Hollywood, like the rest of society, is prone to major moments of upheaval whenever major breakthroughs are made in technology.  Just look at the history of cinema and how it responded to new things like synchronized sound, television, and the internet over the last century.  Some corners of the film industry manage to find their footing by embracing new technology, but there are others who are not so lucky.  The advent of sound put a lot of actors out of work because they didn’t have the right voice for cinema and their style of performance that was geared towards acting through silence was seen as old fashioned.  Computer Animation in the digital age also shook up the world of visual effects, where craftsmen and women who developed elaborate practical effects that were shot live on set were suddenly replaced with blue screens that would later be filled in with CGI by technicians working at a computer stand months later.  Not to say that these new technologies were all a bad thing.  New tools allowed cinema to grow and evolve, which was in the long run a positive for the industry.  But, disruptions aren’t accomplished without a cost to the old ways of doing things, which in of themselves were also instrumental to helping to build the artform.  Sound helped the movies talk, but we also lost the bold experimental storytelling of the silent era movies.  Computer animation brought some amazing visuals to the big screen that couldn’t have been done with just practical effects, but it also has led to a lot more movies feeling artificial compared to the tactile physical effects that were hand crafted.  And the biggest cost of all, big disruptions also put a lot of people out of work; many of whom who were specialized in some fields that sadly phased out.  It’s unfortunate, but that’s the cycle that Hollywood has gone through in it’s entire history.  And there are more disruptions to come in the future.

The one that is especially worrying the industry right now is the beginnings of what is being called an AI Revolution.  Many start-up companies, and also ones with ties to already established tech giants like Google and Meta, are making significant advancements in the development of Artificial Intelligence.  This is far more than the Siri and Alexa assistants on our smart home devices.  The newer AI programs are starting to perform more complex functions including autogenerating text responses to any prompt you give it.  ChatGPT has become a widely used app that people now use for content creation, which can be anything from a text response to a full length speech.  These text prompts are now finding their way into many different written documentation, including term papers, website pages, and most worrying to professionals in the film industry, screenplays.  At the moment, the technology isn’t perfect and some of the robotic sounding phrasing of ChatGPT’s text prompts betrays it’s artificiality.  But, like most artificial intelligence, it learns as it develops, and the imperfections are getting harder to detect.  The presence of an AI that can produce long form amounts of text is one thing, but what is especially worrying is the advancements made in visual AI technology.  Now a text prompt can generate a visual image and more recently, we’ve also seen it create moving images.  There’s talk that this will be the technology that will ultimately destroy Hollywood and the film industry as we know it, and the sad reality is that there is a possibility that it could, depending on how it is used.  It should be noted that AI isn’t advanced enough yet to replace the actual art of physically making a movie, but it’s also a technology that’s still in it’s infancy and growing up very fast.

For those wondering why Hollywood was brought to a standstill 2 years ago with the dual strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, this was a big reason why.  The guilds of Hollywood were seeing what Silicon Valley was doing with their big push into AI, and they wanted to establish some guardrails before it put a lot of current and future careers in jeopardy.  Thankfully, the studios and the guilds agreed to new standards when it came to due compensation if someone’s likeness or written work was used in any AI programming, but development into AI technology within the industry was still allowed to continue.  It’s not just the main guilds that are getting affected by this new tech, but every other below the line profession as well.  If you could just make a movie in a computer that looks about as real as anything that was shot on a set, well that risks the jobs of camera operators, lighting technicians, set builders, make-up and hair dressers, truck drivers and caterers, all whose livelihoods are dependent on there being a steady stream of new films and shows being made.  But, the big movie studios would also like to cut their costs, and making movies and shows with fewer people involved is something that sounds appealing to them.  The rise of streaming saw a giant ramp up in production across the industry, but it also blew massive holes into the budgets of the companies that own the platforms as they were all in an arms race to have the most “content” available for their customer base to watch.  The promise of AI being a cheap alternative is something that would appeal to lot of studio execs who have had to write a lot more paychecks over the last decade.

