“You can generate any footage that you want.”
Actor Brain
Ashton Kutcher — who’s no stranger to controversy these days — has an eye rolling prophecy about the future of filmmaking.
In the near future, the “That ’70s Show” star predicts, entire movies will be generated with artificial intelligence. Specifically, it’ll be OpenAI’s much-touted video generation tool Sora that’ll be paving the way to this nightmarish future, a prediction informed by his fiddling with a beta version of the tool.
“You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real,” Kutcher said during a conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in LA, per Variety.
“It still makes mistakes… But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds,” he added. “In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
Movie Miser
Some major productions have already used generative AI, such as the Marvel TV show “Secret Invasion,” which used wonky AI images for its opening credits sequence. Kutcher, however, imagines Sora will play a much larger role in filmmaking than that early foray — perhaps something like that Sora-made short film that turned out to not exactly be made with Sora?
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100?” he asked. “To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars.”
He even fielded the idea of Sora being used to replace himself for certain movie sequences — which could perhaps prove to be his most accurate prediction, as a production chintzy enough to rely on gobbledygook AI imagery sounds like exactly the kind of project he’s bound to star in based on his dismal career trajectory.
“Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI],” Kutcher spitballed.
Top Minds
To be fair, Kutcher’s not the only Hollywood has-been enamored by the AI tool. He’s in good company with producer and director Tyler Perry, who pretty much blurted the same breathless talking points after seeing demo footage from Sora.
“I no longer would have to travel to locations,” Perry said in February. “If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing.”
Fortunately, not everyone in the industry’s on the same page as those two. Most screenwriters, who fought for historic guardrails on AI’s use in their trade, would probably tell them to get bent.
We don’t doubt that some movie productions will want to take a bet on AI. As for audiences, however, our guess is that they’ll “sniff out the bullshit,” as actress Dakota Johnson recently put it, and take a hard pass.
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