Hollywood’s Fight: How Much AI Is Too Much?

Alan Ruck, the actor who played Connor Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” says he and a director friend tested out the generative-AI tool ChatGPT a few months ago over lunch, to see whether it could write a screenplay. 

They asked it to write a scene about Ruck as a soldier in basic training, a play on the actor’s role in the Broadway show “Biloxi Blues.”

“It was s—,” Ruck said. “It was every cliché and hackneyed idea you could imagine.” 

The potential use of artificial intelligence in TV and movies has become a hot-button issue in the biggest Hollywood labor strike in 60 years. Ruck, like many writers and actors on the picket lines, is worried the technology will replace jobs and produce low-quality content.

Entertainment executives say bots won’t be penning scripts soon, calling such fears overblown. But big companies across Hollywood, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and NBCUniversal, are already using AI tools in other ways and are actively exploring new applications, from summarizing scripts to special-effects to promotional marketing, people familiar with the situation say.

Several studio executives said AI tools could accelerate storyboarding, which uses a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds, and set design, such as dreaming up what a restaurant in the 1960s might look like. Producers could use a digital replica of an actor to make tweaks to a scene without having to reshoot it—to turn someone’s head or change their expression slightly, studio executives said. 

A promising application is for dubbing of actors’ voices in different languages. AI could make the audio sound like Ben Affleck or Harrison Ford in Italian or German and even adjust the movement of their lips accordingly.

Some production workers say this is all leading down a dangerous path. Harry Yoon, a film editor who has worked on such movies as “Minari” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” said he is worried that AI models, if fed enough data, could create a decent first cut of a scene. 

“Pretty soon executives will be asking, ‘Why do we need three editors on a series? Why not two or one?’” he said. Yoon said there is a value in the slow process of humans watching daily footage and hearing lines over and over.

Entertainment giants have talked to a range of AI players, including OpenAI, text-to-video specialist Runway, image-generator Stability Diffusion and Adobe,

“AI raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everyone,” said the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group that negotiates on behalf of studios and streamers. “So it’s something that requires a lot more discussion, which we’re committed to doing.”

Warner has held discussions with OpenAI about using ChatGPT for tasks such as creating descriptions of shows on its Max streaming service and possibly, down the road, for summarizing scripts submitted to studio executives for review, according to people familiar with the situation. 

Netflix

The labor unions involved in the strike—the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America—are pushing for better compensation in the streaming era and to shore up their benefits. But they are also pushing for protections from the rise of AI tools.

“It isn’t just a danger for creative labor in Hollywood. It’s a danger for all labor everywhere,” said Ruck, who has been out on the picket lines. “If they can program AI to replace the creative jobs they will certainly be able to program it to replace middle-management jobs.”

AI company executives say the point of their tools isn’t to replace creators, but to allow them to have more time doing the creative parts of their jobs. “We only hear horror stories and fairy tales,” said Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive of Runway. “It’s much more nuanced than that…you can’t just type in ‘make me a movie,’ and it will create a movie.”

Chad Nelson, chief creative director at Topgolf Media, who recently created a short film with OpenAI’s DALL-E tool, predicted AI tools will be replacing some creative jobs in Hollywood within one to two years. “The idea that you need to secure a drone shot on the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset with a specific color car and the light in a certain way, won’t be a thing people will have to do anymore,” he said. 

Evan Halleck, a visual-effects specialist who used Runway’s tools to work on the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” said he loves that these tools allowed him to reduce some of the more tedious work in his job. However, he said, “I have fears that a 10-day gig might become a five-day gig.”

AI tools already can handle some work done by concept designers, who are hired by studios to help illustrate a scene. “The thing that sucks about the visual-effects industry as opposed to writers or actors is we don’t have a union,” said Bilali Mack, a visual-effects supervisor who recently worked with Brendan Fraser on the Oscar-winning movie, “The Whale.” 

Mark Patch, a former visual-effects production worker, said he is trying to organize people in a union for entertainment industry workers.

The Motion Pictures Editors Guild is addressing AI and how it could affect its members in a coming report, according to a letter the group sent to its members earlier in July. 

The Screen Actors Guild says it wants to ensure studios obtain “informed consent” from actors before using digital replicas of them, and offer talent fair compensation. The Writers Guild of America has said it wants to clearly define that “source material” and “literary material,” which its members get compensated for, cannot be generated by AI tools. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has said it has made robust and fair proposals addressing those concerns.

To address the issue of consent, a startup called Vaisual is creating databases of actors who have given the company permission to have their photos taken and be part of its AI model. 

Entertainment executives said they would be open to writers using AI technologies as a tool to help them brainstorm and develop stories, but the idea of bots replacing human writers is far-fetched. 

“Generative AI can generate a lot of ideas but it can’t tell the difference between a good idea and a bad idea,” said Jon Dudkowski, a director of the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Discovery.”

Some actors and writers are worried that if they don’t take a hard line now on AI, when it is in its infancy, it will be too late.

“The AI technology we have right now is the worst it will ever be in our lifetimes, which is why it’s important right now to define if it is its own creative entity or whether it’s a tool for creatives to use,” said producer and writer Dahlia Heyman, who was picketing at Netflix on a recent afternoon. 

Leif Gantvoort, an actor who has worked on shows such as “NCIS” and “S.W.A.T.,” said he is more concerned about compensation issues than AI. “That is a wave that’s on its way,” he said. “To stand in its way—I just don’t see it as the primary concern.”

—Tom Dotan contributed to this article.

Write to Jessica Toonkel at [email protected] and Amol Sharma at [email protected]