AI will generate an explosion in creativity
When you can create a movie from your laptop, things start to get interesting
One reason why movies, and entertainment more generally, is such an interesting topic for AI technology is because everyone is familiar with the output. Everyone has watched a movie before. Fewer people have, say, negotiated a contract. So the fact that two AIs recently negotiated a contract independent of any human input is, while very interesting, also not as relatable as the notion of creating your own movie from prompting an AI. This is interesting, but not very relatable:
British AI firm Luminance developed an AI system based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM) to automatically analyze and make changes to contracts….
Jaeger Glucina, chief of staff and managing director of Luminance, said the company’s new AI aimed to eliminate much of the paperwork that lawyers typically need to complete on a day-to-day basis.
Obviously if you’re a lawyer, or if you work with lawyers regularly, this particular application of AI technology is interesting to you. And there’s an important post to be written about how AI technology will affect white collar knowledge work, such as that done by lawyers.
But I want to stay focused on entertainment, for at least one more post. My sense is that most people still don’t understand how much our world will change as AI technology becomes more powerful. There’s the saying, the worst AI you’ll ever use is the one you use today. But AI still seems relatively niche. A lot of people have yet to develop an intuition either for the rate at which AI technology is improving, or how more advanced AIs will affect almost everything in our society.
So let’s look at a short film which was created with AI tech. In this case, the filmmakers used Midjourney. Midjourney describes itself as “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.” They are “a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.”
Their most recent model was released in June 2023. The tool is accessible through a Discord bot on their Discord server. You generate images by invoking the /imagine command and your prompt.
Midjourney is, in other words, worlds removed from your typical Hollywood studio. And yet, here’s what some people were able to create with it:
I’m not an anime expert, so I am sure that there are allusions in this film to various canonical anime movies. But what I take from this is the following: it is a concrete example of the power of AI to reimagine and restructure the moviemaking process. It is an important step on the way to fully democratizing filmmaking creativity.
Now, the fact that Midjourney requires that you use the poorly designed Discord environment is certainly a hurdle. But it’s a hurdle that is relatively easily overcome for a motivated amateur interested in making her own movies. More pertinently, think of the typical development of most software: it is first hard to use, and as the software becomes more refined, more people are able to use it. There’s no reason for us to assume that Midjourney won’t become more user-friendly over time. Of course even if Midjourney fails to make its software more user-friendly, there are already user-friendly movie-making AI tools out there, such as RunwayML.
The team behind this movie created a behind the scenes video which explains how they created this movie:
It’s important to understand here that the process described in this behind the scenes documentary is more complex than simply “a random person sits in front of her laptop and generates a movie from prompts sent to an AI.” My claim is this: as this technology becomes more powerful (“the worst AI you’ll ever use is the one you use today”) the workflows associated with generating movies will simplify and become more accessible. Indeed in the introduction to this documentary, the principal speaker notes that this technology has the potential to democratize creativity for everyone.
That’s a pretty ambitious statement, and the workflow that these people designed to create their anime-inspired movie is probably not accessible to most people. But, again, it’s all instantiated in software, and software tends to become more powerful and easier to use over time.
And that’s the key. As AI technology becomes more powerful, and as the software used to interact with AIs becomes simpler, more people will have access to heretofore unknown computational and creative abilities.
So how does all of this affect Hollywood? Right now, it doesn’t. The AI isn’t powerful enough, and much of the software remains too arcane, for widespread use by people looking to disrupt Hollywood. But directional arrows of progress are important indicators, and all indications are that over the next decade or so, Hollywood is going to face a reckoning. It will collide with radically lower production costs and much more powerful software. The combination of radically reduced costs, and simple yet powerful software has given rise to legions of amateurs videographers uploading millions of videos to YouTube. Once AI-generated video approaches par with today’s human-created video, Hollywood may find itself on the losing side of a technology battle.
Sure, some Hollywood movie studios will prove flexible and adaptable. Some of them will take to AI-generated movies quickly, and ride the technology curve to great effect. But a lot of people are going to be dislocated. A lot of people who rely on existing business arrangements will find themselves trying to remain relevant in an industry which suddenly doesn’t need them any more.
Think about this: a typical movie production has a lot of CGI effects, but it also has a lot of sound stages. And those sound stages need people to build the sets, operate the microphones, etc. What happens when all of this is collapsed into, and instantiated in, software? What happens when, at some point in the relatively near future, I can sit at my laptop at my kitchen table, and enter a prompt: Generate me a noirish movie about a bank heist gone wrong. The bank heist occurred in Phoenix, AZ. The protagonist is an African-American male in his mid-30s and his moll is a drop-dead gorgeous woman in her 20s. Invoke the atmospherics and aesthetics of film noir.
That’s the world we’re heading towards. Some movie studios will be able to take advantage of this tech when it arrives. But my bet is that the more interesting work will be that of people sitting in front of their laptop at their kitchen table, trying to scratch a creative itch.