A.I.'S -HOLLYWOOD- AIM : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

THE SUM OF HOLLYWOOD'S collective fears, says Bennett Miller, the Oscar nominated director of ''Moneyball'' and ''Foxcatcher,'' '' is automation'' - robots replacing humans, just as in the movies.

Miller spent five years making a documentary about the dawn of A.I. that he describes as a '' time capsule '' about a '' moment before a real loss of innocence in Silicon Valley.'' [ The untitled film is currently in legal limbo.]

In the course of making it, he got to know the original leadership team at OpenAI, including Sam Altman. A few years ago, they offered him access to a beta version of their forthcoming  text-to-image tool, DALL-E.

'' It was astounding,'' Miller told me. '' From the moment that I had an account set up literally 10 minutes ago, I've just been all in.''

And yet as much as Miller's creative practice has been transformed by A.I. It's still merely a tool to him - and ''the tool doesn't make you an artist,'' he says.

''I just don't see it as a threat the same way others see it.''

The great wild card of A.I. is that it learns and gets better, and we can only guess at its full capabilities.

Tom Graham, a Metaphysic cofounder and its chief executive, says he can see A.I. tools '' summarizing news articles and doing great explainer videos for corporate work.

I can see them creating generic or derivative stories that just kind of seem like other stories.''

But, he adds, '' amazing storytelling is very, very difficult.''

Of course, Hollywood is very much in the business of generic and derivative stories, in which case why not completely outsource the hackwork to A.I.?

The Writers Guild of America's labor deal forbids that, though count on studios to use it for anything in the script-development process that can save them money.

Filmmaking is often described as the most collaborative art form, and Metaphysic was just one among many creative contributors to the trickiest scenes of Hanks and Wright as young lovebirds in ''HERE.''

The actors performed in full period costume, not in green suits covered with ping-pong balls. The makeup department taped back the loose skin around Hanks’s neck and pulled up his droopy ears, so Hanks’s A.I.-generated young face would match Hanks’s real-life old head.

And, of course, they had award-winning actors to deliver all the lines. '' You still need the warmth of the human performance,'' Zemeckis told me. It was the future of Hollywood, and it looked uncannily like its past.

A.I. is an unfinished script in Hollywood. It is already powering visual innovations. Many wonder what's coming.

The World Students Society thanks Devin Gordon.