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Friday, November 1, 2024

A.I. in Hollywood, Wait and See

Devin Gordon, What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood? NYTimes Magazine, Nov. 1, 2024. From the middle of the article:

Over several months of talking to people around Hollywood about A.I., I noticed a pattern: The people who knew the least about its potential uses in the filmmaking process feared it the most; and the people who understood it best, who had actually worked with it, harbored the most faith in the resilience of human creativity, as well as the most skepticism about generative A.I.’s ever supplanting it. There was a broad consensus about the urgency of confronting its many potential misuses — tech companies’ skirting copyright laws and scraping proprietary content to train their machine-learning models; actors’ likenesses being appropriated without their permission; studios’ circumventing contractual terms designed to ensure that everything we see onscreen gets written by an actual human being. I must’ve heard the phrase “proper guardrails” at least a dozen times. But as the prolific Emmy-winning television director Paris Barclay, who has six episodes of multiple shows airing this fall alone, put it, “That’s what unions are for.”

A bit later:

Then in late August, the California State Senate passed long-gestating, SAG-supported legislation requiring estate consent for A.I.-generated replicas of dead performers.

When I asked one writer-director about the practice, he didn’t even let me finish the question. “Nope, nope, nope, nope,” said Billy Ray, who wrote “Captain Phillips” (2013) and co-wrote the 2012 big-screen adaptation of “The Hunger Games,” and who spent his time during the strike hosting a studio-lambasting podcast. “It’s completely insincere, dishonest filmmaking. It’s a lie.” The counterargument I kept hearing, from artists and from technologists, is that filmmaking is a grand illusion at its core, and we all consent to being tricked — we’re paying to be tricked — when we walk into the theater or turn our phone sideways.

There's much more at the link.

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