Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not replace the need for human creativity, despite having an impact on every stage of the filmmaking process, agreed the participants of a panel discussion entitled ’How the AI revolution and technology are shaping filmmaking’, which took place during the second edition of Saudi Film Confex (October 9-12) in Riyadh.
Speaking on the panel, which was moderated by Olsberg SPI managing director Leon Forde, were Technicolor Group CEO Caroline Parot, ORI Group founder Qian Feng and Michael Wolfson, co-founder & COO, Untold Studios.
“Human individuality and creativity will triumph because the world will always cry out for brilliant ideas,” explained Wolfson, whose London-based company Untold Studios focuses on development, production and visual effects. “AI captures everything that has been created by humankind so far and analyses it and uses it to generate new information. But it’s based on past information, content with historical stereotypes, biases and human misrepresentations. So human creativity is needed to keep populating the internet with new images to analyse.”
According to Caroline Parot, COO of leading visual effects company Technicolour Group, human imagination will not be replaced by, but rather supported by AI. “We will still need to produce content that will touch people emotionally because our customers are the people. Job titles won’t change, but the content we will deliver will go to a new frontier of 3D, holograms, small screen, more personalised content. The possibilities are quite amazing. Now we are entering this landscape, we need to go step by step.”
Wolfson said he saw the acceleration of AI work as being “about job displacement, not job replacement.”
“We are hiring a lot more technical people, artists who know how AI machines work and are able to prompt the AI programmes to create the images. A very interesting skill that artists in the future are going to need to have is not just creating beautiful images using computer techniques, but also being able to describe them.”
One of the areas affected most by the arrival of AI has, according to Parot, been the pre-production process. “The speed of AI is changing the way our artists can be even more creative at the beginning of the process. It means low added-value tasks might disappear. It is not just about cost efficiency, it’s an opportunity for us to put the artist even more at the heart of the production.”
Wolfson explained the benefits of AI when it came to filming a recent commercial involving a Hollywood actor flying on the back of a bird of prey. “Because we knew what the rig should look like, it meant we needed the actor for fewer days. AI accelerated the production process.”
Law and order
Still, one of the biggest practical challenges for the industry is that the legislation around intellectual property of AI images is still vague.
Olsberg’s Forde pointed to the fact that “whilst some studios are making deals with AI companies to develop a proprietary tool [Lionsgate teaming up with AI research company being one example], regulatory IP policies haven’t been developed and implemented and in the meantime the industry is trying to use these tools. It is still a very early space and there is still some risk.”
“When we are creating characters thanks to the data of others, the biggest challenge is we don’t know who will own and control these IP’s,” added Parot. “We are all trying to discuss together to move on regulation. Every continent is starting to regulate, but we are at the beginning of what could happen because it is quite sensitive.”
The panel agreed that the cost of implementing AI was another huge challenge across the industry.
“The cost of power is becoming a scarce resource. It’s why some of the largest tech companies in the world are investing in alternative sources of power. We’ve talked about the benefits, but it’s hard to see what are some of the savings that will pay for the cost of AI,” explained Wolfson who suggested that it might be more successful in another industry such as healthcare, where there will be a “much easier payback.”
Looking ahead Parot is cautiously optimistic about the evolution of AI for the film industry. “AI is brand new for everyone, not just for our industry. It’s a fantastic moment, we see the opportunity, but we will need to have an ecosystem, not just with our industry, to build something fantastic.”
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