Audiences will eventually love Tilly Norwood, or a completely artificial, AI-generated artist like her, if you believe Paul Schrader.
Rebel writer and director behind The first reformer, American gigolo and Card counter He has expressed an interest in AI-assisted filmmaking for some time (and technology in general – and recently claimed to have “bought an AI girlfriend online” who dumped him). And in a keynote speech at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event in Culver City on Thursday, the 79-year-old director expanded on his vision for how technology could transform the movie industry, even as he at times seemed a bit ambivalent about it.
“The real tipping point is when we can create an AI hero, not a hybrid hero,” he told the conference audience. “This movie makes money.” He described a scenario in which an AI tool is asked to create a movie star who ends up looking like Clint Eastwood, even though the person requesting the tool never utters the following: Dirty Harry Star name.
“The movie comes out and we’re carbon-dependent idiots spending our money empathizing with silicon-based innovations,” Schrader continued. “And they want the next movie. They want the follow-up. Well, we know where this actor lives and he works for free and he works 24 hours a day and he’s available now.”
Schrader said he disagreed with Amazon MGM Studios’ head of AI studios, Albert Cheng, the day before over whether audiences would embrace an artificial star wholeheartedly. “I think he’s just scared,” Schrader said. “I think it will happen. I think we will have a non-hybrid champion in the arts.”
Clearly, Shredder is not afraid. He’s been open about the fact that he may not live to see whether his predictions come true: “I’ll be able to ride into the cinematic sunset of that old broken-down horse we call the movies,” he said. But he’s already working on an AI movie because he finds it interesting, he says, using an old script. He has a lot of ideas on how to use the technology, like creating a new episode of I love Lucy or Bonanza Using artificial intelligence, and making her write in a ’50s style.
On a more detailed level, he made some jokes about areas of work that could replace human labor with artificial intelligence. In the 2024 movie evil“, which he saw on the plane to the conference: “I see why we pay an extra $180 a day when they look so plastic, and not only do we pay them $180 a day, but we have to shut them down and we have to feed them and we have to deal with their complaints when it gets too hot? Why don’t we just make it?” Regarding the results of true-crime entertainment documentaries: “Why would some poor guy sit there on an instrument and do that pattern when all we have to do is feed him [to an AI tool]?”
But Schrader was also clear that he believed that at some point his skills might be replaced by artificial intelligence. He described asking ChatGPT to produce a text idea in his style and seeing him produce a story idea called Collection agencyabout a former Catholic working as a medical debt collector who comes across a girl who tells an old secret. (In another Schrader-like touch, the man records a daily diary into a tape recorder while staying in cheap commercial hotels.)
“I can send it. I know the response I’ll get: That’s a second-rate Shredder…but he’ll be a first-rate Shredder soon enough.” “And it’s really top notch,” he joked NCIS“.
Schrader isn’t the only one who envisions a future where studios could try to mint artificial stars. The performers’ union SAG-AFTRA was concerned enough about this possibility that in recent contract negotiations it extracted a commitment from studios not to use artificial performers over human performers unless it provided “significant additional value” to the project.