There’s one big issue with trying to use AI as a replacement for physical filmmaking, beyond the obvious one that AI made films still look fake.  Artificial Intelligence, in order to function, must assemble data from the internet in order to create the desired product of it’s prompt’s request.  It’s the one thing that AI still is incapable of accomplishing which is an original idea.  It can imitate, but it can’t create something whole cloth that is new.  So, when we see something that resembles a movie that was developed using AI, there’s a noticeable lack of visual ingenuity.  The image we see is a cobbled together amalgamation of many other things.  There was a demo released on the internet a couple months back of a cinematic car chase that was entirely made using AI.  Some AI enthusiasts said that this was the death of Hollywood, but closer inspection of the visuals in the clip showed how visually inconsistent the actual clip was.  The driver behind the wheel changed appearance multiple times and even the model of the car differed in various shots.  And the streets that it was driving through also had various weird things going on in the background.  The technology may advance to a point where these inconsistencies may be smoothed out, but it doesn’t address the big problem all together.  There’s a general lack of authenticity to the visuals that AI creates.  To make a story that connects with an audience, it takes a human touch to know things like the Mise en Scene of the shot they are constructing and how to edit the shots together for emotional impact.  AI only follows what it’s instructed to do, which doesn’t follow an emotional current.  That’s why it’s visual language is random.  Also, by combining data off of the internet, AI also runs the risk of cannibalizing data that was created by other AI programs, and that often leads to corrupted results that can sometimes appear nightmarish.

The big question is, will audiences care if they are fed more content that is AI generated.  We are seeing a test run of this phenomenon play out currently in our media landscape.  Social media has been flooded with a ton of AI generated images.  Many of them are absurdly artificial and can be easily identified, but the worrying ones are the ones that are trickier to spot.  The especially worrying aspect of AI is how it’s seeping into the world of politics.  Many bad faith actors are using AI for propaganda purposes, creating false images that can feed into misinformation campaigns.  A lot of altered images are easy to swat down now, but as technology improves, it will be more difficult and we will find ourselves living more in a post-truth world.  It becomes even scarier when moving images come into play.  Are people more discernable when it comes to noticing things that aren’t real in visual media?  There’s this thing in computer animation known as the “uncanny valley” where the animation that’s created in a computer attempts to feel as lifelike as possible but reaches a state where the likeness becomes off-putting and repulsed by the viewer.  This was a big reason why motion-capture animation never was able to take off; at least as a replacement for standard computer animation.  The brief period where Hollywood tried to make motion capture a thing, which was spear-headed by filmmaker Robert Zemekis with films like The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007) is not looked back upon with favorability and thankfully died off pretty quick.  But, motion capture does survive in a way as a tool to mix realistic digital characters with live action ones; such as those in the Avatar movies.  AI’s future could run a similar course where audiences reject it as a full replacement for the art of cinema and instead sees it used as a tool in the arsenal of digital artists in the future of visual effects.  The future either way is still uncertain, but for everyone’s sake, it’s better if AI on it’s own is not a catch all fix for all of Hollywood’s problems.

The thing with AI technology is that it’s only bad when used in a bad way.  There are ways that Hollywood could implement AI technology in a beneficial way.  Streamlining the visual effects process is one example where it’s benefits can be useful.  One of the big problems facing the film industry today is the overworked and underpaid labor in visual effects.  So many digital artists are forced into this “crunch” culture of digital rendering, meaning that many of them are working round the clock in order to deliver their rendered shots on time under sometimes unrealistic deadlines.  Many digital artists find it difficult to work under these conditions and it’s only gotten worse in the rise of streaming.  Over time, it’s led not just to a downgrade in quality visual effects for many projects, but a workforce that often has succumbed to bad health due to the long hours as well as a more toxic work environment.  Some AI programs that can carry some of the workload in limited areas could indeed help many of these digital artists meet their deadlines without there being a dip in quality as well as giving them a better work experience as a whole.  There are a lot of applications where it does seem like a little AI assistance could be beneficial, but because people in the industry are wary of what the introduction of these tools may end up replacing, it’s difficult to be nuanced about the good aspects of AI.  We saw one controversy erupt last year when it was revealed that AI was used by the film The Brutalist (2024) in it’s production.  The Brutalist, which was a mostly hand-crafted low budget film, used AI for one specific reason, which makes sense when you learn more about it.  The film’s editor, David Jancso, wanted to have the lead actors sound more authentically Hungarian like their characters should.  Jancso, who is Hungarian himself, used an AI program named Respeecher, which allows someone to mask their own voice with another one entirely.  This is a program that has been used before by Lucasfilm to replicate James Earl Jones’ voice for new lines for Darth Vader, and in The Brutalist’s case, Jancso used his own correct annunciation of Hungarian vowels to fix the line readings of Adrain Brody and Felicity Jones in the movie.  Their performances are still authentically their own, but Respeecher allowed their Hungarian to sound closer to what it should be.  Still, this stirred a bit of controversy and it’s a small possibility that it might have cost the film the Best Picture award at the Oscars.

