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Episode: The Sunday Read: ‘What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?’

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:33:30

Episode Shownotes

“You couldn’t have made this movie three years ago,” said Robert Zemeckis, the director of “Here.”The film stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and is based on a 2014 graphic novel that takes place in a single spot in the world over several centuries. The story mostly takes place in

a suburban New Jersey living room. It skips back and forth through time, but focuses on a baby-boomer couple — played by Hanks and Wright — at various stages of their lives, from age 18 into their 80s.Before A.I. software, Zemeckis could have had multiple actors play each character, but the audience might have gotten lost trying to keep track. Conventional makeup could have taken a decade off Hanks, who is now 68, but not half a century. The issue with C.G.I. is time and money. Persuading us that we’re watching Hanks and Wright in their 20s would have required hundreds of visual effects artists, tens of millions of dollars and months of postproduction work. A.I. software, though, changed all that accounting. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
Hi, my name is Devin Gordon and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
So maybe you remember, last year there was a major strike by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild that completely stopped Hollywood for several months.

00:00:23 Speaker_00
And one of the issues at the core of the contract negotiations with the movie studios was the subject of AI.

00:00:32 Speaker_00
Art Guild members were concerned that AI could replace humans at every stage in the creative process, that studios would soon use AI to write screenplays, direct and edit films, design the special effects, and even read and decide which scripts were greenlit.

00:00:51 Speaker_00
Actors, meanwhile, were concerned about copyright ownership over their images. They wanted to protect their likenesses from exploitation, reproduction, and profit without their benefit.

00:01:04 Speaker_00
But I also heard another perspective from AI optimists in Hollywood. They told me that the technology was still widely misunderstood. So I decided to find out what AI was actually being used for. Did the anxiety match the reality?

00:01:25 Speaker_00
At first, it was difficult to find people in the industry who would go on the record in praise of AI because that can be seen as siding with the machines or undermining union solidarity.

00:01:39 Speaker_00
But eventually, I was able to speak with artists who have already incorporated AI into their work in films you might have already seen. One use of AI is to make actors look younger or older than they actually are.

00:01:55 Speaker_00
For example, in a new movie called Here, AI transformed Tom Hanks' face to make him look anywhere from 18 to 80 years old. This method of facial replacement technology is also being used in stunt work.

00:02:10 Speaker_00
You can take the face of, say, Dwayne Johnson, and digitally paste it onto the face of a stunt person leaping off a cliff.

00:02:17 Speaker_00
Filmmakers have also used AI to bring back dead actors to reprise roles, as was done with Ian Holm for his android character in this summer's Alien Romulus.

00:02:30 Speaker_00
This is the kind of work that would typically take teams of hundreds of artists, drawing every pixel, frame by frame, several months to do, and it can cost tens of millions of dollars.

00:02:42 Speaker_00
For this week's Sunday Read that you'll be hearing next, I wanted to get as many honest takes from people in Hollywood about where AI might ultimately lead.

00:02:54 Speaker_00
And I really wanted to know, and I think many of us as moviegoers do as well, but might be hesitant to ask, could AI actually make movies better? So here's my article, read by Eric Jason Martin.

00:03:12 Speaker_00
Our producer is Jack D'Isidoro, and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.

00:03:24 Speaker_01
The Los Angeles headquarters of Metaphysic, a Hollywood visual effects startup that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, were much cooler in my imagination, if I'm being honest.

00:03:38 Speaker_01
I came here to get my mind blown by AI, and this dim three-room warren overlooking Sunset Boulevard felt more like the slouchy offices of a middling law firm.

00:03:49 Speaker_01
Ed Ulbrich, Metaphysics' chief content officer, steered me into a room that looked set to host a deposition, then sat me down in a leather desk chair with a camera pointed at it. I stared at myself on a large flat-screen TV, waiting to be sworn in.

