āIām going to sue the living pants off themā: AIās big legal showdown ā and what it means for Dr Strangeās hair | Film
The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears ā tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AIās Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. The eagle slowly flapped its wings as it glided down a mountainside, dropping the wolf from its talons. Except the bird only had one leg ā and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.
Make no mistake, though ā this is the future. Generative AI has given us amusingly surreal images such as the pope in a puffer jacket and a 90s nightclub where everyone is Gordon Ramsay, but the entertainment industry is not laughing. In fact, itās panicking. A recent statement opposing āthe unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AIā has been signed by more than 25,000 writers, actors and musicians, including Julianne Moore, Kazuo Ishiguro and Thom Yorke.
Itās not just performers; AI threatens massive upheaval to people who make our movies, television shows and video games. A report published in January predicted generative AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment industry jobs in the US by 2026, and 75% of respondents believed the technology would lead to job losses in their area. One visual effects (VFX) executive describes the situation to me as ālike King Canute trying to turn back the waves. Itās out of the box and itās never going back in again.ā
Things are moving rapidly. This February Open AI, the creators of ChatGPT, unveiled Sora, their astoundingly sophisticated text-to-video tool. In response, actor and film-maker Tyler Perry immediately cancelled an $800m studio expansion he was planning in Atlanta. āI donāt have to put a set on my lot,ā he said. āI can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me.ā Last month, Runway AI announced it was partnering with Lionsgate Studios, makers of the Hunger Games and John Wick movies, to develop ācutting edge, capital efficient, content creation opportunitiesā. Sony has also said it will use AI to āproduce both films for theatres and television in a more efficient wayā. New video-generation rivals are springing up: Metaās Movie Gen, Luma AIās Dream Machine, Adobeās Firefly, Chinaās Kling AI.
And if any further harbinger were needed, in September James Cameron joined the board of Stability AI, creators of market leader Stable Video Diffusion. Cameron laid out the AI worst-case scenario 40 years ago in The Terminator, but now heās learned to love it. āIāve spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push whatās possible,ā he said. āThe intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave.ā
Now that wave is threatening to flood an unprepared industry, washing away jobs and certainties. How do people in the industry feel? To find out, I attended Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn (THU), a digital arts festival near Lisbon in Portugal. Now in its 10th year, THU is a place where young artists entering these industries, some 750 of them, come to meet, get inspired and learn from veterans in their fields: film-makers, animators, VFX wizards, concept artists, games designers. This year, AI is the elephant in the room. Everyone is either talking about it ā or avoiding talking about it.
āArt should be created by humans,ā says JoĆ£o, a Portuguese games designer in his early 20s, as he doodles in a sketchbook (despite being in digital arts, most people here still draw, paint and sculpt). āEvery brushstroke comes from experience, from hardship. AI takes out the curiosity, the learning.ā
āIt makes things faster, but I think itās more dangerous than useful,ā says Rosa, a Spanish concept artist sitting next to him, as she draws in her own sketchbook. āBottom line: itās stealing our work and itās taking our jobs.ā
āIāve only been in this industry for three years and Iāve already lost two jobs to AI,ā agrees another round the table. Before, she was doing illustrations for games concepts, she explains, but thanks to AI, āthe CEO decided, āI can do this on my own now, we donāt need you.āā
Up-and-coming artists used to start out with work like this, illustrating pitches for new projects to studios. But as another young artist tells me, āPitch work is dead. Theyāre not hiring artists to do that any more. Theyāre going to generative AI.ā
The games industry laid off more than 10,000 people in 2023, and this yearās cull is reportedly higher. Companies have already been using AI for āfive or sixā years, an insider tells me. Activision Blizzard, the Microsoft-owned makers of games such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush, has already laid off 1,900 workers this year. In January, Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, laid off 11% of its global staff.
Itās a similar story in Hollywood, which is increasingly digital in terms of big-budget animations and special effects-driven movies. Now the industry is looking battered by declining cinema attendances and expensive but poorly performing movies ā compounded by last yearās actors strike, which was partly over AI. Hence the talk of āefficiencyā.
āIt can do things that used to take two weeks in less than a day,ā says the VFX executive, who did not wish to be named. An ever expanding array of AI-powered tools are now at film-makersā disposal and they are irresistibly powerful: āWe were taking just pencil sketch outlines, and [using AI] you can make them look 3D, so you get rid of the need for a modeller to sculpt something for you. It is frightening.ā People like him are in an impossible position, he says: āIām making my own obsolescence, because if I donāt use it, Iām obsolete; if I do use it, I sort of functionally bring an end to myself as well.ā
Some artists at THU are taking on the AI companies directly, like Karla Ortiz, a fine artist who also does concept art for high-end movies. Her work shaped the look of Marvelās Doctor Strange, for example ā the character, the costumes, the hair, the mannerisms, even, arguably, the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch. Going one step further than the statement by Julianne Moore and co, in January 2023, Ortiz co-launched a class action lawsuit against a group of AI companies including Stability AI, claiming they āviolate the rights of millions of artistsā by training their models on artistsā copyrighted work ā without their knowledge or consent.
