Ashton Kutcher recently opened up about AI technology and what it looks like for the future of filmmaking. The actor says he’s been playing around with OpenAI’s generative video tool, Sora, and says it’s “pretty amazing.”
During a recent conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles Kutcher explained:
“You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics.
“But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
Kutcher said that he prompted Sora to create footage of a runner trying to escape a desert sandstorm, and when talking about that he shared:
“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it. I, in five minutes, rendered a video of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.”
He then went on to talk about what this means for the future of filmmaking and how it will make the process a lot cheaper to produce projects:
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100?
To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars. Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI].”
With AI evolving so fast, Kutcher believes that people will be able to generate an entire film utilizing the technology soon. He explained:
“You’ll be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie.
“Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
He went on to say for Hollywood studios to compete with this, they are going to have to step up:
“What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it. So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it.
“And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good, the bar is going to have to go way up, because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
This whole AI thing is pretty wild, and the studios are already embracing it and utilizing it in their filmmaking processes. The technology is both exciting and scary, and it’s going to be interesting and weird to watch it continue to evolve.
Source: Variety