HOW MUCH WILL AI CHANGE THE FILM INDUSTRY?

From the beginning of film, moviemakers have experimented with special effects. The earliest and simplest involved stopping the camera, swapping an actor for a dummy, then starting the camera again and allowing the character on screen to meet an apparently gruesome fate. From there, methods grew more sophisticated – animation, models and puppets were used to bring monsters and spaceships to life on our screens, before computer graphics enabled more realistic and complicated visual effects to be produced. But creating movie-quality computer graphics is laborious and expensive. Or rather, it was... until generative artificial intelligence (AI), came along.

First demonstrated with static images, AIs such as DALL.E, Midjourney and Firefly showed they could generate amazing visuals from text descriptions. Ask for a tap-dancing cat on a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers and, within an instant, you’d get an image depicting exactly that. But new AI-powered tools also enable images and footage to be rapidly edited. They let you change a character’s clothing without you needing to reshoot the scene, or remove something in the background you don’t like, or even change an actor’s expression or their age. (AI clones – aka deepfakes – generate realistic avatars that can perfectly mimic real-life actors or create entirely fictional, yet totally convincing characters complete with movement and voice.)

Most recently Sora from OpenAI and Lumiere from Google DeepMind have shown they can generate stunning video clips lasting several seconds and showing almost anything you might ask for.

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