00:04:07 Speaker_01
But then, Ulbricht clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. Smile, he said to me. Do you recognize that face? I did, right away.

00:04:21 Speaker_01
But I can't disclose its owner, because the actor's project won't come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret. Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. Smile again, Albrecht said. I complied.

00:04:38 Speaker_01
Those aren't your teeth. Indeed, the teeth belonged to famous actor. The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions with almost no lag time.

00:04:58 Speaker_01
Ulbricht is the former chief executive of Digital Domain, James Cameron's visual effects company.

00:05:04 Speaker_01
And over the course of his three decade career, he has led the VFX teams on several movies that are considered milestones in the field of computer generated imagery, including Titanic, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Top Gun Maverick.

00:05:20 Speaker_01
But in Ulbricht's line of work, in the quest for photorealism, the face is the final frontier. I've spent so much time in Uncanny Valley, he likes to joke, that I own real estate there.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
In the spring of 2023, Ulbricht had a series of meetings with the founders of Metaphysic.

00:05:40 Speaker_01
One of them, Chris Umi, was the visual effects artist behind a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that went viral on TikTok in early 2021, a moment many in Hollywood cite as the warning shot that AI's hostile takeover had commenced.

00:05:57 Speaker_01
But in parts of the VFX industry, those deepfake videos were greeted with far less misgiving. They hinted tantalizingly at what A.I. could soon accomplish at IMAX resolutions and at a fraction of the production cost.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
That's what Metaphysic wanted to do, and its founders wanted Ulbricht's help. So when they met him, they showed him an early version of the demonstration I was getting.

00:06:23 Speaker_01
Ulbricht's own career began during the previous seismic shift in the visual effects field, from practical effects to CGI. And it was plain to him that another disruption was underway. I saw my career flash before my eyes, Ulbricht recalled.

00:06:38 Speaker_01
I could take my entire team from my former places of employment. I could put them on for eternity using the best CGI tools money can buy. And you can't deliver what we're showing you here. And it's happening in milliseconds.

00:06:54 Speaker_01
He knew it was time to leave CGI behind. As he put it, how could I go back in good conscience and use horses and buggies and rocks and sticks to make images when this exists in the world?

00:07:08 Speaker_01
Back on Sunset Boulevard, Ulbricht pecked some more at his laptop.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
Now I was Tom Hanks, specifically a young Tom Hanks, he of the bulging green eyes and the look of gathering alarm on his face in splash when he first discovers that Daryl Hannah's character is a mermaid.

00:07:25 Speaker_01
I can divulge Hanks' name because his AI debut arrived in theaters nationally on November 1st, in a movie called Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, a reunion of the creative team behind Forrest Gump, and co-starring Robin Wright.

00:07:44 Speaker_01
Here is based on a 2014 graphic novel that takes place at a single spot in the world, primarily a suburban New Jersey living room, over several centuries.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
The story skips back and forth through time, but focuses on a baby boomer couple played by Hanks and Wright at various stages of their lives, from age 18 into their 80s, from post-World War II to the present day.

00:08:10 Speaker_01
You couldn't have made this movie three years ago, Zemeckis told me. He could have used multiple actors for each character, but the audience would get lost trying to keep track.

00:08:21 Speaker_01
Conventional makeup could have taken a decade off Hanks, who is now 68, but not half a century. The crux with CGI is time and money.

00:08:32 Speaker_01
Persuading us that we're watching Hanks and Wright in their 20s would have required hundreds of VFX artists, tens of millions of dollars, and months of post-production work

00:08:43 Speaker_01
Doable, in theory, but major studios don't spend that kind of money on movies like here. There's no capes or explosions or aliens or superheroes or creatures, Ulbricht explained. It's people talking. It's families.

00:08:58 Speaker_01
It's their loves and their joys and their sorrows. It's their life. AI software, though, changes all the accounting.

