Filmmakers Are Worried About AI. Big Tech Wants Them to See ‘What’s Possible’

When Hollywood’s writers and actors went on strike last year, it was, in part, because of AI. Actors didn’t care for the notion that their likenesses could be used without their permission, whether by the studios that hired them that week or by someone at home with a computer in 2040. Writers didn’t want to do punch-ups on potentially crummy AI scripts or have their words (or ideas) cannibalized by large language models that didn’t pay them a dime.

But while some Hollywood filmmakers came out of the strikes fearful of how AI might wreck their industries, others wanted to learn more. This week, many of those filmmakers gathered in a movie theater in Culver City, California, for the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative-AI film competition sponsored by FBRC.AI and Amazon Web Services.

Hundreds of moviemakers applied to be in the competition, and 50 were chosen. They got prompts and a production manifesto from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Hard Candy director David Slade, credits to use on AI tools like Luma Dream Machine and Playbook, and a 3D version of a diner from Global Objects to use as a setting. They had a little under three weeks to turn in a two- to five-minute short. From those, eight were chosen to compete (you can watch seven of them here), in-person, with the audience at Monday’s LA Tech Week event selecting the ultimate winner.

 

The Culver Cup championship belt that is awarded to the winner of the Culver Cup gen AI film competition.

Courtesy of Amazon Web Services Inc.

 

The final bracket for the Culver Cup.

Courtesy of Amazon Web Services Inc.

The competition was meant to be “a little experiment,” says FBRC.AI cofounder Todd Terrazas, a way to gauge where the still nascent scene is now compared to where it’s been and where it’s going. Some mistakes in the shorts were inevitable, like inconsistencies in characters or noticeable visual artifacts, but event attendees generally seemed to come away impressed. Jon Jones, the head of AWS Startups, says the point was to see “what’s possible, not what’s perfect.”

Figuring out what’s possible is a fraught proposition when it comes to AI in Hollywood. Because even while AWS Startups is working with companies making generative AI tools for filmmaking, the division of Amazon that produces content for Prime Video spent much of last year bargaining with writers’ and actors’ unions, as part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, over best practices for using AI in movie- and TV-making. The AMPTP has been negotiating with animators over AI, among other things, since August.

Amazon MGM Studios wasn’t involved with the Culver Cup. Instead, the event was an attempt to show how AI could be used to automate processes that independent filmmakers couldn’t do on their own. Hollywood will have to figure out the most fair way to use them.

A similar refrain came out of Adobe’s Max conference this week, where the company showed off new AI-powered video-editing tools while claiming they’re “not a replacement for human creativity.” Meta sang a similar tune on Thursday, when the company announced a collaboration with Blumhouse for which the horror studio paired filmmakers—Casey Affleck, Searching’s Aneesh Chaganty—with Meta researchers to test out its forthcoming Movie Gen video tool.