The Writers’ Strike tries to stop the AI ​​from taking over Hollywood. It’s too late?

I thought escaping San Francisco as a tech reporter would be good for me. Now I spend my days surrounded by people from The Industry who can’t stop talking about AI.

Platforms like ChatGPT And Mid Road turned conversations with screenwriters, concept artists and film producers into existential talks about the future of Hollywood, a labor-driven industry fueled by powerful unions that was quickly injected with a bomb fast technology.

This all came to a head in May, when the TV, film and digital writers who make up the Writers Guild of America announced they were going on strike. This is perhaps one of the first times that we saw AI as a revolutionary technological concept, completely unbridled, crossing all imaginable industries facing the world of work.

What are the consequences? We do not know yet. This is the problem.

But generative AI is already seeping into Oscar-winning movies and TV shows to age actors, lip-synch in different languages, and create worlds straight out of a storybook.

The AI ​​revolution in Hollywood

When I was a dirty teenager in 2015, I spent my days watching an anime series called Bojack Rider.

In one episode, the titular movie star is asked to sit in front of a machine that will perform a 3D scan of her face and body. In case he died, the production house could make the film without him.

The ridiculousness of this concept seemed on par with a show about an alcoholic anthropomorphic horse.

Turns out it was pretty real, the show used technology from Artec Groupwhich makes 3D scanning devices that have been used for production in Narnia, Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, and even The Big Bang Theory (although the latter was actually doing a product placement ad for Microsofts Kinect while using Artecs technology).

Even the former president barack obama became the first president to be 3D scanned through Artec.

Artecs technology allowed movie studios to create a digital twin of their actors and manipulate them on screen, they could morph, disintegrate and disappear. In Narnia, producers scanned a man and a stuffed beast, stitched them together, and made the magical figure walk. CEO of Artec Artem Yukhin used to hang out on lucasfilms set to watch Star Wars filming.

It was very funny because all my friends and co-workers were envious and said, ‘But you idiot who doesn’t appreciate all that, go see all that stuff over there.’ And I really didn’t care, Yukhin said. But it immediately became clear that we were very much needed there.

Fast forward to today: I’m no longer a teenager (still a dirty bag), and AI companies are popping up, signing deals with movie studios, and turning studio executives into tech companies.

Flawless, an AI solution capable of synchronizing the mouths of actors in different languages, does both. The company was co-founded by the director Scott Mann, who saw one of his films awkwardly dubbed into German. Using the same technology that creates deepfakes, Flawless is able to morph actors’ mouths to match the language they are dubbed with. The same technology is also used for digital covers.

This type of technology helps businesses save money on creating repossessions. It also allows them to better exploit international markets to generate revenue.

You can enter to unlock other markets because it’s just a better immersive experience when it looks like your actors are telling their story in that market’s native language, which then lets you do all those cool things to take more content risks,” said Peter Busch, chief strategic officer of Flawless.

The workers’ struggle with AI

Among the WGA’s demands is that studios can’t use written material to train the AI ​​(which the Alliance of Film and Television Producers disagree with). This is important if you’re a writer who’s worked on two seasons of a TV show, you don’t want the AI ​​using that material to spit out the next episodes of plot and character development.

As this technology becomes more mainstream in Hollywood, the various guilds protecting actors, directors, producers and animators are asking more and more questions about the potential harms of these platforms.

We’ll cross, I’ll call it our Taylor Swift when Spotify was reviewed by her as detrimental to the recording industry, Busch said.

Bryant Griffin, a visual effects artist who has worked on films such as Pacific Rim and Avengers, said the WGA’s demands are likely to have broad implications across the film industry, including for visual effects artists, who are not unionized.

Everyone feels that this fight is really important. I think that’s why the writers guild currently has a lot of support from other unions in the industry, Griffin said. The WGA [strike] is the tip of the spear.

Flawless, which employs Hollywood veterans including studio executives and animation heads, said it worked closely with various Hollywood guilds when developing its platform.

The guilds basically control Hollywood, right? Busch said. And so for us to be able to bring a product to market, we have to work within the existing framework.

Drawing: Dom Guzman