00:09:07 Speaker_01
By using every available frame of Hanks's movie career to capture his facial movements and the look of his skin under countless lighting conditions, physical environments, camera angles, and lenses, metaphysics artists can generate a digital Tom Hanks mask with the click of a few keystrokes.

00:09:27 Speaker_01
And what we see on screen is just one factor in AI's ascendancy. It's the quality, and it's the speed, and it's the cost, Ulbricht said, no six-month production lag, no fortune spent.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
During the filming of Here, Metaphysic devised a setup that enabled Zemeckis and his crew to follow the shooting of scenes on two different monitors, one showing the raw feed from the camera of the actors as they appear in reality, and one filtered through its AI tools, showing the actors at whatever age the scene required.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
Zemeckis has a long history of pouncing on new technologies to help him tell stories, from Forrest Gump to the Polar Express, and Hanks has often come along for the ride.

00:10:14 Speaker_01
In this case, the production breakthrough mattered as much as the image quality. It was crucial that the cast could see it because then they could adjust their performance, Zemeckis told me. They could say, oh, I see.

00:10:27 Speaker_01
I've got to make sure I'm moving like I was when I was 17 years old. No one had to imagine it. They got a chance to see it in real time.

00:10:36 Speaker_01
And despite the technical ambition, HERE only cost about $50 million, less than a quarter of some Marvel movie budgets.

00:10:46 Speaker_01
From Metaphysics office in Hollywood, I drove 30 minutes south to Sony Pictures' studio lot in Culver City to watch a screening of HERE in the basement of the Irving Thalberg building.

00:10:58 Speaker_01
And for me at least, the AI-driven scenes passed the baseline test of any ambitious movie illusion, I didn't notice it.

00:11:06 Speaker_01
But reactions are bound to vary, especially when it comes to a face as familiar as that of young Tom Hanks, a high bar for a big-screen visual effect, and when an illusion doesn't work, it can be hard to focus on anything else.

00:11:22 Speaker_01
Maybe it will turn out to be impossible to escape Uncanny Valley after all, even with the help of AI. Then again, the whole fuss over the Tom Cruise deepfakes was propelled by how convincing they were.

00:11:35 Speaker_01
And that was three years and three Nvidia chips ago. It seems like only a matter of time before they fool us all. The history of Hollywood can be told as a series of technological leaps, beginning with the invention of the camera itself.

00:12:00 Speaker_01
And each time something new comes along, jobs are lost, jobs are created, the industry reorganizes itself. Everyone in town of a certain age has seen this movie before. Past leaps, though, have tended to have narrower impacts.

00:12:17 Speaker_01
Home video changed movie distribution. Digital cameras changed movie production. CGI changed visual effects.

00:12:25 Speaker_01
The difference here is that AI has the potential to disrupt many, many places in our pipeline, says Lori McCreary, the chief executive of Revelations Entertainment, a production company she owns with Morgan Freeman, and a board member of the Producers Guild of America.

00:12:43 Speaker_01
This one feels like it could be an entire industry disruptor.

00:12:48 Speaker_01
AI is evolving so rapidly though, and remains so poorly understood by so many people in Hollywood, that it's difficult to predict how it will wind up proving most beneficial, and which aspects of the filmmaking process it will disrupt first.

00:13:05 Speaker_01
Everyone's nervous, says Susan Sprung, the producer's guild's chief executive, and yet no one's quite sure what to be nervous about.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
The use of AI in here is a critical element in its broader illusion, but it's also a small one in a movie full of old-fashioned visual invention.

00:13:25 Speaker_01
And aging and de-aging actors is just one way that filmmakers are tinkering with AI-driven facial replacement. It's also being used in stunt photography, foreign language dubbing, and increasingly in lieu of reshoots.

00:13:41 Speaker_01
AI applications are often divided into two broader categories. The first is generative AI, which helps artists and studios create things. Then there is agentic AI, which helps them get things done.

