Hollywood’s triumph over AI may be short-lived

Two years ago, Hollywood experienced a period of significant labor unrest,

spearheaded by two major strikes: The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike and the

Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)

strike.

These strikes, which lasted from May until November 2023, were partly driven by union

concerns over residuals and streaming compensation. But the main concerns were over

artificial intelligence’s potential impact on jobs and its use in content creation.

At that time, I was the head of the Abu Dhabi Film & Television Commission. I found

myself to be the go-to person for answers and explanations from the media and the

content-creation industry in that region. The compensation issues were familiar to me,

as these have been ongoing industry concerns that I’ve been involved with throughout

career in the film & media business. I was, however, less acquainted with the AI

implications, as consumer-friendly tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E were just starting to

seep into our daily lives.

As the requests for media and conference interviews accelerated, so did my research

into this new world of artificial intelligence, and how these unprecedented technological

advances could potentially take over various human jobs.

Two years on, the acceleration of these language learning models and their ability to

replicate human skill sets was pretty-much unforeseen, even by the creators of the

algorithms themselves. Geoffrey Hinton, aka the “Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate in

Physics, recently noted that the pace of development “was much faster than he

expected”.

Within a few short years, what we see today is that there is virtually no part of the

content-creation value chain that can’t be produced by one of the Generative AI tools

readily available online, which anyone can access:

- Scriptwriting: Commonly used language models such as ChatGPT and Descript

now generate brainstorming ideas, dialogue, edits, and even create character

arcs;

- Storyboarding: AI image generators such as Midjourney program are now able

to create storyboards and animatics, visualizing scenes and sequences;

- Scouting: AI algorithms can analyze vast databases of images and videos to

identify potential filming locations;

- Cinematography: AI-driven cameras can analyze scenes in real-time and make

informed decisions on shot selection and framing;

- Visual Effects: On-the-shelf AI tools such as Wonder Dynamics can automate

VFX tasks like motion capture, rotoscoping and rendering, speeding up the entire

pipeline;

- Animation: AI can now assist in creating 3D animations, including character

animation, lighting and compositing;

- Editing: AI-powered editing software such as Runway and Flawless AI can now

help with tasks like rough cuts, auto-transcription, and object removal, masking,

and more;

- Color Grading: AI tools such as Colourlab.ai can now automatically analyze and

enhance the color and tone of footage, giving films a polished and cinematic

look;

- Scoring: AI-driven music platforms such as InVideo and Amper Music can now

create entire original scores

- Audio Mixing: AI-powered tools such as iZotope Neutron 5 can now assist with

mixing and cleaning, ensuring the sound design is accurate and impactful; and

- Dubbing and Voiceover: AI-powered tools like Synthesia, Deepdub and Eleven

Labs speech generator are now translating and generating dubbing in multiple

languages, making films accessible to a wider audience;

And the list goes on and on with new applications being developed all the time… What’s

perhaps more worrying though is that many of these AI tools are now performing these

tasks as well as the human experts themselves, and at a fraction of the time and cost.

The unions and crews were right to be concerned two years ago when they sounded

the alarm bells about what was coming. But there are no right or wrongs in this two-

sided quandary: any studio head or CEO wouldn’t think twice about being able to make

a $20 million dollar film for $2 million.

Most of the Hollywood trades have been protected by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA

agreements ratified in 2023, where the terms of AI use set up guardrails to make sure

the new technology stays in the control of workers, rather than being used by their

bosses to replace them.

But these deals will expire in June 2026, which is now just around the corner. With the

integration of AI having become common place in most industries on the planet, one

wonders how the 2 million jobs supported by the film and television industry worldwide

will survive the increasing intergration of AI on the production value-chain.

It’s difficult to foresee how the next round of Hollywood collective agreements will

playout, or what kind of agreements will be reached this time. The best-case scenario

would be status-quo. Unimaginable to most, the worst-case scenario would be that the

slew of AI content-creation tools will have become so sophisticated that the Studios

decide that the creative content-creation professionals are no longer needed.

Hans Fraikin is a film & television industry veteran, having been an international

distribution executive at Twentieth Century Fox, head of the Telefilm Canada’s

international bureau, the founding CEO of the Quebec Film & Television Council, and

the head of the Abu Dhabi Film Commission.

In my next article, I’ll talk about how VFX behemoths are already going bankrupt,

primarily due to the rise and take-over of AI.