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Last month we wrote a story about Lionsgate partnering with an AI company as a creative tool for making future projects. It’s a hot-button issue that some fear reduces the need for human creatives, leaving them obsolete and jobless.
Now comes news that Jason Blum, co-founder of Blumhouse, has done the same thing with an AI tech program called Meta Movie Gen which uses text-to-video software to create content. What this means for future Blum-produced movies isn’t clear, they are just exploring the possibilities before the company goes public.
Meta, the company behind the AI program says they are just experimenting. For now.
“While we’re not planning to incorporate Movie Gen models into any public products until next year, Meta feels it’s important to have an open and early dialogue with the creative community about how it can be the most useful tool for creativity and ensure its responsible use,” said Connor Hayes, VP of GenAI at Meta.
Blumhouse selected a few filmmakers to test out the software for the pilot program, one of those being Aneesh Chaganty (Searching, Run) who created the short below in defense of AI.
It’s not exactly the director’s magnum opus, but it does showcase the power and ease of using such a tool. He contends that if the software had been around when he was a kid making movies, it would have served as an instrument to make the movie he wanted, with the background he wanted, and the monsters he wanted. He says that he still would have had to come up with the concept and write the story on his own.
Maybe it’s what he is not saying that’s important. One home movie in the short titled i h8 ai, Chaganty narrates that he wanted to make an alien film, but he had to dress up his brother in a skeleton costume instead of an alien because that is all they had. Using Meta Movie Gen he uses the software to erase his brother and replace him with an AI-generated alien. Perhaps unknowingly Chaganty proved the point that AI detractors are making. He not only erased the memory of him and his brother making movies, but he also completely removed the human talent that brought the creature to life.
Think of that on a grander scale.
Blum shared Chaganty’s short film on social media, but some people weren’t impressed. MovieWeb shared one comment made by Gavin Michael Booth, a former business partner of Blum.
“Nice propaganda. You left out the part where what comes next isn’t just augmenting videos and putting FX artists out of work – it is the ability to create films without even needing the base footage. Or audio. Or actors.”
The AI debate is far from over. Some are worried that Blumhouse’s sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will use the technology, but there is no evidence that is the case. Some conspiracy theories speculate that the AI machine has already created movies, but studios haven’t admitted it to the public.
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