What is called artificial intelligence or more specifically LLMs (Large Language Models) that can generate images and even video directly from text (Generative AI) is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge from the whole AI surge. I have seen examples of video that looks as good as anything Hollywood creates with a mix of live action and CGI. Which I guess isn’t surprising in one sense since this Generative AI, basically, is just another name for CGI. But what is amazing to me is that what formerly was a technology that tech companies sold to movie studios for millions of dollars is now at the beck and call of anyone with access to ChatGPT.
And honestly, I can’t claim to know just how usable these AI videos are from a commercial point of view. Could someone with a reasonable understanding of movie-making produce something that people would pay money to stream? Maybe. Maybe not. But what is fascinating is that I believe it’s already starting to happen. Recently several movies have gotten into the theaters that weren’t produced by Hollywood. Several YouTube “influencers” have parlayed their eight-figure viewing audiences into a multi-million-dollar box office payday by producing their own movies. Now granted, these forays into independent cinema haven’t been particularly dependent on Generative AI. Just the opposite. The two most popular examples I can think of used almost nothing but “practical effects.”
But recently several completely AI generated movies have been exhibited at major film festivals and even streamed on Amazon. Now none of these have made any appreciable money. But that may be because the movies suck as stories. After all, Disney has proven that you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a CGI masterpiece and still produce a story so stupid that no one wants to see it. But the point is if you are at all tech savvy you can now make a short sci-fi movie that looks as good as Hollywood for between $500 to $5,000. That is earth-shaking.
To me that means we are less than a couple of years until we will see tiny studios making movies that are good enough to see in a theater but have no gate-keepers whatsoever between the creators and the audience. That is a startling thing. Some young version of Stanley Kubrick will make his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey in his basement with the help of a “film crew” of less than a dozen people. He’ll make a masterpiece for about $20,000 and it will make a billion dollars and an earthquake will swallow up Hollywood completely. Think of it, all of the bloated, studio budgets and absurd rules that dictate which and how many DEI hires have to be directors, actors and producers will disappear overnight and some much saner award will be handed out for the movie that gets the most views and the highest viewer ratings.
Well, anyway, that’s the dream. How it really turns out will be interesting. Amazon, Netflix and the rest of the streaming services will be the ones to harness the new creators that will appear along with these new video tools. But they’re not entrenched in the old studio systems, at least not to the degree that Hollywood is. I think they’ll see opportunities aplenty in nurturing independent studios; at least after some of them produce stories people want to see. And that’s already happening. “O brave new world, / That has such movies in’t!”