There is no doubt that AI will fundamentally change the ways in which films are made. But rather than worry about how this might affect the film-making process, we should embrace the change that is about to come and use it to think up new approaches to story-telling.
This is a link-enhanced version of an article that first appeared in the Mint. You can read the original here.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Agrim Gupta pointed out that artificial intelligence (AI) systems today are capable of generating 10 times more pixels every two years. Based on his analysis of the rate at which AI-generated video is improving, he concluded that if things continue at this pace, we will have AI-generated TV shows by 2029 and full AI-generated movies by 2031.
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Services like Sora and Kling have already begun to show us what this might look like. It seems like it is just a matter of time before we will have no need for human actors.
A Fear of Change
Last year, the screen actors guild in the US went on strike, protesting against the increased use of Generative AI in the film industry. They were concerned that given the rate at which AI is becoming more-and-more deeply integrated with various aspects of filmmaking as a process, it would fundamentally shift the way in which we tell stories through the medium of cinema.
Fears like these are not new. When power looms made textile production faster and cheaper, gangs of out-of-work handloom workers were so incensed that they went about smashing the machines that had displaced them. When banks mechanised the dispensation of cash by introducing automated teller machines, bank workers who were being replaced had similar concerns, though they raised them without resorting to the same level of violence.
Every generation of technology has given rise to similar concerns among the existing workforce—worries that the skills they have amassed over the course of their lives will soon no longer be relevant. And that, as a result, they will become redundant.
There seems little doubt that Generative AI will have a similar effect on filmmaking. Given that today’s AI systems have already ingested every genre, character and plot-line that has ever been created, it will be relatively trivial for these systems to come up with exciting new scripts far quicker and with greater creative diversity than human script-writers are capable of. When taken together with Agrim’s predictions about the rate at which AI-based video generation will advance, it seems inevitable that the process of making a movie could very soon require fewer (and eventually none) of the people who are currently integral to the creative process. This could reach a point where we, heaven forbid, will no longer need any human actors performing cinema roles.
The film industry has reacted to this with consternation. Even though it is probable that people in this field do not fully understand all that AI can do to their industry, they know enough to understand that it will fundamentally change the way films are made.
Embrace the Inevitable
But if this change is inevitable, rather than trying to prevent it from happening, the film industry would do well to embrace it. Instead of protesting every time AI is incorporated into another aspect of their creative workflow, they would be far better off learning how to work with AI, so that they can use it as a new tool to augment their own creativity.
While it might seem as if AI will let anyone become a screenwriter, what is more likely to happen is that it will start being used by those skilled at the art, as they find it offers them a powerful new tool to generate better scripts. Directors and cinematographers who embrace AI-based video-generation tools will be able to create new types of visual content and new forms of entertainment that cannot be generated by using existing cameras and visual-effects technology.
Actors who embrace AI will be able to augment their performance in ways that were previously not possible. For example, they could use AI to generate visualisations of the scenes they have to perform, so that they can better understand what they have to do. In other ways too, they could use AI enablers to extend their performance beyond what is humanly possible.
New Forms of Storytelling
Beyond all this, for creative studios that are truly willing to embrace the full potential of AI, this technology will usher in new ways of visual storytelling that will change the way we entertain ourselves. To those who understand all it has to offer, it presents an opportunity to create entirely new forms of content that are as hard for us to imagine as user-generated content would have been as recently as the turn of the century.
Studios that acquire a good grasp of how best to harness the power of AI will be able to create believable characters and storylines and use it to generate scripts on the fly. By leveraging AI’s ability to generate visual content quickly with a few commands, or ‘prompts,’ it will be possible for the world’s entertainers to produce interactive creative experiences through which viewers could participate more directly in their own entertainment.
This might take the form of completely immersive experiences—choose-your-own-adventures that have different endings each time you participate. Perhaps this might come to use some sort of a real-time voting mechanism that will capture the feedback of a global audience and then use this data to shape plot developments, so that each entertainment experience is different from the ones that came before it. Or maybe AI will allow us to craft powerful interactive multiplayer experiences in which the viewer is as much a member of the audience as an active part of the world in which the story is set and being told.
What is most likely, however, is that whatever we end up with as entertainment of the AI age will not be what we would ever have imagined.
