Is Hollywood ready for artificial intelligence?

The hotel employee who checked me in was visibly excited. When she leaned over to tell me something secret, I half expected to hear that Ryan Gosling was staying there.

“There is an artificial intelligence robot staying at the hotel,” she said. “He was here at the bar.”

“Does she have her own room?”

“I’m not sure if…,” the woman paused. “do you say What is with you? Processor? friend?”

I had no idea, and I still don’t. While breakthroughs in large pre-trained language models are driving this AI moment, one thing that was on display in Austin this week is how few words we have to properly discuss them.

But we discussed it at SXSW, where AI was the topic that dominated hundreds of panels, workshops, talks, and meetup sessions across 24 different tracks. The overwhelming message that came out of the film’s run was that AI is a powerful tool, poised to turn the entertainment industry upside down, but with the potential (if implemented correctly) to enhance human creativity.

It’s a very SXSW message, where innovators talk about burgeoning technology like Yoda talks about the Force: Very powerful, but if you learn how to use it, you can use it forever.

Meanwhile, the community at the SXSW Film Festival had healthy skepticism about the conference’s tech innovation rhetoric. As one colleague, a longtime SXSW attendee, put it: “Every year they tell us this new thing is going to change everything and ‘democratize filmmaking.’”

More recently it has been blockchain technology; Before that, VR. For several years, the conference has talked about how live streaming would level the playing field… which it has, although the act of doing so has turned out to be painfully sharp. The 2023 WGA strike exposed how movie studios, in the name of streaming capabilities, did lasting damage to the film and television industries.

These conflicting viewpoints led to a real-life demonstration at the March 12 premiere of “The Fall Guy.” The show was preceded by the SXSW conference’s AI recap, but the video’s voiceover became inaudible as the sold-out Paramount Theater audience revealed its disdain with boos and whoops.

In attendance were Daniel Cowan and Daniel Scheinert. Earlier that day, the Oscar-winning filmmakers gave a keynote at SXSW, “How We Succeeded at Doing Everything Everywhere at Once,” which also gave voice to the filmmaking community’s fear of artificial intelligence in the wake of the Sora demo Just three weeks ago. .

“It’s magic, it’s going to solve cancer and provide solutions, it’s a powerful thing, but I’m really terrified by this new story,” AI’s Cowan said. “If someone says there are no side effects and it’s great, that’s terrifying nonsense. We have to think about how we disseminate these things carefully.

In many ways, the Daniels, who premiered “Everywhere Everything All at One” at SXSW 2022, represent the spirit of a DIY filmmaker. Their films look handcrafted and bear their fingerprints, which is a contrast to what artificial intelligence represents to those at Paramount.

Adding to the inconsistency is the reaction to the premiere of “The Fall Guy.” Rolling around in the back of a pickup truck on 6th Street, after his new performance of “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars, Gosling’s brilliantly orchestrated arrival said everything about movie stardom being unsurpassed by an artificial intelligence robot.

Fresh off her Oscar win for “Oppenheimer,” Universal president Donna Langley and her team were also in Austin to unveil what will likely be another box office hit for the premier theatrical studio. Director David Leitch’s film is an ode to practical stunts and a return to big action and romance. Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s chief film programmer, described The Fall Guy as the kind of old-school movie that “makes you remember why you first fell in love with movies.”

This premiere encapsulated something about this cult moment in cinema, the power of movie stars over franchises, the re-embracing of celluloid and moviegoing, and the belief that computer-generated images are bad (interesting, practical stunts), leading to the natural conviction that the implementation of artificial intelligence will It only gets worse. As someone who learned filmmaking while watching 16mm prints of studio films from the 1930s and 1960s in a basement screening room, I couldn’t help but smile when the jubilant Paramount audience exited the premiere, one of them shouting: “AI will never make this !

There is no denying the fact that something has been lost in Hollywood filmmaking over the past 10-20 years. The basic principles in the struggle against Hollywood’s transformation into the Marvel universe are rooted in two ideas: the primacy of the director and that worldbuilding occurs in the visualization of the frame. A director’s vision when nurtured with studio money, time, and talent produces cinematic excitement that far exceeds recent blockbuster-dominated productions. Now, in the midst of Marvel fatigue and the triumph of “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” “Dune: Part Two” and soon “The Fall Guy,” there’s a little wind in those sails.