Ortiz, who is Puerto Rican-born and San Francisco-based, first stumbled across AI-generated art online in early 2022. Having dug into the training datasets, she believes these companies assimilated the work of every artist she could think of, including herself: āI found almost the entirety of my fine artwork in there, and I knew thatās what powered these models.ā None of the artists were informed, consulted or compensated. āMy paintings arenāt just copyrighted ā theyāre my life,ā says Ortiz. āThis feels like identity theft.ā
She believes a more ethical form of AI is both possible and necessary, but even she acknowledges that it will be difficult to put this genie back in the bottle. āOnce the models are trained, they can never forget. Un-learning is not a thing ā¦ A lot of people say, āWell, itās out there, adapt.ā Hereās how I adapt: Iām gonna sue the living pants out of them.ā
Stability AI and the other defendants have successfully dismissed aspects of the class action, but legally this is uncharted waters, and the lawsuit is now proceeding to discovery, which means Ortizās side will get to see internal communications within these AI companies, with a view to eventually going to trial. A victory could have enormous repercussions. āI think we have enough to totally win,ā Ortiz says.
From the AI companiesā point of view, rather than destroying the creative industries, they are saving them. āThe cost of making content has skyrocketed,ā explains CristobĆ”l Valenzuela, co-founder of Runway AI, speaking over videocall from the US. āPeople are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make films, and thatās not sustainable long term, because the market needs more content. So something needs to happen. And for us, this is the moment where technology can come and help drive the cost of production down.ā
Born in Chile, 35-year-old Valenzuela studied economics, taught himself software engineering then came to art school in New York, where he and two friends founded Runway in 2018. āWeāve always been fascinated by the intersection of AI and art,ā he says. Since 2022 the company has held an annual AI film festival in Los Angeles and New York. Despite my disastrous wolf-eagle experiment, Runwayās AI is already being used in film and music videos, including the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once.
What data Runway trains its models on is āconfidentialā, Valenzuela says, but their deal with Lionsgate avoids at least some of the copyright issues raised by Ortiz, since it is using the studioās own back catalogue. āIf you have content in one particular style, the model can better assess and understand that style, and so help you generate in that particular direction.ā
That doesnāt mean youāll be able to make a movie just by typing in, say, āJohn Wick 17ā, but it will make it easier, he says. āThereās a lot of fires and explosions and CGI in those movies, right? Well, blowing up cars is really expensive.ā Even blowing up a CGI car āneeds hundreds of hours of time and work. Wouldnāt it be great if we have a system that does it better and faster?ā He says AI āwill free you from much of the tedious, repetitive day-to-day work. Thatās great. We should celebrate that.ā
This doesnāt necessarily mean a reduction in personnel, reckons Valenzuela: āI actually think weāll see the opposite. If the cost of making stuff goes down, then you will start hiring more people, because now you can make more projects.ā Some jobs will disappear, he argues, but new ones will be created. āWe used to employ people in elevators to press the buttons, or people to throw rocks at your window before alarm clocks were invented.ā He thinks āWill AI replace humans?ā is the wrong question. āItās software, itās a computer, itās technology, but a pen is technology. And so it would be strange for us to position an argument like, āDo you prefer humans or pens?āā
Veterans of the industry have seen this kind of technological upheaval before. When CGI movies such as Toy Story arrived, old-school animators felt they had become obsolete. Many left the profession, but others adapted and learned new skills. As one industry pro at THU points out, CGI actually grew animation: a traditional hand-drawn animated feature required about 120 artists; last yearās Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse employed about 400. Whatās his AI advice to THUās young artists? āBefore we get fucked by it, we have to make it ours.ā
Andre Luis, the 43-year-old CEO and co-founder of THU, acknowledges that āthe anxiety is hereā at this yearās event, but rather than running away from it, he argues, artists should be embracing it. One of the problems now is that the people eagerly adopting AI are executives and managers. āThey donāt understand how to use AI to accelerate creativity,ā he says, āor to make things better for everyone, so itās up to us [the artists] to teach them. You need people who actually are creative to use AI.ā
Luis likens generative AI to ultra processed food: it cannot create anything new; it can only reconstitute whatās already there, turning it into an inferior product. āAnd a lot of companies are trying to make fast food,ā he says. Many see AI as a way to churn out quick, cheap content, as opposed to higher quality fare that has been created āorganicallyā over time, with loving human input.
In addition to Ortizās lawsuit potentially cutting off the supply, the public doesnāt like AI-generated content, and nor do the artists working in these industries ā many of whom feel like trained chefs being made to flip burgers. āThere are a lot of people quitting these companies trying to do AI fast food,ā says Luis. āThey are searching their own paths in a different way, and I think they are right.ā He sees THU as part of that; beyond the festival, it is also a year-round platform for creatives to connect and collaborate.
The democratising potential of AI could usher in what Luis calls āa new era of indieā in films, games, TV. Just as digital technology put cameras, editing and graphics tools into the hands of many more people. āAI will allow a lot of young kids that never had the budget to implement their ideas, to do incredible stuff,ā he says. āInstead of being scared of AI, a lot of young creators are thinking, āMy dreams are now possible. I donāt need $100m to do this ā I can do it with $2m.ā Instead of one organisation with 500 employees, youāll have 100 organisations with five employees.ā As happened with cinema in the 90s, āthe major studios will start buying content from the indies,ā Luis predicts.
This might not be good news for entertainment corporations, but it could be great news for audiences, creators, and art itself. Whatās important, says Luis, is not the bottom line but culture and the impact it has on people, to enrich society. āAI is something that is here,ā he tells the young creators at THU, āso you need to adapt. See the opportunities, see the problems, but understand that it can help you do things in a different way. You need to ask yourselves, āHow can I be part of that?āā
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