + lower quality (Score:2)
From a consumer perspective, there definitely is good and bad AI.
OK, so what is the bad kind of AI? Image generators? Video generators? Audio generators? Text generators?
Which kind of AI is "shitty slop"?
I think you're making a category mistake.
Bad AI? Obviously deception and fraud How about fake product images? How about deep faking an actor without his or her permission? I thought I put it pretty clearly. Giving us what we want and spending less doing so? Most of us are fine with that. Giving us less for our money in the name of AI? No one wants that. Obviously those in the entertainment industry want proper credit for their work. It would be quite shitty for someone to mimic Quentin Tarantino's writing style using an LLM rather than a
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, you're confusing the tool for the application. Remember that the post I was initially responding to was specifically separating AI tools by kind, NOT by application. Read darkain's post again, then call me autistically pedantic again or apologize.
But I understand that you're disappointed in how the future turned out. I am too. Not because of the advances in AI and technology, though. But because the current set of humans and especially those in power (whether through money or politics) seem very clearl
It's legit to blame the tool for the cost (Score:2)
However, that aside. Well one complaint I made about costs is fully legit and 100% the fault of the tool. AI is resource and power hungry. It's not a human misusing that's going to
Re: (Score:2)
Actual advice: if you just want to rant about something, do it in your diary. You're just wasting your time here. I responded to a specific statement with a specific reply and you clearly want to vent your anger about something related but markedly different. You don't even realize that with your lobbing of ad hominem shots my way and attacking straw facsimiles of my stance you're actually driving away a potential ally.
It's not healthy to point your anger outwards to strangers on the internet. I know you're
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:1)
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)
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. For example. [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't commenting on the talent of the creator, but the capabilities of the AI generation. AI still very much leaves you in uncanny valley.
First off, a lot of AI use in movies is not "generating the movie". It's special effects.
Try and follow the conversation. No one is talking about special effects touch-ups here. That is a place where AI is actually really good and in many cases can achieve better results than standard tools. The GP postulated entirely CG action scenes, instead of having actors learn how to move, not special effects.
Secondly, you can do a lot better than that terrible demon movie. For example. [youtube.com]
That entire video sits firmly in uncanny valley. If that's
Re: (Score:2)
I've shown it to about a dozen people in person without telling them it was AI first, and not a single person noticed. It's only "uncanny valley" because you've been told in advance that it's AI.
It's like my favourite social media hobby: when I encounter anti-AI people, I post things made by humans, generally masterpiece paintings or award-winning photographs, suggest that it's AI, and then watch them tear down how awful and fake and soulless it is. It's pre
Re: (Score:2)
Congrats, you know a dozend people who are easily duped. I know some as well. That doesn't mean the video passes muster for a holywood production.
Also I wonder if those people are as easily duped if you played the video through a 70mm IMAX projector.
Re: (Score:2)
By the way this isn't a new thing. The same problem exists for CGI in general. What you see on your computer screen utterly fails to impress in the cinema. Maybe the people you are showing videos to aren't anti-AI but anti bad production. Make sure when you're doing the comparison that you're not posting something with poor colour grading, or other vfx that makes things look generally unappealing.
We've had bad cinema before AI. But AI is not yet in a position to replace good cinema.
Re: (Score:2)
Sloppy AI generated cities would be pointless, and quite possibly misrepresenting stakeholders.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
AI... the great equalizer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: AI is Woke. Modern movies will be WOKE AI SLOP (Score:1)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Recursion (n): See "recursion"
It's hilarious how obsessed you people are over a term that you can't even define and that none of you agree on. As far as I can tell, the only thing "woke" means today is "I'm A Right Winger, And This Is Something That I Personally Hate". I've seen people describe concepts as unrelated as "the concept of a metaverse" and "removing copyrighted materials to
Re: (Score:2)
John Brunner called them: WASP(s).
For me, not for thee (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For me, not for thee (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
> like anybody else doing what Hollywood does on their own
Like all of hollywood, then? There hasn't been an original film out of the place in years. They're just too busy rehashing the same crap the place down the road released a few months back.
Fsck hollywood. It's time someone else had a crack of the whip.
What did you think? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
It figures... (Score:2)
Disney wanted to build tools that protect everything from Bambi to Star Wars from being pilfered.
ILM and Skywalker Sound were looking for engineers to come up with things they can use to differentiate themselves and provide more advanced capabilities for film makers.
Amazon was hiring an executive manager to forcefully coerce employees into using AI as much as possible in film making. You go, Amazon.
Heh (Score:2)
If AI can create a better movie than what the current standard is, I'm all in.
After all, movies are becoming so incredibly expensive that something will have to give at
some point because a single failure will do amazing financial damage to a studio and / or
the producers funding it.
Thus, the reason so many are hesitant to create anything outside of the established
content that has always made them money in the past.
If AI can:
1) Match or exceed the current quality
2) Do so far more cheaply
Then I suspect we wi
A bit late (Score:2)
We already had the Space Smurfs, it will never stop.