In his 2002 film S1m0ne, Kiwi director Andrew Niccol imagined the sensational rise of a Hollywood starlet that existed only as a digital creation. The movie was a critical and financial flop, but like many of Niccol’s films, Gattaca and The Truman Show among them, S1m0ne proved to be a prescient take on the future of the film business.
New artificial intelligence tools released in the past six months have made it relatively easy to produce convincing digital characters and video animations. Just check out some of the incredible images on the web that were created by the Midjourney and Stable Diffusion AI programs. Video is also getting the AI treatment.
Digitally enhanced actors and scenery are nothing new, but generative AI takes them to the next level, which is sending a shudder through the film industry.
Twenty years after S1m0ne, 160,000 film and TV actors who belong to the US Screen Actors Guild have gone on strike, joined by their scriptwriting colleagues in the most extensive industrial action to hit Hollywood since 2008.
The strikes will stall production on shows and movies not just in the US, but also in runaway film production destinations such as New Zealand. The main bone of contention for the actors and writers is the royalty payments they receive after a TV show or film has screened. The rise of streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ has shaken up the business model of film and TV, but the contracts signed between studios and the talent who write and act in their productions haven’t changed significantly.
Actors are now pushing for a share of the streaming revenue that the big platforms generate from subscriptions. But they also have an issue with the growing use of AI in their industry. Technically, Warner Bros or NBC Universal could feed their archives of movies and TV shows into generative AI systems and create new content based on the actors and scenery they’ve already captured. The results may not be compelling enough to hold an audience’s attention for two hours – yet. But that day will soon come.
For A-list movie stars such as Brad Pitt and Scarlett Johansson, that’s actually a lucrative opportunity. They have the bargaining power to license the use of their voice and visage in a completely digital creation, not even turning up to the movie set. But if you are an extra milling around in the background of a TV scene, you are in danger of being automated out of the picture. A studio could simply recast a previously captured scene for a new project using AI, paying hundreds of bit actors nothing in the process. Actors want a watertight contract that prevents this from happening.
With production budgets ballooning in Hollywood as streaming platforms battle for subscribers, AI is seen as a way to cut costs in everything from visual effects and writing to acting and composing film soundtracks.
The US$200 billion video games industry is also in flux thanks to AI, which is slashing the cost of illustrating characters and scenery. The government recently introduced a 20% tax rebate for our video-game developers, worried that we’ll lose our best people to Australia, which offers generous federal and state tax incentives to its games sector.
But a bigger threat could be the extent to which games-development houses employ AI. For a small country with a limited pool of developers, clever use of AI could give us a competitive edge, speeding up productions and lowering development costs.
Creativity is, admittedly, at the sharp end of the AI revolution, because of the ability of large language models to be developed and trained based on huge amounts of text, images, video and audio available in digital form. But the battle now playing out in the culture industry is a sign of things to come everywhere from law firms to software studios as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in every profession.
