Hollywood Already Uses Generative AI (And Is Hiding It) (vulture.com) 58
Major Hollywood studios are extensively using AI tools while avoiding public disclosure, according to industry sources interviewed by New York Magazine. Nearly 100 AI studios now operate in Hollywood with every major studio reportedly experimenting with generative AI despite legal uncertainties surrounding copyright training data, the report said.
Lionsgate has partnered with AI company Runway to create a customized model trained on the studio's film archive, with executives planning to generate entire movie trailers from scripts before shooting begins. The collaboration allows the studio to potentially reduce production costs from $100 million to $50 million for certain projects.
Widespread usage of the new technology is often happening through unofficial channels. Workers are reporting pressure to use AI tools without formal studio approval, then "launder" the AI-generated content through human artists to obscure its origins.
Lionsgate has partnered with AI company Runway to create a customized model trained on the studio's film archive, with executives planning to generate entire movie trailers from scripts before shooting begins. The collaboration allows the studio to potentially reduce production costs from $100 million to $50 million for certain projects.
Widespread usage of the new technology is often happening through unofficial channels. Workers are reporting pressure to use AI tools without formal studio approval, then "launder" the AI-generated content through human artists to obscure its origins.
Re: Would anyone have noticed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Hollywood knows it as well. The thing with living in this area is I occasionally run across filmmakers, and they say that there really isn't much work here anymore. Something like half of the sound studios here are either going unused or are being used for events unrelated to the film industry. Apparently much of production moved abroad after the last round of actor/writer strikes, one guy in particular who I spoke to said something like the directors can't even choose the guys who they know to do a good job over the ones who don't, and you still have to pay the latter the same. So a lot of them just got frustrated and made a permanent move.
Apparently there's a lot of other annoyances with the area as well, like permitting being excessively expensive and tedious, and you need permission from anybody who lives anywhere remotely close to the location, including all of the squirrels.
So the only ones that remain are the big producers (Disney, Warner, Sony, etc,) and they're always trying to appeal to the tastes (and in some cases, Chinese laws) of every possible nationality that they possibly can, which means everything even remotely interesting has to be cut from the script lest it might offend somebody from Timbuktu, and they want that Timbuktu money.
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It's unfortunate about all the sound studios. I know a lot of these are just idle or being sold off, or have already been sold off to artists as personal studios. I live in Chicago and I don't think the studios are suffering the same fate. I don't think Nashville is having any problems either. The response to AI by the major studios is reprehensible. Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.
Re:Would anyone have noticed? (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem is that these studios are so afraid of risk, they don't even try anything different. Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Showtime, and the other streaming services do have more variety, which is why they are still around.
You can go a bit further into the problem, when they release 20 movies a year, three can do poorly, three can do really well, and fourteen of them can do "ok", meaning they don't make a lot, but they don't lose much either. The result is though, that people keep going to the movies because there is variety. Now, over the years, these studios have dropped how many movies they make per year, and that means they don't want to run a risk of even one movie being a flop. So, we get "more of the same", and that means, more people decide to just wait for it to become available to watch at home, because the options generally suck.
If you aren't willing to take a risk, then you will never get these movies that really amaze people because the story and characters are really well written. Nope, it's just bland garbage. Netflix cut back on their development, and will probably be feeling it before too much longer, because without a LOT of different content, many don't find enough to justify the monthly cost.
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more people decide to just wait for it to become available to watch at home
For me, still only if the plot sounded interesting. Thinking back, I've been watching less movies and series year over year, and enough of them were actually pre-2000 which I had already seen on broadcast TV around the time they were made.
AI and dishonesty go hand-in-hand (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the deal with AI and dishonesty? Roughly 1/3 of all articles are shills hyping the latest trend (we're on to post-agentic AI now, yay), while 2/3 are about the harm of AI, and a good portion of that is dishonesty, whether it's mass theft of data and intellectual property to train the beast, lies about green energy and all those diesel generators out back, literal cheating in education, lawyers and policy makers getting slapped for not checking and removing all those fake sources in "their work", failing to pay their bills and folding up shop and disappearing overnight, and then there's this.
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Was this generated by an AI programmed to blame anything on "feminism"???
