Into It with Sam Sanders Get new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribe to the podcast here. Photo: Vuk Valcicy Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
Writers and actors in Hollywood are demanding more control over how artificial intelligence will be used by studios in the future. There’s a lot of dystopian language being thrown around — that AI could be an existential threat to livelihoods; that it could replace entire professions. But the thing is: AI is already very much a part of the Hollywood production process today. VFX artist Ryan Laney explains how he used AI to help disguise and protect the identities of LGBTQ+ people in a documentary called Welcome to Chechnya. He says without AI, it would have been impossible. “The number of frames, the number of minutes — it was more visual effects than were in The Matrix.” Less altruistically, AI has resurrected Paul Walker for the Fast & Furious franchise and de-aged multiple boomer leading men such as Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford. Josh Glick, an expert on film and AI at Bard College says that there’s always fear when technology makes a big leap. “I think we have a lot of anxiety that sort of gets shaped into very grand narratives of whether a technology is good or bad.” But whether AI is good or bad is up to who controls the technology, not the tech itself, he says. Subscribe below and listen to the full episode of Into It to find out who’s using AI for the forces of good and who has the potential to use it more like an AI-generated Marvel supervillain.