It is healthy for the Hollywood community to be skeptical.  This is something that if put into the wrong hands could end up ruining cinema as we know it.  The big concern is that the studios are going to do whatever they can to make more money, and the belief is that investing more into AI would be worth it in the long run if it meant that they would have a tighter control over how much money they’ll be spending.  But there are a massive amounts of unseen costs that could lead to more trouble down the road.  To replace the amount of production that is involved in making a full length movie, it would take a massive amount of data processing, which means using a significant amount of server space in data centers across the world.  Using data centers is not cheap, and it also uses up a lot of energy to run them, which could also lead to significant environmental impacts as well.  And all this for something that is not going to be new and original, but rather a faint reproduction of many other things that we’ve already seen.  It all depends then on if the audience is eager to buy the product they are serving up.  It’s hard to say what that result may be.  We are already in a moment of cultural stagnation where the majority of new movies out there are either sequels or remakes.  Hell, we just witnessed A Minecraft Movie gross nearly a billion dollars at the global box office, which kind of tells you that we may be already primed to accept AI slop at our local movie theaters.  But, there are signs that people have more discerning tastes than that.  Take a look at the rise and fall of other tech advancements in the last couple years.  The NFT market thankfully died a quick death after people realized that owning digital art was fairly pointless and also a scam, and people are also opening up their eyes to the fraudulent nature of crytocurrency as well.  We’ll have to see if people call the bluff of those pushing AI generated media on us as well.  What may ultimately decide things one way or another is how many creative people may end up using the technology.

Strangely enough, we have been programmed to distrust AI over the years by Hollywood itself.  From HAL 9000, to Skynet, to Ultron, Hollywood has made AI feel like a very sinister force that often intends to eliminate humanity altogether.  And it’s understandable to be fearful of the technology.  The biggest threat that it currently possess is the possibility that it may replace us in the workplace, and in many professions it already has.  The sad thing is, we are largely responsible for all of the threats that AI poses for our future because we are addicted to convenience.  We like using self-checkouts at the grocery store and using Google to help us with our research instead of going out to the library.  Streaming has also caused us to move away from attending the movie theater, and pretty soon it will try to replace the very act of movie-making itself.  But, it’s something that we can still have the power to push back on if we still value movies as they are.  There are thankfully many filmmakers out there who are still making movies that are as practically constructed as they can be and are still able to find their audience.  The recent success of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), a fully original film made by real artists and utilizing actual, physical film stock in it’s making and presentation is a good sign that audiences are still hungry for true cinematic experiences.  Even with a million detailed prompts AI could never make something as new and original as Sinners because it took a lifetime of human experience to craft that kind of story and make it connect with audiences.  There’s hope that this will convince the studios that they need to still invest in original films made by actual people.  The AI encroachment will always be there as the technology continues to be refined.  But like how music lovers rediscovered the beauty of vinyl in recent years and the steadily increasing loyal fan base of physical media shoppers out there, there will always be an appetite for something that’s real and that’s what will ultimately be what drives the future of cinema.  AI at best is a tool that can help the business improve beyond it’s shortcomings, but it can’t motivate change in the same way that a new voice and original idea can.