Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to play an active role in the movie industry—starting in the special-effects departments.
Key Details
- AI is beginning to be used by major film-production companies as a tool in upcoming films, starting in the special-effects departments, where it is being used to speed up and low the costs of digital effects, The Wall Street Journal reports.
- Directors like Robert Zemeckis and Anna Kendrick are using the technology to assist in de-aging special effects and generating original artwork.
- The special-effects team of the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once used generative AI to digitally remove a pulley system that animated two rocks to look like they were having a conversation.
- Matt Stone and Trey Parker have also invested in a deep fake startup Deep Voodoo, which has used its face-swapping technology in a recent Kendrick Lamar music video.
Why It’s Important
AI is one of the most powerful technologies in the world, and the entire tech world is proclaiming that the recent innovations of the past few months are just the start of a revolution that will change the world. The technology stands to make major inroads into Hollywood, where technology can reduce ballooning film production costs and solve special-effects problems for imaginative filmmakers.
Every major studio in Hollywood and creative outlet is experimenting with ChatGPT and determining its strengths and weaknesses, seeing how the current rendition can be used to simplify basic tasks and reduce cumbersome workloads. At the moment, the technology’s early adopters will be special effects artists who can find creative ways to use the technology efficiently. The technology is already being used to assist with subtitling and translating dialog for films.
The Problem
The technology does create fears from creatives that their work will eventually be replaced. However, as we previously reported, the current renditions of ChatGPT and Bard AI are not powerful enough to replace screenwriters and authors. The technology is imperfect and struggles to maintain consistency in its storytelling or writing of subtle character traits or meaningful motivations.
The rapid growth of the technology could prove these initial worries to be true in the future if the most ambitious projections of AI chatbot technology come to pass.
Notable Quote
“The conversations we are having are not about how generative AI is going to create the story for you, but it is how it can make things faster and cheaper around the edges. And those edges are hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Bain & Co. head of media Andre James.
