Hollywood doesn't have to worry about A.I. Yet - But Filmmakers Should Embrace It (column)

Artificial intelligence has been a buzzword for futurists ever since computers have existed, but 2022 was the year the public began to dread its advancement. With the chatbot going public and generating complex responses to millions of prompts in seconds, many people in the storytelling space became concerned about the new competition. Hollywood screenwriters don't need to know how to do it if a computer can do it for them.

This year has been fraught with dramatic uncertainties for the industry, from wild swings in the streaming market to the bombardment of doomsday predictions for arthouse cinema. But these fleeting dramas have nothing to fear from encroaching on the A.I.

I'm in the business of finding silver liners. In recent weeks, I've found there's an optimistic twist to this rise of machines that should reassure artists who feel under fire, at least for now. Before A.I. becomes a credible threat to the creative process, it's a powerful tool for experimentation, far from anything that could endanger the art itself. On the contrary, filmmakers should embrace it.

I'll leave the more troubling general questions to technologists and policy makers, but it felt right to devote this week's column to the ramifications of ChatGPT for the creative community, and filmmaking in particular. Anyone invested in the singular and subjective nature of the creative process might want to sound the alarm. It's an existential crisis lurking in plain sight, after all: imagine a future where, instead of Stanley Kubrick directing '2001: A Space Odyssey', HAL 9000 does it for him.

Well, not so fast. Questions about the guardrails surrounding A.I. behavior, and its application to all facets of human life, will only accelerate in the years to come. For now, however, they pose no real threat to filmmakers eager to embrace the potential of AI. as a new tool. We fear what we refuse to understand; accept it and we are more likely to bend it to our will.

First of all, anyone scared of ultra-intelligent AI. should recognize that we have long lived under the yoke of IT processes; we just used different words to describe it. Every complaint about how streaming platforms rely on algorithms is basically about the role of AI. in modern entertainment.

Of course, this advancement stands out more when the robot responds to you with actionable ideas. However, while ChatGPT can certainly come up with story ideas on the fly, it's not the first A.I. with this potential.

At the New York Film Festival over a year ago, I hosted a conversation for a short film produced by Campari and directed in the style of Fellini - or, at least, a computer idea for a. "" was an attempt to harness artificial intelligence for a new short film inspired by the work of Federico Fellini. As ridiculous as it sounds, the carnivalesque end result seemed about right: it wasn't so much a Fellini movie as a slick homage to Fellini, laden with circus imagery and haunting, dreamlike encounters experienced by a introspective protagonist. However, the computer did not make the final film; it was carried out by business manager Maximilian Niemann, who used concepts suggested by an A.I. program that scanned Fellini's films and spat out suggestions piecemeal. Newman then filtered them through his own creativity.

I've thought back to this short for the past few weeks as ChatGPT both amazed and terrified all who encountered its mind-blowing technological precision. Every legacy media publication had a hot version of it — and for good reason. The program, which was released by OpenAI this month (the same masterful/weird software geniuses behind the A.I. DALL-E drawing program), can unleash a shocking amount of substance in response to user-generated prompts: docs detailed, video game code, and poignant love stories, all conjured up in seconds. Fears of maniacal robots overtaking the world have spread as quickly as ChatGPT itself. Was this the start of the dystopian robot wars that everything from "The Terminator" to "The Matrix" had warned us about? Why didn't we watch the movies?

Easy now. At NYFF, I spoke with filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zack Canepari, who produced a 45-minute documentary on Fellini's short. "It was an experimental art project," Cooper said. "If you look at the way A.I. is used in our daily lives...what's unique about it is that we were...