00:13:57 Speaker_01
A new AI tool called Kalea, for instance, reads scripts and generates 35-page coverage reports, along with historical comparisons and suggested theatrical release patterns, the core duty of countless junior studio executives' daily work life, though perhaps not for long.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
Gen-AI is, depending on your vantage point, either the fun kind or the dystopic kind. It's either going to empower artists or replace them, or do both.

00:14:28 Speaker_01
But Gen-AI is also the category where all the creative exploration is happening, and where filmmakers are learning on the fly how it can help them tell new stories and, they believe, make better movies.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
Shortly after HERE wrapped up principal photography in April 2023, Hollywood shut down for several months because of overlapping strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild.

00:14:57 Speaker_01
Among the central issues in both labor disputes was how to protect the livelihoods of union members from AI encroachment.

00:15:05 Speaker_01
Even a year before the strikes, AI was still just a plot device for sci-fi thrillers for most people in the movie industry, not a pressing real-world threat. Then, OpenAI unveiled its first public version of ChatGPT in November 2022.

00:15:24 Speaker_01
Suddenly, AI was an asteroid hurtling toward Los Angeles. Any day, studio executives would start using ChatGPT to spit out screenplays.

00:15:34 Speaker_01
eliminating all those pesky writers, and using text-to-video programs like Runways Gen 1 to auto-generate all the filmmaking elements that professional artists get paid to create now. Costumes, set design, cinematography.

00:15:49 Speaker_01
And even though the guilds managed to extract strict limitations on AI use in their ratified labor agreements, their victories felt pyrrhic.

00:15:59 Speaker_01
I spoke with more than two dozen people across the industry for this article, and discovered that while there's no shortage of AI optimists in the movie industry, they're often reluctant to share that sentiment out loud for fear of seeming to side with the machines, or appearing too sanguine about a technology that everyone agrees will cost some people their jobs.

00:16:22 Speaker_01
There were also a couple of occasions when an eager early adopter scheduled an interview only to cancel at the last minute at the behest of skittish corporate overseers.

00:16:33 Speaker_01
And yet, the reality of AI's adoption within Hollywood so far has been more muted and incremental, and considerably less dystopic than the nightmare scenarios.

00:16:45 Speaker_01
What was billed as an industry earthquake has been more like a slow leeching into the topsoil, AI in Hollywood right now is like AI in here. It's everywhere and it's nowhere. It's invisible and it's all over the screen.

00:17:02 Speaker_01
There's too many people in Hollywood today who think that if you type movie and press enter, you get a movie, says Cristobal Valenzuela, the co-founder and chief executive of Runway, whose AI video generation engines are among the most widely used.

00:17:20 Speaker_01
The moment you start using it, you understand, oh, it actually doesn't really work that well yet, and it's full of flaws, and it doesn't actually do what I want. The critical limitation with generative AI tools for now is the absence of control.

00:17:37 Speaker_01
CGI requires a factory line of hundreds of artists working one frame at a time. But you control every freaking pixel.

00:17:46 Speaker_01
You control every character, says Oded Grenote, a visual effects artist at a generative AI video startup called Our One, who worked on the Oscar-winning team behind Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse 2018.

00:18:02 Speaker_01
Making images with AI, Grenote explains, is like Russian roulette or a slot machine. The front end requires just a simple prompt. You write, I want Spider-Man hanging from a building, and it generates it.

00:18:16 Speaker_01
But that still leaves countless decisions up to the machine, and you're stuck with the output. What does the building look like? How is he hanging? Upside down? Sideways?

00:18:27 Speaker_01
And that's a single still image, not a full sequence, let alone a feature length film. You can't expect James Cameron to prompt an avatar scene, says Joe Plata, Metaphysics Chief Innovation Officer and the lead architect of the AI tools used in here.

00:18:45 Speaker_01
It's just not going to work. Or with Bob Zemeckis or Steven Spielberg. If you've ever made a movie with one of these guys, you know that they will want to change every pixel if they can.

