Artists and filmmakers should embrace AI as a tool, not fear that it will put them out of work.
That was the message from Cristobal Valenzuela, the cofounder and CEO of hot genAI startup Runway, and Jake Aust, a veteran television producer who is now the chief innovation officer at Agbo, both of whom spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah, on Tuesday.
“These are exceptional tools for great artists,” Valenzuela said, referring to the AI image and video making models his company and others, such as OpenAI, have been releasing.
He said he regretted how polarized the conversation about AI in the creative arts had become. “It’s really hard to get nuanced conversations,” Valenzuela said. “I think we get into extremes. This is either destroying everything we know or it is the best thing we’ve ever seen in our lifetime. I think it’s like none of both. It’s somehow in between.”
Runway is known for its text-to-image and text-to-video generative AI models. At Brainstorm Tech, Valenzuela played a short video that highlighted how quickly Runway’s AI models have improved in just two years, with its latest Gen 3 Alpha model able to compose one-minute long, cinematic video clips.
But the company has been sued by artists who claim the company infringed on their copyrights by copying their works without permission and using them to train AI models. Runway has been cagey about what data has been used to train its models, saying for its latest Gen 3 Alpha model only that it was proprietary mixture of publicly-available and private data.
Aust said that angst about the impact of new technology has roiled Hollywood since the very beginning of the movie industry—fears about the advent of sound, color, television, digital production, computer-generated images, streaming, and now AI sparking similarly existential concerns. “I think we’ve been here before and it is important to recognize that Hollywood exists because of technology,” he said. “I don’t see AI as something that is going to kill Hollywood.”
He said that Agbo, like other Hollywood production houses, was mostly using generative AI models to do the initial “visualization” for films—creating preliminary story boards and concept images for what the look of a film might be. He said these were often being used at the earliest stages of a project’s development, when a production house is still trying to pitch the idea for a project to studios or producers.
Valenzuela urged artists to experiment with AI tools—to discover what their strengths and weaknesses are—and not to dismiss them out of hand. He said the best uses of the technology would push the boundaries into new art forms, comparing the current stage of AI to the earliest days of photography, when people referred to photographs as “mirrors with memories” because they had no language to describe the new art form. “Try to go for the things that don’t have names, that you’ve never seen before,” he said.
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