Modern Times 3: Lionsgate, Dead Celebrities, Gordon Ramsay, AI Rules and more...
Lionsgate entered the AI game, digital replicas are now getting jobs in the movies and some regulations have been laid out. This is MODERN TIMES, a digest to help creatives feel more comfortable with AI, so they don’t get left behind. We’d like to bridge the gap between the tech world and Hollywood.
OK, let’s dive into these MODERN TIMES.
Lionsgate’s Runway AI deal will lead to an explosion of creativity
Lionsgate, the company responsible for notable franchises like “John Wick,” “Twilight”, “The Hunger Games” and the “Saw” movies, is the latest major studio to partner with an AI company (The Hollywood Reporter).
Runway AI will get access to Lionsgate’s proprietary content to train its AI, with the possibility of alleviating future production costs for Lionsgate. So instead of building exhaustive explosions and other effects for every single “John Wick,” AI tools could “learn from” and reimagine previous work for new “John Wick” projects, saving time and money.
The next step might be that other studios who use Runway might be able to leverage Lionsgate’s creative techniques for their own productions. Tons of filmmakers already recycle ideas to pay homage to filmmakers that came before them. Think of how Brian de Palma nodded to Sergei Einstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (video) when he recreated the baby carriage scene in his 1987 crime drama “The Untouchables” (video). This type of deal may pave the way for other studios to follow suit.
For creatives, it seems that artists well-equipped to leverage these tools are going to be the most valuable candidates for jobs at studios as they continue to move in this direction.
Replicating Celebrities, Dead or Alive...
From Tupac’s hologram (Youtube) to Elvis in concert (Forbes) we are seeing a rise of tech being used to bring dead celebrities back to life. Celebrities are posthumously being used as performers in new art using AI.
A couple weeks ago, “Alien: Romulus” was the topic of controversy (Open Data Science) when Ian Holm, who passed away in 2020, appeared in the brand new film. With the family’s consent, the filmmakers used his likeness to create a digital replica of the actor, so that “he” could reprise his role in the franchise.
But, this is not a first: ElevenLabs, an AI voice-cloning startup, has a project called “iconic voices” (Bloomberg) where they have a catalog of voices, such as James Dean, Judy Garland, and Burt Reynolds, which can be used to read audiobooks. It doesn’t stop there, though, because the technology goes beyond audio: Travis Cloyd, CEO of Worldwide XR, decided to cast a “digital human” AI of James Dean to “act” in the movie “Return to Eden,” currently in production. This would obviously put current working actors out of jobs, but the money made would at least go to the estate of the family.