00:18:58 Speaker_01
Rather than play wait and see and have AI thrust upon them in ways they couldn't control,

00:19:04 Speaker_01
Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of the previous two Avengers movies for Marvel Studios, hired a machine learning scientist away from Apple to help guide how their production company, Agbo, would use it.

00:19:18 Speaker_01
There's a lot of ways that we are experimenting with AI right now, Anthony Russo told me. We're not quite sure what's going to work and what's not going to work.

00:19:28 Speaker_01
But he is sure that AI will figure somehow into how he and his brother make the next two Avengers movies, both currently scheduled for 2026, even if it's only to help with brainstorming ideas and working through them faster.

00:19:44 Speaker_01
Over several months of talking to people around Hollywood about AI, I noticed a pattern. The people who knew the least about its potential uses in the filmmaking process feared it the most.

00:19:57 Speaker_01
And the people who understood it best, who had actually worked with it, harbored the most faith in the resilience of human creativity, as well as the most skepticism about generative AIs ever supplanting it.

00:20:10 Speaker_01
There was a broad consensus about the urgency of confronting its many potential misuses. Tech companies skirting copyright laws and scraping proprietary content to train their machine learning models.

00:20:23 Speaker_01
Actors likenesses being appropriated without their permission. Studios circumventing contractual terms designed to ensure that everything we see on screen gets written by an actual human being.

00:20:35 Speaker_01
I must have heard the phrase proper guardrails at least a dozen times. But as the prolific Emmy-winning television director Paris Barclay, who has six episodes of multiple shows airing this fall alone, put it, that's what unions are for.

00:21:06 Speaker_01
The twilight sun over the Aegean Sea behind Tom Hanks was so golden and incandescent, and lit his profile with such cinematic flair, that the composition was almost too perfect, as though it could only be the product of advanced machine learning, and not, say, Zeus.

00:21:26 Speaker_01
One week after my visit to Metaphysic, I was once again staring into a camera, and Hanks was again staring back at me. Only this time it was the real Tom Hanks, enjoying the last few days of a sailing trip in the Greek islands.

00:21:40 Speaker_01
He was tanned and relaxed in a dark open collar polo. And unlike the last time I saw him, he looked like a man in his late 60s, with clear frame glasses, tufts of short gray hair barely peeking over the top of his head, and a tight white beard.

00:21:57 Speaker_01
The nameplate at the bottom of his Zoom window read H-A-N-X. I asked Hanks if it gave him any pause making a movie so reliant on A.I. tools at a moment when so many of his colleagues in Hollywood were anxious about it.

00:22:13 Speaker_01
He rejected the premise and characterized the work on Here as being in the grand tradition of Lon Chaney and monster movie magic. This was not AI creating content out of whole cloth, he said. This is just a tool for cinema. That's all.

00:22:29 Speaker_01
No different than having better film stock or a more realistic rear screen projection for somebody driving a car. For someone like Hanks, AI could enable him to take on roles for which he had long assumed he was too old.

00:22:44 Speaker_01
If it's possible for me to play a younger person than I am, I read stuff all the time and I think, oh man, I'd kill to play this role, but I'm 68. I'd kill to play Iago, but I can't because Iago's in his 20s. I would do it in a heartbeat.

00:23:00 Speaker_01
Though pity the poor 20-something actors shut out from playing Iago by an ageless Tom Hanks. When AI evangelists talk about its capacity to empower artists, this is the kind of thing they mean.

00:23:14 Speaker_01
Though, Hanks's experiences have compelled him to contemplate some morbid implications. They can go off and make movies starring me for the next 122 years if they want, he acknowledged. Should they legally be allowed to? What happens to my estate?

00:23:32 Speaker_01
Far from being appalled by the notion, though, he sounded ready to sign all the necessary paperwork. Listen, let's figure out the language right now.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
Metaphysics handiwork has already appeared in two major theatrical releases this year, Furiosa, a Mad Max saga, and Alien Romulus.

