The Daily AI: Yes AI can win Oscars
Do We Really Want Terminator Oscars?
The Academy has announced that AI use will not rule out an Oscar. What to make of this? The reaction to AI in filmmaking tends to fall into one camp: that it's bad for creativity and bad for the industry.
I veer towards a different, uncomfortable opinion. That AI might actually deliver creative possibilities while (simultaneously) being catastrophic for the people of the industry.
Why do I think this?
I suspect it may, at least for a while, change the fate of writers. Turning them into hybrid creatures - half writer, half producer. Traditionally, writers are excluded from the production process once they hand over a script or a book. They typically lack the money or skills to realise their own work onscreen. But AI could shift that — making writers more like today’s music producers. Today, a music producer can access an entire symphony, a full studio, any instrument or sample they like, all compressed into a single laptop. Could the same become true for screenwriters? And what will that mean?
AI Cliché
A current, dreadful AI cliché is that soon we’ll see the first billion-dollar, one-person business. The idea being that AI allows a single individual to create something extraordinary — using agents and generative models — to run a powerhouse enterprise.
It’s possible. And I’m intrigued by the One Person Studio.
Think of previous artistic schools. like the Impressionists. Their work is celebrated today partly because they embraced industrial chemicals — brighter pigments, better spread — and turned them into something vivid, modern, brilliant. There may new creative chemicals to be found with AI.
But there may not: currently there is something strange, flat, and homogenous about AI-generated art. Despite its increasing competence. And some really strange possibiliteis are lurking.
Long Prompts
It is likely — or inevitable — that we’ll see completely autonomous films in the near future. After all, a script, is similar to a long prompt.
That possibility does worry me. The labour savings would be enormous, and the profits vast. A solo studio executive could cycle endlessly through film after film, algorithmically generated, waiting for that one viral hit every hundred or so automated turkeys.
No need even for writers then. And it will mean cinema moving fully to the attention model of Spotify and YouTube.
What to make of the Academy’s decision? I’m uncertain. I wonder what we’re going to see — and whether we’re heading for a lot of Terminator Oscars.