There’s an old idiom about “closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted”. It refers to implementing a solution too late to do any good.
That’s how I react to the complaints about Hollywood’s shedding jobs through the use of artificial intelligence in film making. Hollywood has been on a slippery slope for very nearly a century. Perhaps something could have been done about it twenty or thirty or fifty or more years ago but trying to do something about it now is too little too late.
You can practically draw a straight line from Westworld (1973) to A New Hope (1977) to Looker (1981) to Tron (1982) to The Last Starfighter (1984) to The Abyss (1989) to Jurassic Park (1993) to Minority Report (2002) to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) to Avatar (2009). I’m sure I’m leaving some steps out but you get the idea.
Many of these steps involved Michael Crichton who is clearly a seminal figure in the replacement of practical effects with CGI and now artificial intelligence.
You can draw similar (and related) evolutionary chains for dubbing (from the earliest days of sound films), “stop motion”, and for animation starting with Steamboat Willie.
Yes, AI will make a lot of jobs in filmmaking obsolete. Yes, that will include actors and actresses. I doubt that the “Tillie Norwood” strategy (as highlighted on todays Sunday Morning) will go anywhere and the first AI A Trip to the Moon hasn’t been made yet but it will be.
Yes, an enormous amount of “slop” will be produced. What I’m hoping will happen is that AI will democratize filmmaking. Anyone with an idea and enough patience will be able to create a full-length motion picture on their own or with a small team of friends. It would be interesting to see what a young Sam Raimi could do.