00:23:53 Speaker_01
And in both cases, the assignment was to resurrect a fan favorite figure from an earlier film in the franchise who had been played by a since deceased actor. In Furiosa, Metaphysic enabled the director George Miller to bring back the bullet farmer,

00:24:08 Speaker_01
by putting the face of Richard Carter from Mad Max Fury Road onto the body of a living actor. In Alien Romulus, the android from Ridley Scott's 1979 original Alien, played by Ian Holm, who died in 2020, returns in updated form for several scenes.

00:24:28 Speaker_01
Even though Holm's family blessed the use of his likeness, public response was divided. The movie was a hit, but some viewers posted ethical critiques on social media.

00:24:40 Speaker_01
Then, in late August, the California State Senate passed long-gestating SAG-supported legislation requiring estate consent for AI-generated replicas of dead performers.

00:24:53 Speaker_01
When I asked one writer-director about the practice, he didn't even let me finish the question.

00:24:59 Speaker_01
Nope, nope, nope, nope, said Billy Ray, who wrote Captain Phillips, 2013, and co-wrote the 2012 big screen adaptation of The Hunger Games, and who spent his time during the strike hosting a studio lambasting podcast.

00:25:16 Speaker_01
It's completely insincere, dishonest filmmaking. It's a lie. The counter-argument I kept hearing from artists and from technologists is that filmmaking is a grand illusion at its core, and we all consent to being tricked.

00:25:32 Speaker_01
We're paying to be tricked when we walk into the theater or turn our phone sideways.

00:25:38 Speaker_01
When your movies require visiting multiple fantasy worlds, dreaming up new superpowers and nastier villains, you need to come up with lots of ideas, knowing that a vast majority of them will be bad.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
This is the grunt work of making popular art, the failing part. And AI could prove to be a godsend for artists who need to fail fast and at minimal expense.

00:26:03 Speaker_01
It's a bit like you have 5,000 phenomenally smart interns at your disposal 24-7 in all time zones, says Dominic Hughes, the Oxford University-educated AI whisperer who left Apple to join the Russo brothers.

00:26:19 Speaker_01
Hughes switched industries, he told me, in part because he came to believe Silicon Valley was getting AI all wrong. Generative AI tools are unruly and imprecise.

00:26:31 Speaker_01
Sloppy, he said, but too many companies were trying to use them for tasks where they couldn't afford to be wrong. like self-driving cars or robot surgeries or whatever, he says, and we've been struggling with that for years.

00:26:47 Speaker_01
Because if you don't wanna run over seven-year-olds in Kansas, you've gotta be 99.999999% precise. Whereas in a creative context, if I generate a bunch of elves and they have seven fingers, hallucinations in the parlance of the medium,

00:27:05 Speaker_01
It doesn't matter, because they're part of my iterative creative process of brainstorming what elves could look like. Generative AI, he has come to believe, is best suited for tasks where hallucination is a feature, not a bug.

00:27:24 Speaker_01
The sum of Hollywood's collective fears, says Bennett Miller, the Oscar-nominated director of Moneyball and Foxcatcher, is automation, robots replacing humans, just as in the movies.

00:27:38 Speaker_01
Miller spent five years making a documentary about the dawn of AI that he describes as a time capsule about a moment before a real loss of innocence in Silicon Valley. The untitled film is currently in legal limbo.

00:27:53 Speaker_01
In the course of making it, he got to know the original leadership team at OpenAI, including Sam Altman. A few years ago, they offered him access to a beta version of their forthcoming text-to-image tool, Dolly. It was astounding, Miller told me.

00:28:11 Speaker_01
From the moment that I had an account set up to literally 10 minutes ago, I've just been all in.

00:28:18 Speaker_01
This January, at Gagosian's Paris gallery, he will open his third show of ghostly, surreal images that evoke the grainy early days of photography, but were created with Dali.

