AI is coming to Hollywood

Artificial intelligence is ready to conquer Hollywood with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid Man breaking down a wall.

AI proponents are making bold promises. This potentially means that human creativity will be replaced by the theft – sorry, data scraping – of pre-existing words, sounds, images and ideas. Jobs will be lost as human actors and crew are eliminated from the process. Clean water will be wasted, and billions of gallons will be needed to cool data centers. What will remain is anyone's guess.

Despite these concerns, AI has found (bought?) a place in film festivals, which are supposed to exist to celebrate the art of cinema. At Cannes this year, a producer was selling AI translations of international films. Actors who earn their living by dubbing such films? Soon obsolete apparently.

Earlier this month, a Korean film festival in the city of Bucheon spear its first competition dedicated to AI filmmaking. And closer to home, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York Featured a program of short films made with generative AI.

Among the participating filmmakers was Nikyatu Jusu, the writer-director of the horror feature “Nanny,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2022. My colleague Michael Phillips called it “a strange and assured.” also received a home video release from the prestigious Criterion Collection. All this allows us to say: Jusu is respected and her work is appreciated. So it came as a shock to many that she adopted AI.

That's because she voiced her own concerns a year ago on social media: “I can't help but think about all the different ways AI will be used to replace minority artists living and breathing people who already struggle to tell their own stories. AI will become a simulated representation – an empty imitation of Black and Brown light commodified and vomited towards us.

These are valid concerns. But last week, she was promoting its Tribeca premiere on Twitter with a still from the film and the caption: “Crucify me now, get it out of your system.” Some people got involved in good faith. “Not an attempt at crucification: what made the tool of plagiarism attractive as a filmmaker? someone said. “Ask the people who created it and the studio executives who are currently implementing it,” she replied. “It's strange to ask the creatives below to adapt to inevitable changes…it's here whether you shout or not.”

I don't know if movies made with AI are inevitable, but let's put that aside for a moment.

“This is so depressing,” someone else said. “I know,” she replied facetiously, “there are so many black faces.”

But of course, none of the faces in his film belong to actual black people. These images were constructed from real people who did not give consent or receive compensation. How is this a victory for representation? In Jusu's own words, it is a “simulated representation” and an “empty mimicry.”

Others were less polite in their comments and Jusu eventually deactivated his account. I reached out to see if she would be willing to talk, but got no response. Some questions I would have asked: What was it like to make a film in this way? Was it creatively fulfilling? What did she learn using this technology? Is she allowed to speak freely about her experience, or has she been asked to sign an NDA prohibiting her from discussing the technology in anything other than glowing terms?

People make all sorts of decisions for reasons we are not aware of. Sometimes there are financial considerations. Sometimes people just rethink their position: if you can't beat them, join them. So I would have also asked: what made him change his mind about AI?

I hope Jusu receives clemency for what might have been a decision made under stressful conditions – funding and jobs have dried up for many in Hollywood right now, where everyone is encouraged to “stay alive until 'in 25' – but I also hope that in the future she will have more opportunities to make films in the traditional way.

But we should be wary of AI for purely ethical and philosophical reasons. According to Human Rights Watch, “personal photos of Brazilian children are used to create powerful artificial intelligence tools without the children's knowledge or consent. ” According to another reportGoogle image search “serves users with AI-generated images of celebrities in swimsuits and does not indicate that the images are AI-generated” and in some cases, these celebrities “are made to look like to minor children.

Even from a cowardly, capitalist perspective, does it seem strange that studios aren't talking more about potential copyright violations?

There are also aesthetic problems.

Last year, Robert Zemeckis had plans for a film starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that will use “new hyper-realistic technology including AI-generated face replacement and de-aging to allow its stars to tell a story that spans generations.”

Previously, directors would simply cast other actors to play different versions of the same character – and luckily, many still do. It's one of the most enjoyable aspects of AMC's “Interview with the Vampire.” The series didn't opt ​​for aging software to rejuvenate 71-year-old Eric Bogosian for scenes set in the past, but hired 36-year-old Luke Brandon Field, who looks a lot like Bogosian and has the talent to imitate his performance. One of my favorite examples is 11-year-old Mayim Bialik, who plays the younger version of Bette Midler's character in 1988's “Beaches.” As a viewer, I don't want to lose that. I also don’t want actors to lose these opportunities.

There are other potential uses of AI, one of which was recently praised by Ashton Kutcher: “You'll just have an idea for a movie, then he'll write the script, then you'll enter the script into the video generator and it'll generate the movie. Instead of watching a movie made up by someone else, I can simply generate and then watch my own movie.

I can't imagine anything worse. After a long day, I have to do more working just to watch something entertaining? How dark! “What if every time you watched a movie, the plot was different? » teased another report. “The idea is to use AI to mix scenes and create completely different versions of the same movie every time it plays.”

These are terrible ideas.

“Since we've been gathering around the fire, we've loved being together to tell stories, it's important to us,” technologist and media analyst Sydette Harry told me. “Cinema was another physical manifestation of that. Social media is the digital manifestation.

The word community is thrown around a lot and may have been flattened in the process. But experiencing entertainment together can provide an agent of cultural connection, which has been fractured by the over-distribution model of streaming. These proposed uses for AI will further break the experience.

“Another thing about AI,” Harry said, “is that it likes to put a definitive mark on things: it's 'knowledge,' because we've eliminated everything that it there was to know. Well, we really don't know everything there is to know. There is an entire history of existence that has not been digitized, which means that as far as AI is concerned, it does not exist.

The assumption is that if you're resistant to AI, you don't want progress, Harry said. “But if we want to progress in creation, we must leave room for sloppy things” and allow ideas to spring from imperfections and happy accidents. “Think about the truly amazing things in cinema. If you were in a real gunfight, the one thing you never want to do is the traditional John Woo limbs and hips pose. But it's incredible on screen and it's now a signature imagined by an extraordinary filmmaker.

“People's discomfort with the human learning process – and the ability to have fun – should not become the guide to our art forms,” she said. “We have to allow it if you want any form of culture. Transmit it to a computer that has balanced judgments about what's important? Well, that makes someone in an executive office feel good and no one has to be held accountable for what a show or movie says because the computer black box said it.

Even though AI is initially a cheaper way to make films, I suspect that will change; Once studios rely on it, prices will increase (much like Uber's pricing trajectory), but it will be harder for studios to go back to the “old” way because fewer people will have the necessary skills.

It's worth hearing the concerns of those who have no financial stake in AI domination. Privacy expert Meredith Whittaker recently describe The AI ​​business model this way: “Training these models costs hundreds of millions of dollars. So there is a lot of pressure from companies – who are basically promising God and sending messages via email – to get a certain return on their investment in this technology. »

Timnit Gebru is a researcher in AI ethics and is less convinced technology is a fait accompli: “This 'it's inevitable' speech is designed to disempower. It's not inevitable. These guys don't need to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to realize their dystopian utopia.

And according to at least one recent big title: “The results of AI projects are 'dismal,' complain business leaders.” Despite the marketing and propaganda, AI is not even the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.