Tonight, the focus was on people, not AI,” actor and comedian Will Arnett declared at the Dolby Theatre last month while presenting the Oscars for both best animated film categories at the 98th Academy Awards. “Animation is more than just a prompt. It’s an art form that deserves to be protected.” The rise of artificial intelligence has long been seen as a threat to the struggling film industry. Hollywood’s decline has been widely documented, with box office numbers fluctuating, fewer films being produced each year, and days on set at an all-time low. Once the epicentre of American soft power, it now appears to be the subject of nostalgic longreads.
Generative AI, capable of producing a Hollywood-standard scene with a simple one-line prompt, has become a common target. This fear came to a head in 2023 when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike for 148 days over concerns about the lack of protection for writers’ contracts in this new landscape. Although the WGA raised concerns about the impact of machine learning on creativity, it still seemed like a distant issue.
However, this February saw the emergence of an AI-generated video that caused alarm. The short clip depicted Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt engaging in fast-paced, Bruce Lee-style combat in an apocalyptic Los Angeles — a fitting metaphor. Deadpool writer Rhett Reese was “shocked” by the video’s realism, while the Motion Picture Association raised concerns about its legality, claiming that Seedance 2.0, the platform used to generate the video, had “engaged in unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale.”
Seedance, owned by ByteDance (the company behind TikTok), paused the product’s launch following panicked calls of copyright infringement from major studios such as Netflix, Warner Bros, and Disney. Despite this, the firm quietly rolled out Seedance 2.0 globally last week.
Walt vs Big Tech
The Seedance launch added to a tough week for Disney, which had previously agreed to a $1 billion deal allowing OpenAI’s video generator Sora to use its characters. However, OpenAI boss Sam Altman shut down Sora last week to focus on more profitable areas. As OpenAI faces pressure to spend billions wisely, Disney cancelled the deal. This move highlighted the challenges Hollywood faces in determining its relationship with Big Tech — whether it is an adversary or an inevitable part of its future.
“Every time a new model comes out, my initial reaction is to go ‘Oh my God, this is a real game-changer,’” says Tim Webber, chief creative officer at CGI and VFX powerhouse Framestore, who won an Oscar for his work on 2013’s Gravity. “But after a first glance at the Cruise vs Pitt video, you can see the characters aren’t actually engaged. What’s going on in the brain doesn’t match how they’re acting.”
Webber points out one of the most common failings of generative AI videos: a lack of depth and humanity. They also struggle to obey the laws of physics, often making things move faster than gravity would allow.
Youssef Alami Mejjati, who works in corporate generative AI with video platform Synthesia, explains that “when more movement or complex physics are introduced, the model’s job becomes harder because uncertainty increases at every prediction step.” Synthesia AI videos are largely static, which removes these problems, but as Mejjati notes, “video models generate frames sequentially, so small errors can quickly compound over time.”
So how far away are we from AI being completely integrated into Hollywood? According to Webber, it has already happened. But he makes a clear distinction between two types of AI: generative (where a prompt results in an image) and directed. “Directed AI isn’t creating stuff on its own,” he says. “We use it to speed up processes for visual effects.”
More challenges arise with generative AI. “These models produce a very glossy image, but it’s not necessarily the image you want,” says Webber. “Being able to control it to the level needed for most of our work is very hard. But without a doubt, within the next year, generative AI will be a part of rendering feature-length films.”
A question of ethics
While the artistic challenges of AI use in film are being addressed by professionals like Webber, ethical considerations are even more pressing — especially when copyrighted data is used to train the models. “We’re careful about ensuring that if using a model not trained on data for commercial use, we retrain it on legal data,” says Webber. “I’m not sure our competitors do.”
The use of actors’ faces — dead or alive — is another contentious issue in Hollywood. A No Fakes Act is being pushed through Congress to protect intellectual property rights in the voice and visual likeness of individuals.
One of the most discussed and morally ambiguous projects is being undertaken by Fable Studio. Led by Edward Saatchi, scion of advertising mogul Maurice Saatchi, it is using a mix of AI and old footage to reconstruct lost scenes of Orson Welles’s 1942 feature The Magnificent Ambersons — the final cut of which Welles disowned upon its release due to apparent editing interference. Saatchi aims to restore a version he claims is closer to Welles’s original vision. However, the Welles estate called the project “disappointing.”
For now, the hybrid use of AI seems to be the way forward for the film industry. If properly regulated, it is not an inherent adversary, but rather another development for a medium that has continually led human innovation.
