AI in TV and film productions won't be going away any time soon. How fast should we embrace it?
In the early aughts, Andy Serkis gave an impressive motion-capture performance as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet he wasn’t recognised by the major award-giving bodies—because it wasn’t his face. Even further back, Audrey Hepburn failed to land an Oscar nomination for My Fair Lady because her performance was supposedly incomplete, having had to rely on dubbing for some of the scenes.
Today, however. Emilia Pérez is leading the 97th Academy Awards with 13 nominations. The gangster musical’s lead Karla Sofia Gascon is nominated for Best Actress, even as her singing voice was admittedly improved with AI technology. Likewise, The Brutalist stars Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones are up for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively. The film’s editor Dávid Jancsó admitted that he used AI to refine their Hungarian dialogue. Critics have questioned whether their performances deserve the acclaim—it’s almost like they’re taking PEDs for moviemaking.
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Film studios, on the other hand, have been studying the feasibility of AI tools. James Cameron, always at the forefront of new filmmaking technology, is now part of Stability AI’s board of directors. Warner Bros. partnered with Cinelytic to use AI to make casting decisions. Lionsgate has tasked AI startup Runway AI to “create a generative model trained on its corpus of 20,000 titles spanning 27 years.” The goal is to make storyboarding and preproduction more effective.
While AI is still inconsistent at best, it’ll be only a matter of time before it perfects its methods. And whether one is for or against the use of AI in filmmaking, it is clear that it is here to stay. The industry has no choice but to keep up fast by making safe rules that could benefit everyone.
Here are some films that have already demonstrated the power of AI—for better or worse.
