Over her more than four decades in the film industry, Kathleen Kennedy has been at the forefront of technology, both through her work in… star wars Universe or all those Steven Spielberg. Jurassic Park It alone makes you a pioneer.
You might expect, then, that this veteran would be similarly enthusiastic about AI in filmmaking. But Kennedy sounded more skeptical on Tuesday, even as he spoke with one of the AI founders at an event he hosted.
“Taste is absolutely fundamental to the process of making things,” she said in an on-stage conversation with Runway co-founder Cristobal Valenzuela, as part of an AI Summit hosted by the New York-based startup in Manhattan on Tuesday. She said: “They are life and educational experiences. The best film and photography directors came out of art and studied art.” She suggested that films that rely on artificial intelligence, by definition, cannot have this experience.
The event saw a series of prominent figures speak out about the promise of AI in cinema, a cause Runway has dedicated itself to pursuing. Valenzuela delivered a keynote address titled “Normalizing Magic” to an auditorium packed with hundreds, and executives from Adobe, Promise AI and Paramount all praised the technology’s artistic potential with thoughts like “human creativity will endure.” [now] “Don’t be constrained by time” (Adobe’s GenAI New Business Ventures Vice President, Hanna Al-Sager).
Kennedy, who left her position as Lucasfilm president in January, hasn’t completely dismissed the technology, saying it could help with the kind of basic tasks that almost everyone agrees it could be useful for —
“Planning, budgeting, scheduling.” But that was faint praise when I doubted more sweeping requests.
“Once you get into the implementation phase, the model can get stuck in the essence of filmmaking,” she said. “What are you trying to do? What painting are you trying to create?” Kennedy said. “there [beautiful] Unpredictability in the creative process will be difficult to maintain because AI is so predictable.
At one point, she also defended Hollywood’s creative community, leveling an accusation, albeit a muted one, against parts of the tech world for how it is implementing the AI movement.
“I think what’s missing from the discussion right now is transparency, and I think people,” she said [in Hollywood] They feel like there’s a lot they don’t know about what’s going on. When there is a conversation about how to train these language models, for example…. “I think if we can get to a point where there is more transparency in those discussions — and, frankly, more transparency, and therefore, in the people who are using these tools,” she added, “I think that will help tremendously in dissipating [the distrust]”.
Valenzuela has mostly deferred to Kennedy and not challenged her, although the AI community of which he is a part believes there is transparency and largely sees AI-skeptical filmmakers as too traditional and needs to get on board. He occasionally brought up common counterpoints, such as the idea that AI tools would lower the barrier to entry for filmmakers.
Companies like Runway see themselves as a bridge between Silicon Valley fanatics and Hollywood skeptics, catering to filmmakers with tools and eschewing social apps like ByteDance’s Seesaw (the Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise movie fighting people).
Kennedy has embraced some potential new use cases for AI in filmmaking, such as getting simulated opinions from a group of actors about a script without having to extract it from them (the idea being to get new perspectives on the material). She also said that thanks to artificial intelligence, “we’re on the verge of something that might look very different from the experience of a two-hour movie…or TV,” most likely in short form.
But she seemed largely wary of incorporating artificial intelligence into the filmmaking process, and even raised eyebrows at 3D printing, saying it did not create supports as sturdy as those made by traditional human methods.
“The interesting thing that happened with the props was that after about 3 minutes a lot of them started breaking, and we realized that when a lot of the things we do are done by hand, the materials used and the choices made… were something that was decided by humans. And when we were doing it with new technology, we didn’t take advantage of that.”
Kennedy’s most philosophical response to the AI camp came when she described the value of the human experience in film.
“I’m going to sound like a traditionalist,” she said, “but I have a deep appreciation for learned experiences that then contribute to the collaboration and the creative process. And it’s just like when we’re working with a composer, if you know that someone is classically trained, but they’re still performing a very modern, rock ‘n’ roll piece of music, you’re going to delve into the decision-making process along the way that I think is really valuable.”
She said the same thing with lighting.
“It’s one of the most complex tools in art because it permeates everything we do,” she said. “And you need to see a lot of examples so you can do it the right way.”
