AI Is Trying to Steal Our Industry. Please Don’t Help Them

A Historic Bubble, And A Delusion Parade

We may have entered a historic bubble when tasks that actually require real knowledge, skill and expertise can be mounted by almost anyone. You know, the AI creation world.

In truth, AI is going to be a real tool used in the film industry. In a Deadline article titled “Danny Boyle Confirms Use Of AI In New Movie ‘Ink’” the discussion centers around approximately 30 seconds of the film using AI generated “rats,” and “Some viewers of the movie took to social media this week to ponder whether AI had been used to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Per Boyle’s video from Telluride, the answer to that would seem to be yes.” This is not the kind of use I am talking about. And, Boyle said they compensated actors (but I guess not rats) whenever they were supplanted in those 30 seconds.

What I am concerned with is the upending of the professionalism of the business by the folks who delusionally think that they can just go from a brainstorm to making movies by interacting with their computer in a dark corner. Computers, since their emergence in the late ’70’s have enabled many advances in our industry. Digital capture and making, fine-tuning, coloring, special effects, visual walls have revolutionized what filmmakers of all stripes do and can achieve. But, at the heart of AI is a system which engorges (as much as it can) all that humans have written, painted, filmed, voiced, crafted over time, and then that system allows us to, basically, blindly remix all that content, most disturbingly by creating seemingly new written material, and visual material. Where is that remixed material stolen from? Music has done this borrowing and remixing for some time, but in the hands of often poor dreamers, even if it is in their dank basement on a cheap pawn shop mixing board. That is closer to art and creation than using an LLM. But it is the unearned achievement goals that are making me worry, not really creative honoring and utilization, with intent.

Folks have been warning that citizens all around us are second-guessing everything; from vaccines to monetary policy, from international interdependency to community and neighbor relationships. These delusions of “nothing is beyond me,” have infected the minds of many. These many are afflicted with a lack of knowledge, but not of unearned intellectual chutzpah. We have to let artists bump up against and declaim and dishonor those who have achieved in their world. That is how new art and art forms are made. But trying to cheat on the homework does not make a robust industry.

I have been involved in the independent film business for years and worked with scads of filmmakers on hundreds of films and have always championed outsiders who have interesting and unique visions, and their big, medium or small dreams. Often starting filmmakers dream of getting just a tiny slice of the money that is spent on the big films out there. Making films costs money, at nearly every level. This itches in the psyche, the zeitgeist, and the culture. People want to get around the very hard work necessary to achieve in this business. They want to scratch that itch.

Expertise, Hard Work and a Dose of Luck Drive the Film Business

The process of motion picture making is a highly technical art form, and that high technical and technological expertise goes all the way through, from the crafting of a script through the planning of a film, and through the often grueling and highly technical production and postproduction, all the way to display and consumption. It requires grit, determination and vision.

And, if you thought that was enough complexity, all filmmakers who seek to enter their film into the market, have to also interact with the business side. Just wait until you dive into the complex business forms that will control your life and the life of your film: The international flow of money, tax law, rebates and incentives, chain of title, deliverables and more, which are all wrapped significantly in legal comings and goings that bound and rule the entire realm of trading, selling, licensing, windowing, and every other element of the distribution of films. You may have a dream to make a film and get out there with the folks who have spent years becoming experts in various elements of this art form and business. To do that you need to be certain you are at least on a path to becoming an expert in your element of the business too, and you need to respect and work among all the other experts as well. This business is way too complex for almost any single person to accomplish, much less succeed in.

Oh, God (or AI), Please Save Me

Learning, putting in the hours, putting in the days and years it takes to get the knowledge and experience you need will provide you with the payoff in the filmmaking industry. None of the AI will give you more than a smidgen of that knowledge, though it can possibly lead you to experts you can or need to learn from.

Please don’t think you can just jabber through a keyboard or a microphone and coax a script, much less a movie out of an interface. Stop thinking you can just chat your way to a killer lookbook or pitch deck. In fact, pitch the idea of pitching out the window of your room and watch it blow away on the breeze. (Now he is spouting blasphemy) It is not worthless, but it is not storytelling and it is not art. It is artifice, and a concept that folks cling to, to make the hard work ahead seem attainable without the labor, rejection and heartache. Movieland god is almost assuredly not on the other end of your pitch ready to whip out the checkbook and the permission slip. “Oh, god, please save me!” is not a very good business plan.

I see all around me folks making infographics with AI (like mine above) that astound them, but only confuse and confound me, or short “films” that move, that speak or crash cars, even contain music. It can sometimes be hard to tell them from a clip that a crew of ten or fifty or two hundred worked like crazy to achieve. Each of those crew members contributed their specific job, with specific experience and expertise that ensures the film will approach a level of professionalism, or art, or performance, all synced together to deliver as near a seamless event as possible. I see both ends of this, those who think it will be easy, and want it easy, and those who bleed and sweat and go through the grueling toil to get to their dream.

AI May Help, But It Will Not Make a Worthy Film or Plan for You.

I live in the here and now, make and help other people cobble their concrete plans, concrete proposals, concrete financial documents, understandable audience studies and the like. In my part of the business, it is all an effort to understand how a film goes from “concept to screen,” the stages, elements from beginning to delivery. This is a term I have used for well over 20 years, and it still encapsulates all the processes, including the potential of AI. But in my world, I present solid cases for why a film not only has a place in the world but also has audience potential and business potential, using facts, reports, data and studies, no hallucinations. If you don’t know how it works, how could you know a “fact” spit out to you is even a fact or not? This real work, with supporting data and calculations is all to show how a film can achieve that place by being prepared with real information to find and tread the path. The path of a film and filmmaker is strewn with all the fear and insecurity and trepidation anyone experiences in a march to a new endeavor, but, a plan, a map makes it much more viable as an artistic endeavor that is wrapped so deeply in business endeavors. The end is attainable through knowledge, information, effort, ingesting and digesting the endlessly changing film art and film business.

The AI money-gobblers want you to believe otherwise. Go out and do the work all the others have done before you and which they are still doing using newer and newer technology like the film business always has done. Just, please don’t ask AI to do it all for you.

Onward and Upward,

Jeffrey Hardy