Week 2: Take Two

By Elise Hernke with input from Niren Hiro

This is MODERN TIMES, a digest of the technology developments that affect professionals in the tv, movies & live entertainment industries. We wish to help bridge the gap between the tech world and Hollywood and to empower creatives to embrace new technology so that they don’t get left behind. 

Tell us what you think and tell us what topics you want us to write about.

OK, let’s start talking about these MODERN TIMES. 

First Up:

Pixar to use AI to create Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Videos

Attention future filmmakers! Learn how animation king Pixar will  emulate video games to make their future movies interactive (Andressen Horowitz). When Netflix released the super-hit choose-your-own-ending “Black Mirror” episode...

It was known for its five different endings and became the first adult-oriented live-action experience. However, its success was difficult to replicate because of the costs and the time spent filming all the variations. Now, new generative AI models might be the solution for building interactive content at scale. This article dives into the details of the how.

VFX People & “World” Creators might need to read this:

It's a very dry read but if you’re into visual effects, then take a look through this Google white paper about Genie, a general purpose AI that was trained from Internet videos to help create action-controllable environments. Incredibly, an entire playable world can be generated from one single image. 

We see this initially impacting children’s animation on streaming services, similar to the model of “Blue's Clues” or “Dora the Explorer.” To ensure powerful storytelling, the creative team will have to work closely with the AI experts to blend the narrative and visual design together seamlessly with the technical elements. Solutions to hurdles around copyright and compensation remain to be solved.

Storyboarding on Steroids

PromeAI just made it so much easier to turn your rough sketches into fully fleshed out images, which could revamp filmmakers' approaches to storyboarding. You won’t need to be as proficient at drawing as Martin Scorsese (video of “Taxi Driver” storyboards side by side with the film) to articulate your vision. 

The platform is user friendly and supports team collaboration. You just upload your rough doodle and watch as it morphs into a fully realized, polished image. Watch this video to see how PromeAI works.

We laugh, we cry, and so does AI.

Lu Huang, a filmmaker experimenting with AI, took to X to showcase the capabilities of new text-to-video software developed by Hailou AI, which shows a video (on X/Twitter) with an AI expressing an impressive range of emotions that looks shockingly realistic. 

Huang submitted a descriptive prompt, reading: [Over the shoulder shot of a woman’s close up, at first she is laughing, then she becomes sad, then she starts to cry, then she covers her face with her hands]. 

Another user commented that they had tested the software for themselves and generated a series of videos that all felt believable using a similar prompt. Click to watch the incredible results. 

This represents how rapidly the technology is improving, meaning people are going to have more opportunity to cost-effectively see their stories come to life which could help inspire more creatives to try their hand at filmmaking. This is an opportunity for independent filmmakers to realize their vision without having to rely on other people, resources or funds.  

Controversy of the week: A major news corporation started using AI generated newscasters.

Hawaii’s newspaper The Garden Island, is using AI newscasters (404 Media) created by Caledo, an AI news platform company that specializes in turning news stories into broadcasts.  

PROS: On the one hand, this could help protect journalists in places where they are heavily targeted. It could also offer opportunities for people who are uncomfortable on camera, but would like to create informative content. It could resolve the problem of language barriers since the same avatar could be used to deliver news in multiple languages. Plus, people could receive the news from fun characters, reminding me of when Spongebob and Patrick hosted the kids livecast of the Super Bowl for Nickelodeon. 

CONS: However, there are genuine fears about how this would take jobs from talented broadcasters (unionized journalists are against this innovation) and removing humans from the news could result in detachment from viewers, especially about more serious topics. And by watching the clips from their site, the AI newscasters aren’t as natural at reading the teleprompter as trained professionals, but the tech is improving at a rapid rate to make the AI-generated humans more realistic.

The Business: In the face of rapidly advancing technology, Hollywood might have to fully dismantle and rebuild.

This week, the New York Times published a piece about how even the top producers in showbiz are getting “squeezed.” Studios are reeling from the delays caused by the labor strikes last year, the changes in audience preferences, the pressure to adapt to streaming-friendly formats, and the challenges of working within tighter budgets. 

