Hollywood & Tech Try Getting Along

On this week’s edition of Rushfield Lunch, I spoke with Kenneth Williams, the executive director and CEO of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Kenneth spent years working at Sony and also at Chase, working as a VP in the film entertainment lending division. To rub it in, he also went to Harvard and Columbia University and is an Academy member twice over — film and television.

And now, Kenneth is at the leading edge of the next frontier: where technology (including, prominently, AI) and Hollywood storytelling meet — with complications.

“I’m in a place where I can actually at least talk about it, and try to sort of walk a middle road that engages people in a conversation again because — like a lot of things that have polarized our country politically — AI has polarized the entertainment industry,” Kenneth says. “There are people who want to lean into it and recognize that it’s inevitable and it’s going to happen, and therefore they need to participate. And there are also people who absolutely feel that there’s something fundamentally inappropriate or wrong — or even evil about what the implications are for the human creative spark.”

Unlike several other industries overrun by AI — Kenneth cites legal firms, where 50 paralegals have shrunk to five as ChatGPT writes briefs and the remaining staff checks for quality control — Hollywood is a forward-facing business. There are stars; there’s attention.

“My feeling is that there are a number of issues that need to be dealt with very, very carefully,” he says. AI is “gonna happen, and therefore, my job is to try and at least be a part of helping to make it happen in an ethical, fair way, that recognizes the opportunity, but also recognizes the need to retain human creative control — the human element that uses this in a way that is enhancing content as opposed to encouraging sloppiness or laziness.”

Hollywood’s reticence to speak publicly about AI usage has begun to waver recently — this fall, Danny Boyle, Ben Affleck and Ava DuVernay are among the directors who spoke openly about using AI for their projects in ways they said helped elevate the creative process.

“Our position is that we don’t have the same type of AI know-how on the storytelling side that we do on the image creation side,” he says. “We’ve been working with our major studio partners and other companies to come up with tools that assist the screenwriter. Don’t replace the screenwriter, but augment them. We call it a helping hand. How do you re-create a sense of a writers room when you don’t have other writers to talk to?” Kenneth has some answers; watch my chat with him below.