AI is Taking the Stage

by Patrick Ellis

A.I. for the past year has been seen as a hot button topic of sorts that has loomed over the creative sphere of artists of all types threatening to wipe them out of jobs due to how cheap and efficient AIs such as ChatGPT, created by the company OpenAI, can be. As time has gone on this has become more and more prevalent due to how we have seen AI develop and evolve and OpenAI seems determined to shake hands with the directors down Hollywood Lane.

OpenAI has recently begun trying to strike up business deals with Hollywood utilizing their new AI “Sora” as explained in OpenAI courts Hollywood over plans for video generation model Sora (ft.com) “Altman and Lightcap showed off Sora, a new generative AI model that can create detailed videos from simple written prompts.” The videos produced were astonishingly uncanny and moreover were quite cohesive to the point of being somewhat usable even if Sora has some faults as explained in the article. “OpenAI is also working to improve the system. Currently, Sora can only make videos under one minute in length, and its creations have limitations, such as glass bouncing off the floor instead of shattering or adding extra limbs to people and animals.” Typically this would lead to the idea that ‘it can’t be THAT bad then’, however AI has developed insanely fast to a concerning degree. The YouTuber Moist Critical points this out in a video discussing the Sora videos called “You Can’t Trust Anything Anymore” where he talks about Will Smith eating spaghetti, a popular trend when AI was first becoming big, which brings to attention the reality that perfecting Sora may be within the next five if not this very year. OpenAI has already released their game plan on where they wish to go with Sora as well, wanting Sora to “aim to compete with several available text-to-video services from start-ups, including Runway, Pika, and Stability AI. These other services already offer commercial uses for content.”

At the end of the day though the main idea that comes to mind is that ‘this is fine and all, but why would Hollywood want this.’ And unfortunately the answer is quite obvious. With the acceptance of OpenAI and use of it it would lead to far faster as well as cheaper productions allowing for producers to avoid having to hire on actors, animators, or even a director. To make things worse it is even more likely to be plausible because of the recent writer’s strikes from last year having finally come to a close. In theory if they were to utilize a fully functional and developed Sora they would no longer have to worry about such strikes, as unlike people AI can’t go on strike and they are far less concerned about working conditions due to being a computer generated program and not a robot. Why a robot you may ask? Well to make a tangent as short as possible recent clips have been released of robots breaking down while working in similar conditions to people. Which if anything goes to show how we as people work hard and should not be getting stripped from jobs due to cheaper alternatives that are only partially functional.

Of people who express similar concern of such a thing like myself the article Hollywood AI Crisis: Will Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Acting & Jobs? (variety.com) is one. The author Stephen Colbert exclaims this through his article “The suits in Hollywood are clearly intrigued by AI, as are executives in every industry. About 96% of AI decision-makers at media and entertain­ment companies said they plan to increase their spending on generative AI technology in the next 12 months, according to a survey of 6,000 employees by enterprise search-engine vendor Lucidworks conducted between May and July. They add that they’re not looking to use it to eliminate workers; just 4% of those surveyed said they ex­­pect AI adoption to result in “job displacement.””  From a basic look you would think that this would make my point moot, however when taking into account the strides AI has taken in improvement and considering the point AI is at already and suddenly the likelihood becomes far more concerning. If a similar study were to be conducted all but two years ago surely no one would have even conceived of such an idea within Hollywood, but slowly the advancement of indistinguishable AI technology is becoming a reality.

So far all I have really been doing has been just talking doom and gloom instead of talking about ways to prevent a problem like this from striking. Thankfully people in Hollywood saw similar issues that I did and protested for AI to be banned or restricted which is fully explained in Hollywood's New AI Rules: Here's What Studios Can & Can't Do (screenrant.com), however I feel it is important to address them and explain the problems with them. “Foundationally, it establishes that any writing created by "Generative Artificial Intelligence" (GAI) or traditional AI cannot be considered "literary material" - a legal umbrella term referring to any written material, published or unpublished. In effect, this stipulation amends the definition of "literary material" to only apply to written material created by a human and not any written material generated by AI. The agreement specifies that if a company asks a writer to use AI-generated material as the basis of creating new literary material, the writer must be informed that the written material was generated by AI, the fact that the writer was supplied with AI-generated material can't be used to reduce the writer's pay, the writer gets full credit for the resulting material and will only share credit if other human writers are hired to perform further rewrites.” Now on a base level this seems acceptable however the main reason for making the literature “literary material” is because AI pulls from previously copyrighted material in order to make most of its reactions, responses, and scripts. Because of this the AI is taking from completely separate writers and utilizing their work without the authors consent. Now the most logical thing to do would be to compensate the author however that would be quite difficult to do considering the AI takes from multiple sources and does so with keeping track of who leads to people not being credited for their stolen ideas.

This brings us to what can be done or what should be optimally done in this scenario that we find ourselves in and although my solution is quite extreme I also find the situation to be extreme as well. AI does bring a lot to the table as a tool however due to how it functions it only makes sense that it should not be used in a way to gain profit as it wouldn’t lead to actually helping workers. The best way to utilize video AI would be for fun transformative content that is not used for profit, but instead used as part of the community. Realistically speaking this can be seen as extreme however I feel that it is necessary to prevent AI from being used by big corporations that reside in places like Hollywood especially since AI is still often supported by a large variety of people and often paid for and funded by people who look for AI for recreational and fun needs as well as admittedly ‘scholarly’ needs however that can be taken with a grain of salt of course.

Overall I feel that the best way to fight back against AI taking over cinema and art as a whole is for us to push for the prevention of monetizing AI due to it having the potential to remove people from jobs while also taking from other artists without properly compensating them. Although AI still doesn’t have the ability to perfectly replicate work and art from humans it is rapidly approaching that point and in the near future it may become completely indistinguishable. OpenAI as a company is a threat to the film and cinema industry and is actively working towards what we need to fight against in order to continue having practical and original movies made by humans.