By Michaela Gordoni
The AI wave tsunami is unstoppable, so how will it change Hollywood business models?
AI firms are replacing Microsoft, Google and other industry giants in the tech space. OpenAI is valued at $500 billion. Anthropic is $183 billion, per Variety.
These tech firms edge closer to Hollywood as they train their models on large libraries of media to create stories, art concepts, human and animated movement and more.
Google, Facebook and other Big Tech names scramble to keep up, but so far, they haven’t stayed at the same pace as major AI companies. They already have it hard amid the competitive drive for simplified streaming.
Related: Are Hollywood’s AI Concerns Reasonable?
“Culturally, it’s been very hard,” said Doug Shapiro, media analyst and the author of The Mediator newsletter. “It’s so foreign to the media business historically that it’s a really, really difficult transition.”
Already, there have been several copyright lawsuits between Hollywood and AI companies as they break in precedents for AI and copyright infringement. Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery are suing Midjourney because the AI is rampant with copyrighted art, like Mickey Mouse, Batman and more.
For Hollywood, the new way to protect copyright may be documenting the series of prompts typed into an AI-powered bot that delivered the requested results and proving who entered the prompts.
“If there’s something you want to prevent others from reusing or re-creating, an important element of its creativity has to be done by a human,” said Ghaith Mahmood, a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins. He suggests that producers insist that all outside vendors, like visual effects firms, be “contractually required to disclose when AI is used in any of their material.”
Mahmood believes AI firms aren’t out to steal copyrights.
“They’re not trying to re-create your movie,” he said. “They’re trying to re-create the human body moving through space.”
Two movies that used AI to alter voices, EMILIA PEREZ and THE BRUTALIST, have been nominated for Oscar Awards, per BBC. Adrian Brody even won the Academy Award for best actor for THE BRUTALIST, despite that AI was used to fine-tune his accent when he spoke Hungarian in the film.
Earlier this year, Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo told the Wall Street Journal they plan to invest $400 million to craft AI tools for filmmakers.
Hollywood and AI will become more blended, but the other end of the stick could be a bold AI company gunning for Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. or HBO.
Read Next: Bob Iger Tells Hollywood to ‘Embrace’ Changing Technology, Including AI
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