Our Close Encounters of the AI Kind
Silicon Valley didn’t conquer Hollywood — it cloned it. So why are our leaders suspiciously quiet?
In the past few years, as the AI products have rolled out, I’ve largely sat out the debate.
There have been a few reasons why I haven’t written very much about the topic:
1. My own techno-incompetence that makes my brain go into vapor lock whenever phrases like “machine learning” or “large language models” are uttered.
2. The fact that most of the flare-ups around this issue occurred around massively over-hyped clickbait stunts like the Tilly Norwood thing, and sorting out why each of these is silly or inconsequential is a job I was happy to leave to others.
3. Many of the complaints about AI felt more like moral panic than any valid arguments. They feel cast with a Luddite air of discontent about all these ’puters nosing their way into “creativity” and a sentiment that anything that moves us an inch away from drawing stick figures on cave walls in charcoal is an unforgivable assault on artists.
4. Feeling like this question is much more complicated than either side is willing to acknowledge, and really having little sense of what the right outcome is.
So what brings me at last to the Shootout at the AI Corral?
A couple of little articles in the last week turned on some lightbulbs on a few things that tie into other issues I’ve been freaking out about lately. Specifically, what I saw was:
Whatever “this” is, it’s bearing down on us like a locomotive.
No one in Hollywood (myself included) has any idea what to do about it.
Here are the two that jump-started my brain on this issue.
First, there was this dispatch from a newsletter covering AI, reporting from a couple of industry events around AI. The piece is titled:
This caught my attention and was more or less what I’d suspected in the big picture, aside from those who are making use of various tools. But the article laid out:
I lost count of how many times a version of the phrase “we care about copyright” was invoked at Screentime like a prayer. At the same time, no one at the event wanted to specifically address the fact that OpenAI clearly trained on their IP without permission and unleashed a product that, at least initially, had no shame in making that clear. The fact that Hollywood’s leaders are unable to share a public perspective on this issue, or more importantly, what they are going to do about it, should be alarming to everyone working in the business.
Then I hopped over to a piece at Deadline on where AI fits in the coming guild negotiations, and found a lot of issues swirling around with very little sense of how to tackle them. Not much will to push on them consistently, as you might push back on a freight train heading towards your home.
The use of generative AI tools in production is also problematic, Handel and Nolan noted. There are different copyright issues facing the input (text submitted to a model like OpenAI’s Sora, for example) and output (the video that is produced as a result).
“The trouble and the confusion is that the technology and the workflow have advanced so quickly and are gonna continue to advance,” Handel said. There can be hundreds of prompts, and revisions of prompts, resulting in video sequences with some resemblance to protected work, but the eye is sometimes in the beholder. “That is going to force at some point more nuanced court decisions, and it’s going to be very difficult to figure out, you know, where’s the line?” he said.
Where indeed?
And in our own excellent AI column, Reel AI, Erik Barmack wrote on Sora:
Everyone was experimenting, and few in Hollywood were admitting how quickly we were growing dependent on Sora (and tools like Sora). But on Sept. 30, when OpenAI released Sora 2 — the version that could drop real faces and voices into photorealistic, viral-ready videos — the industry’s quiet fascination snapped into open panic. Overnight, the film business saw what it had been enabling: a machine that could generate entire performances without paying, crediting or even asking the people it copied.
It wasn’t an innovation anymore. It was a mirror — showing Hollywood the endpoint of its own obsession with automation, franchise mining and cost-cutting. And that’s why, after years of rationalizing disruption as inevitable, yes, the industry is finally treating this as existential.
Barmack is semi-optimistic that Sora’s shock was enough to shake Hollywood out of its complacency on this issue. I hope he’s right, and I can see the panic. But I also know how Hollywood panics come and go very, very quickly. It will remain to be seen whether the genuine will exists to mount an effective fight against an enemy that doesn’t rest, doesn’t sleep and has on its side all the money and political power in the world.
Related:
This brings me to the point of this column and why I feel the AI panic approaching is something like a primal scream.
The AI “debate” — such as it is — really brings together the strands of all the other fights we are having. It may be wrong or confused on various issues of this complicated topic (I know I am), but it is right in that the panic senses AI is the leading edge of a lot of factors working to undo this industry altogether.
In some ways, it’s a moral panic, in that a lot of this fight is about general feelings and symbolic issues, but in other ways, it’s very focused on the exact threats we face.
Given that, let’s go through why this particular fight is so terrifying for so many. I think the Tilly Norwood-esque fears that AI is going to replace actors, writers, or even marketers remain a fantasy. For a hundred reasons, I believe computers still have leaps to go before they can match the serendipity of human creativity, which is still the foundation of entertainment.
And consider this — if an AI company wants studio IP — these companies are currently so well-capitalized that they can buy a studio and swallow the entire vault in one bite. They could buy all the studios for that matter. Currently, they’ve got more money than many of the old-fashioned tech companies, which could also swallow us without blinking.
But even if those particular fears are still over the horizon, the AI panic is so striking because it brings together a bunch of very real threats, most of which we’re fighting against already. So let’s break down what those are, and why even if Tilly Norwood isn’t about to push Taylor Swift off-stage, she represents something real and genuinely terrifying.
1. THE INDUSTRY HAS NO IDEA WHAT IT’S UP AGAINST
