Hollywood’s A.I. Judgment Day

And a deeper truth behind the creepy senator from Alabama

Image from the Our T2 Remake A.I. film parody of Terminator 2

Hi you,

I’ll skip the long intro this week in the interest of time. If you haven’t yet paid for a Puck subscription to read my last piece about President Joe Biden’s struggles with Black voters, or if you prefer me to read it to you, I did a special YouTube Live reading on Super Tuesday and took some questions. I’m going to experiment more with this format, so keep an eye on my channel.

The president gave a mostly strong State of the Union address last week, though he did look a little claymation-y to me—and probably set the record for coughs by someone giving a joint address to Congress. Brittany Packnett Cunningham has an explanation of the G.O.P. rebuttal from Alabama Senator Katie Britt that’s truly worth watching, and you’ve surely seen lots of comedy about the odd performance by now, so I won’t link to those.

In the meantime, with this being Oscars week, I’m focusing on a nascent part of the film industry: A.I. filmmaking. I spent some time talking with writers, directors, and an entirely new cadre of creators who are excited to tell stories in a new way.

Hollywood’s A.I. Judgment Day

Just a few days before the Oscars, eight miles west of the Dolby Theatre, I drove to the old Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard to glimpse what may be the future of filmmaking in Hollywood. It was a screening of Our T2 Remake, an almost entirely A.I.-generated parody of James Cameron’s Terminator 2. I had stumbled across the film while watching one of my favorite YouTubers who covers A.I. and, without overthinking it, bought two tickets.

After all the agitation over whether artificial intelligence will destroy Hollywood, I was eager to see if “one of the world’s first A.I. feature-length films” was actually any good. Less than a month earlier, OpenAI had revealed Sora, its breakthrough generative video tool that appears to be leaps and bounds ahead of its competitors’, allowing just about anyone to turn a simple text prompt into practically photorealistic moving images. It landed with such an impact that Tyler Perry immediately decided to put his $800 million studio expansion on hold, blaming the technology’s “mind-blowing capabilities” for his reticence to invest. Maybe it was a scapegoat, but the panic in the industry is real.

Inside the Nuart, however, the tech-savvy crowd was mostly excited. I immediately ran into Willonius Hatcher, a fellow Black creator I first met at SXSW Interactive over a decade ago. He’s embraced A.I. video making, and some of his work has gone viral on Instagram, including a trailer for a fake movie featuring famous Black comedians as the Avengers. Willonius, who had flown in from South Florida for the screening (and to take a meeting with Kevin Hart’s production company), walked me through the theater lobby and introduced me to other members of the A.I. filmmaking community: Dave Clark, a commercial filmmaker whose A.I.-based spec Adidas ad has been generating buzz; Shelby and Caleb Ward, who created Curious Refuge, the online A.I. filmmaking academy behind viral videos re-creating I.P. like Star Wars in the style of Wes Anderson; and Jeremy Boxer, a creative director and co-founder of the L.A.-based Friends With A.I. collective. I was also joined by my friend Matt Klinman, a comedian, TV writer, and tech critic whom I first met during our days at The Onion.

It was an extraordinary night, capped off by Clark screening a hybrid A.I./live-action horror short. So much of the vibe in Hollywood these days is fear or outright opposition to A.I., but as Nem Perez, one of Our T2 Remake’s executive producers, said, “We’re really not out here to destroy the world. We just want equal opportunity. We just want to make movies and films.” Perez is now one of the ringleaders of this creative community, and for a few hours I was at its physical epicenter: a screening of a parody of a film about a deadly superintelligence, made by creators using A.I., in Los Angeles, a few days before the Oscars. So here are a handful of observations, thoughts, and predictions about what A.I. filmmaking tools are going to do for us… and also what they’re likely to do to us. 

And this is where I direct you to the full piece in Puck! It includes

• A comment I got from director Guillermo del Toro!

• The new type of talent required to create with these tools

• The powerful role of editing

• The new voices empowered to create but not necessarily make money

• How the speed of change makes this unlike previous technological revolutions

Closing thoughts because I like you.

When I first started writing about generative A.I., a very distant 15 months ago (or was it 15 years?), I expressed hope that we would be able to get ahead of the threats because we were quick to name and organize against them, unlike previous waves of technology. As del Toro put it to me, “The moral and ethical aspects of [A.I.] will need to be regulated and the nature of copyrighting and creation will necessitate a long, long time to happen.” But we don’t have a long time. The emergent problem is that the thing we’re organizing for is also changing faster than anything else we’ve dealt with. We can pat ourselves on the back for moving quickly against A.I., but if A.I. is progressing at an exponential rate compared to the explosion of social media, are we making progress? It melts my brain to even think about this, but we must work hard to figure it all out. It won’t sort itself out magically. 

At the theater last week and elsewhere, I’ve seen firsthand how A.I. can be used as a tool to unleash creativity and create beauty—and, perhaps most importantly, offer new inroads for people who have been traditionally excluded from a very gatekept industry. Whatever revolution is ahead of us in entertainment, it is all but certain that A.I. will play a central role. But if that technology evolves too fast, and the old industry burns to the ground before we can establish the pillars of support and safety that will protect the creators and businesses that keep it propped up, the potential utopia that A.I. evangelists continue preaching about will evolve into something much darker. 

Read it all.