And while my heart goes out to those who were at Paramount on Tuesday night, there is something troubling about the knee-jerk reactions rooted in a belief system that doesn’t always reflect what the modern movies we love are like. In reality to make.

Four hours before the premiere of The Fall Guy, I participated in an AI workshop hosted by Framestore, the visual effects company that works on many, many major films, including (Shhhh!) “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie,” and “The Lying Man.” Like many filmmakers in virtual production, animation, and visual effects, they are not only excited about the advancements that artificial intelligence might bring to their craft, but they are also employing them. AI be damned, Framestore is made up of old-school craftsmen – but our anti-CGI viewpoint denies our understanding of that.

Over the past three decades, visual effects artists have had to reinvent their workflow several times to incorporate new innovations, making them more open to the potential of artificial intelligence. A recent seismic development has been the introduction of real-time game engines that are breaking down the barrier between visual effects and other filmmaking crafts, a trend that will only accelerate in the coming years.

However, this is not a popular topic for discussion. By rejecting the way Hollywood started making films, we have developed a belief system that new technologies and tools are to blame, rather than focusing on how to employ them. When every action director we have on the Toolkit podcast pretends that everything is practical and not CGI, and Christopher Nolan would rather you believe he dropped a real bomb instead of using visual effects, we’ve reached a point of dangerous orthodoxy. An anti-CGI cult has formed, which has given studios permission to regularly delay, block, or block interviews with VFX teams because doing so would somehow diminish our appreciation for the amazing work of “Barbie” production designer Sarah Greenwood, or worse, Our embrace. To see Greta Gerwig and her pre-digital roots in “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Wizard of Oz.”

I would call bullshit. Beyond justice and acknowledgment of the hundreds of people who work on our favorite films and TV shows, we must realize that the death grip on tradition creates the worst kind of self. It’s not about drinking the Kool Aid at SXSW that promised we’d all be wearing VR headsets by 2021; It deals with how rapidly new technology is already being advanced and implemented, as AI tools are expected to be used in visualizing projects at every budget level and stage of the filmmaking process.

The biggest problem may be our language and lack of it, which leaves us no closer to being prepared for the difficult conversations about generative AI. To be clear, no filmmaker using AI believes that a well-written prompt will allow Hollywood to produce a musical in the style of The Daniels Family. (Most don’t even see a path for generative AI video to end up in their final product.) Filmmakers who insist on this dystopian perspective risk becoming flat-Earthers in Hollywood. By actually turning our belief system into a tool object good or badInstead of turning our critical (and highly skeptical) eyes to how we employ it, our path toward irrelevance will continue to move as quickly as technology.

Take out your phone. (According to Google Analytics, 75 percent of you are holding one while reading this article.) Look at some recent photos and videos, then compare them to those you took six years ago. Lenses and resolution have improved dramatically, but have they really gotten better technically at taking photos? For most of us, the answer is no.

Your phone is already an AI camera. (Presto: We’re all early adopters of AI.) Its devices have a neural engine that uses machine learning to analyze countless photos and make adjustments to the scene in front of you, but does that make the photos less authentic? Newer iPhones have the ability to get deep data, and with free AI software, your simple videos can become motion-capture animations like an amateur James Cameron.

There’s a lot to be skeptical about AI, as well as good reason to distrust how Hollywood and corporations use it to create “content,” but it’s also why we should educate ourselves rather than keep our collective heads in the sand. If we don’t understand how technology is being adapted as a filmmaking tool, we leave ourselves powerless to shape the conversation around what we collectively hold dear: the creation of moving images through the eyes and hearts of imperfect human beings.

And go watch “The Fall Guy” on May 3. It is a nice. Look forward to Bill Desowitz’s coverage of the CGI work that allowed stuntmen’s amazing stunts to shine — once Universal lifts its ban on interviews in the fall.