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Re:AI and dishonesty go hand-in-hand (Score:5, Insightful)
"This" is a cast iron example of why everyone involved in AI - the content producers, AI companies, VCs backing them, policitians, and users - need to deal with the elephant in the room; copyright law was not designed for the digital age, and certainly wasn't designed for the wholesale ingestation and regurgitation of AI engines. That the media companies, usually the first to cry "foul" and demand outrageous amounts of damages because copyright, are themselves playing fast and loose with other's content while complaining about their own being used as training data more than proves the point it's way past its sell by date.
While amended since, the Berne Convention dates from 1886. AI isn't a crisis for copyright; it's an opportunity to give it a thorough overall, make it fairer for all given it's now so easy to content shift and share data, and generally fit for purpose and fair for the 21st century and beyond. Fail to do so, and it's just a matter of time before the legal fallout (and damages) under the current system are going to give the lawyers on the winning sides of the inevitable disputes a whole new fleet of superyachts.
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2/3 are clickbait from 404media fearmongering that AI will kill us all, we will all get unemployed and if AI can't kill us it will at least make us addicted to it, make us dumb, and suggest us to commit suicide. Slashdot should really stop using 404media as if it were a reputable source. The other 1/3 are articles from different sources, some more insightful than others.
Re: AI and dishonesty go hand-in-hand (Score:4, Insightful)
I think 404 media is just dedicated to populist topics, with little care or concern about accuracy, only that it sounds believable.
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Should have been the FP rather than the AC brain fart that took FP.
However, I can't tell from your post if you are mostly for or mostly against.
I think my main take that seems to be related to your unclear take is that AI is not helping us become better people. I still dabble with the toys from time to time, but it used to feel like playing with a loaded gun and now it feels more like juggling hand grenades with loose pins.
And as regards ye olde Turing Test, the AIs definitely lie bigger and better than man
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And as regards ye olde Turing Test, the AIs definitely lie bigger and better than many actual human beings. The main difference is that the humans usually have motivations and the AIs still don't. At least not that I've been able to detect yet.
The AIs aren't telling lies when they "hallucinate" as they're doing exactly what they're programmed to do. It's the humans that go around pretending that the gibberish generators are magical thinking machines that are telling the lies. And why wouldn't they? There are trillions of dollars on the line.
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You have to be conscious to lie. A sign that points the wrong way isn't lying. It's providing false/faulty information.
We may unintentionally anthropomorphize LLM's because we use natural language to control them. We are not communicating with a machine, we're controlling it with queries/prompts. It's not a conversation, because by definition a conversation is an exchange of thoughts, feelings, concepts using a common language. It can't embody concepts due to a lack of consciousness. It's no more a conversa
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What was the last "major" Hollywood movie that was watchable?
Probably Top Gun: Maverick.
When was the last time Hollywood had an audience that was tolerable? Standards have dropped because people will watch utter dogshit and clap. Twice. Then nominate it for an award nobody cares about anymore.
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Re: Whatever, nobody cares (Score:2)
I had a hard time watching that movie. The contrived mission they had was just too stupid. Radar systems literally give away their position. So what do you do? Precision bomb them from well beyond the reach of their SAM batteries, then the latter become pretty much useless. Then you can just do whatever the hell you want.
This is exactly what was done in the first gulf war, all the way back in 1991. The live from Baghdad footage was of the Iraqis firing tracer rounds into the air at random because they could
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The realism of that mission didn't have much to do with it being successful. It's not a documentary. It was essentially a Star Wars trench run, and they came up with it because it looked super-cool and worked for the plot. They did an excellent job of pacing that movie and building tension. We're told over and over again that the chances of success are slim. The second time I watched it, even though I knew what was going to happen, as they were approaching the coast I was still on the edge of my seat.
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imho, last decent movie out of hwood that wasn't a sequel or just derivative or bottom of the bucket slop.
Arrival was junk, Interstellar, preachy junk -- we might have technology, but everything comes down to the "love conquers all" theme. <gag> Also any movie with Matt Damon (especially) but also including Johnny Depp, or ScarJo, playing a scientist is Unwatchable. So actually, everything since 2004/minority report.
