My friend Andy Halliday sent me today’s “The Daily AI Show” podcast. He and his co-hosts Jyunmi Hatcher, Beth Lyons and Brian Maucere mulled over the question “Will An AI Movie Win an Oscar Within 7 Years?” Andy knows I have a particular interest in Cinematic AI, having worked in motion pictures the first ten years of my career. Indeed, I listened to the whole podcast and even wrote my own thoughts on this very compelling question: will an AI movie win an Oscar within 7 years?
Bob Zemekis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Roger Rabbit) is directing a film starringTom Hanks and Robin Wright, Here, due November 2024, in which the actors are de-aged by using Metaphysic AI. In some scenes, the stars’ avatar will be the only performers. This could certainly win an academy award for best picture, or more likely, Special Effects, and could happen in 2025. Does that count? Metaphysic is famous for its deep fake Tom Cruise TikTok videos from 2022.
AI is a tool that will enhance the special effects and animation pipeline, where work can cost millions of dollars per minute. In most but not all cases the AI should disappear. This will happen sooner than 7 years. Winning an Oscar, or even being nominated, will require, as always, great filmmaking, by humans. Using AI, along with other cloud-based approaches, will enable producers to make $100M movies for $10M. They don’t give you awards for that, but it’s a dramatic change.
There’s one use of AI in entertainment which artistically, could be the most compelling: Films made, or hallucinated, by AI from a prompt. This is one person, doing very little, “making” or prompting, the film. This may well become a genre; imagine a channel or YouTube channel, that shows films imagined by Sora and other AI, with very limited human intervention. I saw synthetic media for the first time at SXSW where “The Golden Key” won for the immersive category (it didn’t fit into any other category). I could have watched the film produced using Stable Video in real time for hours. The viewer can choose which actors they’d prefer in their synthetic entertainment, or have their own avatar “star” in the show.
Finally, from an awards standpoint, I predict it will take the Academy a decade – or more – two decades – to accept this new synthetic media (who knows what it will be called) genre as legitimate. As the panel notes, MP Academy is a lifetime membership. It is structured so that the final vote is made by the members whose average age is 65 +. The audience would have to show they really want this, and still it will take decades before academy voters even consider synthetic actors, directors, composers, editors, etc. etc. Seven years is soon.
Personally, I have not seen anything to suggest a screenplay will be “written” by AI. Instead, a skilled writer will use it as a co-pilot, as a tool, which will be invisible. Professional writers in journalism, academia, media and business are using AI, but it is invisible. It is merely a tool to make the process move faster.
The studios, while giving AI lip service (“AI! Of course we’re working on it”), have too much to lose by using AI before the legal and copyright issues are resolved. Also, these are union shops, which will resist AI by nature, so it will take a lot of friction to introduce it. More likely, in ten years, a studio will go buy Metaphysic.
Finally, as the “Daily AI Show” wrapped up, Halliday pointed out that AI will be used by the entertainment industry in ways that have nothing to do with awards. Marketing, for example, will use AI. Recommendation engines, discovery engines, used by streaming services are powerful machine learning algorithms. There are of course many definitions that would call this ML app AI.