00:28:31 Speaker_01
In one of them, a silhouetted man looks up from the floor of a century-old theater at a massive sea creature on stage, its body so large that it extends beyond the frame.

00:28:42 Speaker_01
It's like realizing that you had locked-in syndrome, because you really can navigate to extraordinary places. He fell in love with getting lost.

00:28:52 Speaker_01
The mistakes, the wrong turns, the model's peculiar way of comprehending the human world, a bit Louis Bunuel, a bit Diane Arbus, led to all of his breakthroughs, which is how the best art often gets made, by accident.

00:29:09 Speaker_01
It's not just a change in degree of what's been possible before. It's really like a change in kind. And yet, as much as Miller's creative practice has been transformed by AI, it's still merely a tool to him.

00:29:24 Speaker_01
And the tool doesn't make you an artist, he says. I just don't see it as a threat the same way others see it. I'm not saying that there aren't going to be huge problems that emerge, but here's the thing that I cannot comprehend.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
human artists being replaced. The great wild card of AI is that it learns and gets better, and we can only guess at its full capabilities.

00:29:50 Speaker_01
Its performance so far, though, has also highlighted the gap still to be closed, especially with text generation tools like ChatGPT, a lowest common denominator regurgitation machine whose countless practical uses don't appear to include writing screenplays.

00:30:09 Speaker_01
Tom Graham, a Metaphysic co-founder and its chief executive, says he can see AI tools summarizing news articles and doing great explainer videos for corporate work.

00:30:21 Speaker_01
I can see them creating generic or derivative stories that just kind of seem like other stories. But, he adds, amazing storytelling is very, very difficult.

00:30:36 Speaker_01
Of course, Hollywood is very much in the business of generic and derivative stories, in which case why not completely outsource the hack work to AI?

00:30:46 Speaker_01
The Writers Guild of America's labor deal forbids that, though count on studios to use it for anything in the script development process that can save them money.

00:30:56 Speaker_01
And some creative guilds are bound to be hit hard by the adoption of AI, especially in digital animation, with its battalions of entry-level artists who spend an entire year tweaking pixels on two minutes of film.

00:31:11 Speaker_01
Many of those people could be working in AI soon, and fortunately for them, AI firms are hiring.

00:31:19 Speaker_01
We need to double our size really quickly just to keep up with the demand, says Alejandro Lopez, the chief marketing officer at Metaphysic, which currently has about 120 employees working remotely in more than 20 countries. We are so behind.

00:31:37 Speaker_01
But as anxious as the guilds are, Hollywood's history with paradigm shifting technology suggests that the folks on the studio side, the agentic side, have just as much to fear.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
We went from renting movies to streaming them, and it's not filmmakers that go away.

00:31:55 Speaker_01
Blockbuster goes away, says Bryn Mooser, a filmmaker and a co-founder of the streaming channel Documentary Plus, whose new company, Asteria, is an independent movie studio bidding to be the Pixar of AI. Or think about the switch from film to digital.

00:32:14 Speaker_01
Polaroid is the one that's got to figure it out. Kodak has to figure it out. Photographers are still there.

00:32:21 Speaker_01
Filmmaking is often described as the most collaborative art form, and metaphysic was just one among many creative contributors to the trickiest scenes of Hanks and Wright as young lovebirds in here.

00:32:35 Speaker_01
The actors performed in full period costume, not in green suits covered with ping pong balls.

00:32:41 Speaker_01
The makeup department taped back the loose skin around Hanks's neck and pulled up his droopy ears so Hanks's AI-generated young face would match Hanks's real-life old head. And, of course, they had award-winning actors to deliver all the lines.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
You still need the warmth of the human performance, Zemeckis told me. The illusion only works because my actors are using the tool just like they use their wardrobe, just like they'd use a bald skullcap. It was the future of Hollywood.

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And it looked, uncannily, like its past.