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Failing to disclose? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a built-in assumption here - that anyone *has* to disclose which tools they use. Nobody has to disclose anything.
But the culture among grunt-level artists is that AI companies are evil and anyone who uses AI is morally questionable, and so anyone who doesn't come right out and say how they use AI is "hiding" it from the public.
"People are angry on social media! It's the socially responsible thing to do!"
Go have your butlerian jihad you zealots, get it over with already.
Re: Failing to disclose? (Score:2)
The people who led the Butlerian Jihad in Frank Herbert's Dune where the good guys.
Manford was an unmitigated hypocritical twat and the less said about Vorian Atreidss the better, but that's probably just because Brian Herbert is a hack.
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Right the proposition here is that there should be 'good money in commercial art.'
What is technology really but application of knowledge to replace manual labor activities with capital assets.
Being anti-AI at this point is really just being anti-tech. Sorry that is what it boils down to, you can justify it anyway you want but the objection is really no different than a ferrier being upset with the development of rubber tires and the automobile.
Really this boils down to very fundamental questions about 'wha
Wow ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Graphics and video tools have AI functions for like 15 years, and depending on what you count as AI for even longer. Did you ever think about how "smart selection" works? What is generative fill, if not generative AI? Just because a few really good models are hyped now, that doesn't mean that creative use of AI is new.
Lack of imagination (Score:2)
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The movie studios (particularly 900lb gorilla behemoths like Disney, and whatever the name of the company that owns HBO is this week) already own the copyright on enough content they don't need to train outside of their own copyright library. LLM summary of script -> Script of trailer -> shot by shot description of trailer -> 2-5 second "video clips" -> human or machine stitches them together, throws on a backing track is definitely something they can do/train on using their existing library. Si
AI is a new type of CGI (Score:3)
I feel for the artists that are going to get hit by this, but no reasonable person would expect movies to come with a list of ingredients like a box of cereal. We don't expect disclosure of whether special effects are practical or CGI but now AI needs disclosure because why? It's just a new type of CGI.
Re:AI is a new type of CGI (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument is that how the training is done makes this new and different from CGI. LLM output isn't some clever programming someone wrote based on math they thought up. It is deep analysis of every available archive to reproduce mechanically what was done by hand. The argument is that LLMs learning from the available works is a violation of copyright when that LLM is then used to generate new work that displaces the artists whose work was used in the input. It's definitely new. It's definitely not a legal violation as law is currently written. It's definitely hurting existing artists. It's definitely opening up new ways of creating for non-artists. It's definitely got unanswered questions all over it. And we definitely need to have a discussion as a society and as a legal system about what we think is right for these tools. None of that was true of CGI. :-)
Re: AI is a new type of CGI (Score:2)
TFS says the studio is using its own back catalogue, unless they can somehow infringe on their own copyrights?
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Part of the ARAG strike was the argument that artists never signed away the rights to reproduce their voices and likenesses for eternity, even when they signed for a particular project (e.g. motion capture for a specific movie). That applies to FX artists as well. So even when these films were made "work for hire", was it really intended to be used like this? Not from the artists' POV it definitely was not. None of them would have signed a contract that permitted this. And the argument is that whatever copy
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You actually have this very backwards. Artists aren't negatively impacted by AI, they are embracing it. VFX is forever the lowest margin bottomfeeder of the movie industry. They have shitty budgets, shitty timetables, and there's massive expectations on them. The industry has set them up for failure to the point where you can actively see in many movies precisely where the money ran out with world class VFX cast alongside horrendous rubbish all caused by being out of time and out of money.
Generative AI isn'
The 10 person indie production company (Score:5, Interesting)
The time of "major Hollywood studios" is visibly coming to an end. No need for massive resources to make a movie. Each of the production phases can be accomplished by one person working with an AI. A couple of writers working with an AI will come up with a plot and a screenplay. Someone else will use that to quickly generate one or more prototype storyboards the team can evaluate.
No sound stage or on-location shooting required. The AI will motion-scan your actors in front of a green screen to get a library of relevant style and emotional expressions. The human talent will show up for a few days of in-person filming for critical scenes. Then the AI will generate your movie segment by segment over the course of a week or so. Viewings by test audiences will let you tweak the results for maximum satisfaction and then its off to the Oscars.