Though it is a difficult time for the industry, optimists believe that the movie business is not going to die, but is undergoing a massive shift. As filmmaking tools (like the ones we showcase in this newsletter) democratize the artform, we will likely see a lot more projects from up and coming creators, which can be great for expanding upon diverse stories and perspectives, but will also create a lot of mediocre content and noise. 

For filmmakers, this means it's time to think outside of the box. “Freshness of thought is what brings people back into theaters, not regurgitated old things,” said Cathy Schulman, the “Crash” producer, to Noam Scheiber of the NYTimes. 

For Marketers: With increased competition, Adobe’s AI Tools struggle to make an impact. 

As AI tools become more accessible and other AI companies continue to sprout up, Adobe’s stock fell after they showed weaker-than-expected revenue uplift from their suite of AI tools. The company that was one of the first to wow people with its implementation of AI is now failing to prove itself as a necessity. Conversations around Firefly (their suite of generative AI products for creatives) went from “this is going to replace us” to “this is only helping us a little (up 11%).” It goes to show that if you are not keeping up with the dynamic tools in this space, it is easy to start to fall behind. 

Lastly, Some FYI’s:

🤳Snapchat (TechCrunch) is making itself more competitive with companies like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels by introducing AI-based video generation tools. This means more AI-based options for content creators.

🤖“AfrAId” is a new horror movie that just hit select theaters about an AI assistant gone wrong: Check out the trailer for "AFRAID" here. It is currently available to rent on AppleTV, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Google Play, but is set to land on Netflix by December of this year.

🏎️Watch this amazing AI-generated video made by Hailuo AI (the same company that showed a wide variety of AI emotions) that captures the stylings of Nicholas Winding Refn who made “Drive” and “Only God Forgives” with stunning visuals and score.  

🎨Check out Midjourney’s collaboration with Spellbrush, nijijourney, which specializes in helping people make their own anime moving images. 

Before You Go…Have a Cookie 

Oprah Winfrey’s Special on AI

You know something is massive when Oprah gets on board. On her new special “AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special” (Hulu), she discusses this major technology with a selection of guests close to the work: Aza Raskin, who invented the infinite scroll (and introduced doom scrolling into our lives), Microsoft Mogul Bill Gates, and Sam Altman of Open AI, among others. 

For those who do not subscribe to Hulu, one helpful YouTuber uploaded the special onto the site, so we have linked excerpts below if you would like to watch along. 

Altman emphasizes the seriousness of rolling out this technology responsibly and helping the general public become more literate about how it works. He also talks about what he and his colleagues learned from the haphazard roll out of social media, discussing how they would like to be more responsible this time around with introducing such powerful, potential consuming technology to the general public.  

Marquez Brownlee, Award-winning American YouTuber, shows us an example of how fast this technology is improving and we hear about a harrowing story about how scammers have used voice imitation to prey on people. Voice imitation AI has also been under fire since Scarlett Johansson sued Open AI for allegedly using her voice on a project without her consent, but there are positive uses for it as well. For one, podcasters could write out a script for each episode and have an AI read it in their own voice, saving time on the recording and edits. These machines have been able to sound naturalistic in their delivery and this would allow creators to spend more time researching and developing more content more rapidly. 

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Maryanne Robinson suggests that it is human-nature to mechanize our own humanity, calling us all to contemplate what we want to get out of AI, so that it can make our lives easier without making our lives less valuable. Much of the special encourages viewers to recognize the ways that discomfort can benefit us in life and foregoing any struggle could make us feel less valuable and fulfilled. 

Gates shares his hope for a future where work will no longer be the predominant aspect of our lives (looking to three day work weeks, for example!), which could challenge us to find fulfillment in other ways that we have not had the capacity to explore yet. 

The overall sentiment is that knowledge is power. The better we can understand this technology, the more effectively we can find positive uses for it in our lives, to enrich our time on earth rather than depreciate it. 

We would love to hear from all of you about the role of AI in Hollywood. Do you worry about AI stifling creativity or are you excited to see the ways it will enhance it? Are you hoping to use these tools immediately or hesitant to jump on board? Share your thoughts with us below. And tell us what else you want to see us cover.