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James Hawes giving evidence on British film and high-end television to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee at the Houses of Parliament, London. Picture date: Wednesday February 21, 2024.
A night at the soap opera
British director James Hawes recently testified to Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport committee that AI might be able to make realistic soap operas within three to five years. That number comes from Hawes’ own polling of visual effects professionals in the film industry and lawyers advising the Hollywood screenwriters union in its negotiations with major studios this summer.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Hollywood director Tyler Perry has reportedly put his studio expansion on hold citing concerns about AI video generators taking hold and disrupting the filmmaking industry. He said he’s reconsidering a plan to pour $800 million into his Atlanta, Georgia studio after seeing OpenAI’s Sora video generator, which is yet to be released to the public.
Perry said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that AI technology might eliminate the need for him to shoot on location, if he’s instead able to simulate scenes convincingly through text generation. Of course, he’s worried about the human toll: “I immediately started thinking of everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors, and looking at this, I’m thinking this will touch every corner of our industry.”An artificial intelligence sign is displayed on a phone screen, with the shape of a human face and binary code in an illustration.
AI will get stronger in 2024
While its lawyers are suing the world’s most powerful AI firms, reporters at The New York Times’ are simultaneously trying to make sense of this important emerging technology — namely, how rapidly it’s progressing before our eyes.
On Monday, veteran tech reporter Cade Metz suggested that AI will get stronger in innumerable ways.
“The A.I. industry this year is set to be defined by one main characteristic: a remarkably rapid improvement of the technology as advancements build upon one another, enabling A.I. to generate new kinds of media, mimic human reasoning in new ways and seep into the physical world through a new breed of robot,” Metz writes.
Huh? He’s referring to the advent of mass-market AI-generated video. Just like Midjourney and DALL-E brought AI-image generators to us in 2023, new tools will make it easy to type and generate whole videos made by AI.
Not only that, but popular chatbots like ChatGPT will become multimodal, meaning they can respond just as seamlessly with images, video, and audio as they do today with text. So perhaps there will be a true one-stop-shop for all your generative AI needs.
Logical reasoning of AI tools could also improve greatly this year, he suggests, allowing them to better function as “agents” to whom humans can delegate tasks and offload responsibilities.
Dust off your sci-fi classics: Smarter AI systems could power smart robots — though they’ll almost certainly invade factories first, rather than trying to become at-home personal butlers.