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LOL we are insanely far away from that reality. There's a big difference between someone cranking out a couple of minute short that is tethering on the edge of uncanny valley and producing a major studio film. AI have a huge consistency problem. AI has an art style problem - you can usually tell something is AI because ... it actually all looks the same if you focus on what to look for. There's no variance, no creativity, and no real intelligence helping it along.
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>> we are insanely far away from that reality
Are you sure? There seems to have been a huge amount of progress just over the past few months.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
"We've never seen anything like Veo 3 before. It's impressive. It's scary."
"Veo 3 also produces audio and dialogue. It doesn't just offer photorealism, but fully realized soundscapes and conversations to go along with videos. It can also maintain consistent characters in different video clips, and users can fine-tune camera angles,
Congress needed (Score:2)
There'll have to be a law designated how AI can use copyrighted data. I feel like the time is right for AI to use all our output, the function of IP law (according to the constitution) is so that the the "useful arts will be advanced" (see reference below). Since human creativity seems to have maxed (I am being sarcastic). But no, seriously .. why the fuck is every movie a sequel. Even politicians are the same recycled idiots.
From the constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by secu
Every movie a sequel? Lower risk to the producers (Score:2)
Film making is about making money. Most movies flop (AKA go straight to DVD). However sequels have already an audience who enjoyed the first episode, so are far more likely to be willing to splash out on a second. Unfortunately this works - so we get sequel and remakes and prequels etc etc.
Re:Congress needed - not followed (Score:2)
"The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act â" also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or (derisively) the Mickey Mouse Protection Act â" extended copyright terms in the United States in 1998."
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
oh absolutely (Score:3, Interesting)
Definitely hiding it from the attorneys (Score:3)
The suits would be very upset about buying, shooting, and releasing screenplays that can't be copyrighted.
Might be a very good thing (Score:1)
Disney must die.
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Particularly I don't mind "strong women" (as well as "strong men") as long as it makes sense in the story (some classic examples: Sarah Connor, Ellen Rippley).
There must be a reason or trajectory of a character becoming strong/powerful/skillful/etc., it's stupid making them inexplicably strong because yes. That's valid no matter the gender.
There are a lot of "strong men" movies that sucks as well, but "strong women" movies sucks more because they're forcing that down our throats because of agenda, it's not
" while avoiding public disclosure " (Score:2)
Hollywood has left Hollywood (Score:2)
My Surprised Pikachu Face (Score:3)
Obviously special effects was bound to go this direction, and that would almost certainly be legal with or without actor permission. Replacing a computer mildly attended by a human with another computer mildly attended by a (much less paid) human is so common as to attract practically no notice. Programming explosions was always a job with a shelf life. Either the production can afford real (if scaled down) pyrotechnics and practical effects, or they're a no-budget indie production that would otherwise go with some stock library for the purpose. So that gets AI into machines and onto desktops very quietly and legitimately.
Also, it's still acceptable to use AI to produce storyboard images and placeholder music and the like that are never going to see the light of day, right? I imagine the writers throw their scene into an AI and let it churn a few iterations. If none of them are even close to what they want, send it off to a sketch artist like always. Otherwise it may be faster and involve a lot less message-passing to just fake it themselves and explain/caption how it's wrong. They already do this when a scene changes after sketches have been made. Again this gets it into machines and onto desktops. It allows for a plausible sounding excuse of "there aren't any clean systems, every editing rig uses AI for in-house purposes". Render rigs make half-decent AI rigs too, even if they're not designed for that purpose. The builds are very, very similar -- GPUs, RAM, storage, and to a lesser extent the CPU itself are all pushed to 100% at some point in both workflows. A pair of 48 GB RTX 4090 is great and all, but you need the bandwidth on the system side to feed it and to display/store the results.
The questions start when the material designed for in-house use gets disseminated to the world, as it might be for a trailer of a movie still in early production. But if they haven't even hired a cast yet, they're not contractually obligated not to use something resembling a known actor -- although they may burn bridges if it ends up they want that person for the real deal. I suppose if they said "do it in Ghibli style" then nobody could claim to be fooled that it actually is Famous Actor.
playbooks, spitball ideas (Score:2)