Hollywood is marked, like its movies, by constant plot twists. The latest is the explosion of AI, the artificial intelligence that until now was mostly used to create realistic characters in science fiction films. But there’s a wave of apps out there that could influence, among other things, script development, predict the best cast and how much money to spend per project based on what a movie will earn, and even determine audiences’ movie preferences.
“AI is a tool that is going to help people who have been stifled up to now,” says Helena Packer, vice president of DGene, a Silicon Valley and Shanghai-based artificial intelligence developer. Big movie studios have already For example, Miramax turned to tech developer Metaphysic to create younger versions of the key characters featured in the movie “Here” (Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, the duo of “Forrest Gump”), which is an adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel.
Metaphysic, already known for its deepfake of actor Tom Cruise and Simon Cowell on the set of America’s Got Talent, which raised $7.5 million last year to help expand its content creation tools. As co-founder and CEO Tom Graham explains, “Metaphysic’s AI is able to de-age actors like Hanks with a younger version.” It’s like a cape sewn to your face that allows you to have immediate results in parallel with your live performance.
This new technique is cheaper to produce than VFX (visual effects) or CGI (computer generated imagery) and also more realistic. “In fact, we can do things with AI that are impossible with traditional methods to get that really hyper-real look. It looks amazing, and not strange like with the CGI”, insists Graham, who points out that the AI is in the initial stage but could eventually permeate all areas of making a fiction. Entertainment, games, or music, powered by AI
“The growth has been really breakneck in terms of the sophistication of the AI, models, techniques, and the software that supports it,” says Graham. “But in the last six months, it’s really taken off, and there’s no reason why that shouldn’t continue. Because of the sheer number of people who are interested in building Open IA applications,” he enthuses.
The visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, created by George Lucas, is among the forerunners of these applications for the cinema (the first season of “The Mandalorian” is a compendium of how different AI techniques work together to recreate a Luke Young Skywalker). “We are working on more than 30 programs right now. I think all of them are using machine learning and AI. one way or another,” acknowledges Rob Bredow, creative director of Industrial Light & Magic and senior vice president of Creative Insights at parent company Lucasfilm.
ILM is a pioneer of visual effects in motion pictures, responsible for the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise and the spaceships and lightsabers in Star Wars. Jurassic Park, in particular, was a turning point for the industry as the first film to use realistic on-screen computer graphics, an evolution of previously used models and miniatures.
Today, Bredow notes, the movie industry is beginning to see some machine-learning algorithms compete with, and sometimes even outperform, hand-coded algorithms. One area of notable interest is denoising algorithms, which can resolve some of the noise that basically appears grainy in an image.
And the newest technology can speed up artists’ workflows by drastically reducing render times. ILM used those machine learning-based algorithms to de-age actor Mark Hamill, who appeared as a younger Luke Skywalker also in the Disney+ series “The Book of Boba Fett.” Bredow notes that aging or rejuvenation tools are “definitely an area where we’re more than attentive,” but stresses that hundreds, even thousands of artist hours still go into creating the final illusion.
The mixed use of computer graphics, practical effects and new technologies such as AI. is what makes Bredow excited about the future of visual effects.
Big Hollywood studios are investing in AI. in various ways, including Warner Bros., which signed an agreement with Cinelytic to improve marketing decision-making and film distribution strategies, including defining the best release date. And 20th Century Studios worked with Google to use machine learning to better predict audience targeting.
And artificial intelligence also plays a role in developing talent. Digital studio TheSoul Publishing uses DALL-E2 software to create images for its virtual music artist Polar, who has amassed 1.7 million followers on TikTok since he released his first single “Close to You” as recently as September 2022. “Over time, we definitely see artificial intelligence playing a bigger role in the production process,” says Patrik Wilkens, TheSoul’s vice president of global operations.
Wilkens says that the creative team is using AI. to speed up the production process, including creating multiple colors for marketing materials and reducing the amount of time it takes a music publisher to create longer tracks. Ultimately, this investment in technology allows TheSoul to create more content. He says younger consumers are gravitating toward artists like Polar because the line between real and unreal people has blurred.
“I think they will make a distinction between authentic and inauthentic people, but they are much more open and much more natural to interact with virtual people”, says Wilkens, opening the fan for the advent of virtual artists like “S1mone”, to the protagonist of the film. that Al Pacino starred in early 2002, when artificial intelligence seemed like a futuristic tale in films like “AI” (2001, by Steven Spielberg), “Bicentennial Man” (1999) and “I Am Robot” (2004).
Meanwhile, writers are alarmed that ChatGPT and other such tools could replace their jobs. And if AI defines Hollywood’s decisions about which projects to greenlight, what will that mean for artistic expression? Experts say the technology is so new that it’s hard to predict exactly how it will be used in the future.
“There is a lot of contention right now about who should be seen as a creator when using AI,” says Danny Tobey, a partner at global law firm DLA Piper. “At the moment, the law says that only a natural person can be an inventor. But when you understand the technology, some of the worry goes away, because there still needs to be a real human element to using AI. to generate creative content ”, he concludes. Debate that suddenly crosses the entire entertainment and culture industry.
by RN
