Insights from a film scholar

The bitter conflict between actors, writers and other creative professionals and the major film and TV studios represents a flashpoint in the radical transformation the entertainment industry is undergoing. The ongoing Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes have been fueled in part by artificial intelligence and its use in the film industry.

Actors and writers alike fear that major studios, including Amazon/MGM, Apple, Disney/ABC/Fox, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount/CBS, Sony, Warner Bros. and HBO, will use generative AI to exploit them. Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that learns from text and images to automatically produce new written and visual works.

So what are the writers and actors specifically afraid of? I am a film art professor. I did a short exercise that illustrates the answer.

I typed the following sentence into ChatGPT: Write a script for a 5 minute movie with Barbie and Ken. Within seconds, a script appeared.

Next, I asked for a shot list, an overview of all the camera footage needed for the film. Again, a response appeared almost immediately, featuring not only a “fun activities montage” but also a nice flashback sequence. The closing line suggested a wide shot that showed, “Barbie and Ken walk away from the beach together, holding hands.”

Then, on a text-to-video platform, I typed these words into a box labeled “Prompt”: “Film shot of Margot Robbie as Barbie walks along the beach, early morning light, pink sunbeams illuminating the screen, tall green grass, photographic detail , film grain.”

About a minute later, a 3 second video appeared. It showed a slender blonde woman walking on the beach. Is it Margot Robbie? Is it Barbie? It’s hard to say. I decided to add my own face instead of Robbie’s for fun, and within seconds I made the trade.

I now have a motion picture clip on my desktop that I can add to the script and shot list, and I’m well on my way to making a short film with someone like Margot Robbie as Barbie.

The fear

None of this material is particularly good. The script lacks suspense and poetic grace. The recording list is uninspired. And the video just looks weird.

However, the ability for anyone – amateurs and professionals alike – to create a screenplay and conjure up the likeness of an existing actor means that the skills that were once specific to writers and the likeness an actor once made his or her own own, are now readily available. – especially with questionable quality – for anyone who has access to these free online tools.

Given the speed of technological change, the quality of all this material created through generative AI is destined to improve visually, not only for people like me and social media creatives worldwide, but potentially for the studios, who likely to have access to much more powerful computers. Further, these separate steps—pre-production, screenwriting, production, post-production—could be incorporated into a streamlined prompting system that bears little resemblance to the current art and craft of filmmaking. Generative AI is a new technology, but it is already reshaping the film and TV industry.

Writers fear that, at best, they will be hired to edit AI-drafted screenplays. They fear that their entire creative work will be swallowed up in databases as food for writing instruments to taste. And they fear that their specific expertise will be pushed aside in favor of “prompt engineers,” or those adept at working with AI tools.

And actors worry that they’ll be forced to sell their likeness once, only to see it used by studios over and over again. They fear that deepfake technologies will become the norm and real, live actors will no longer be needed at all. And they worry that not only their bodies, but also their voices will be used, synthesized and reused without ongoing compensation. And all this comes on top of dwindling incomes for the vast majority of actors.

Towards the AI ​​future

Are their fears justified? Kind of. In June 2023, Marvel presented titles – opening scenes with episode names – for the “Secret Invasion” series on Disney+ that were partially created with AI tools. A major studio’s use of AI sparked controversy, in part due to timing and fears that AI would drive people out of their jobs. Further, series director and executive producer Ali Selim’s tone-deaf description of using AI only added to the sense that there are no concerns about those fears at all.

Then software developer Nicholas Neubert posted on July 26 a 48 second trailer for a sci-fi movie created with graphics created by AI image generator Midjourney and motion created by Runway’s image-to-motion generator, Gen-2. It looks great. No screenwriter has been hired. No actors were used.

In addition, a company called Fable released Showrunner AI earlier this month, which is designed to allow users to submit images and votes, along with a short prompt. The tool responds by creating full episodes, including the user.

The creators have used South Park as an example, and they’ve presented plausible new episodes of the show that integrate viewers into the story as characters. The idea is to create a new form of audience engagement. However, for writers and actors alike, Showrunner AI must indeed be hair-raising.

Finally, Volkswagen recently produced a commercial featuring an AI reincarnation of Brazilian musician Elis Regina, who died in 1982. Directed by Dulcidio Caldeira, it features the musician as she appears to be singing a duet with her daughter. For some, the song was a beautiful revelation, a poignant mother-daughter reunion.

For others, however, the AI ​​regeneration of someone who has died raises concerns about how someone’s likeness can be used after death. What if you are morally opposed to a particular movie project, TV show, or commercial? How can actors – and others – maintain control?

Keep actors and writers in the credits

Writers’ and actors’ fears could be allayed if the entertainment industry developed a compelling and inclusive vision that recognizes advancements in AI, but works with writers and actors, not to mention cinematographers, directors, art designers and others, as partners.

Right now, developers are building and improving AI tools at a rapid pace. Production companies are likely to use them to dramatically reduce costs, contributing to a massive shift to a gig-oriented economy. If the dismissive attitude of many of the major studios towards writers and actors continues, not only will the needs of writers and actors be little taken into account, but technological development will lead the conversation.

But what if the tools were designed with the collaboration of informed actors and writers? What kind of tool would an actor make? What would a writer create? What kind of intellectual property, copyright, and creativity terms would developers consider? And what kind of inclusive, forward-looking, creative cinematic ecosystem could emerge? Answering these questions can give actors and writers the assurance they seek and help the industry adapt in the age of AI.

This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article by Holly Willisprofessor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California