Over the past few years, the world has been experiencing a seismic shift in the technological landscape. We’ve seen the rapid rise of a technology that is making headlines everywhere, both optimistic and fear-inducing. We are talking about artificial intelligence.
Before we expand on the topic any further, it is good to mention that like many other programs that we use now, AI programs like ChatGPT also rely on the consistent availability of the internet. To be able to take full advantage of AI, it is important to choose a provider that means business when it comes to signal strength and customer service. Like Xfinity Customer Service makes sure that you get no downtime even during peak hours.
In this post, we’re going to be talking about how AI has already changed the film industry and whether or not it’s getting close to completely taking over. How exactly is AI being used in the film industry today?
When you take a step back and look at it, most of the ways AI is being used in the film industry today can be put into three categories we will be discussing.
- Idea generation and script writing
There’s been a lot of chatter about how ChatGPT can replace screenwriters and be able to write screenplays with just a single prompt. At first, you might even believe this. If you do a quick Google search of how to write a screenplay with ChatGPT, you’ll be presented with several guides on how to do so.
This might look impressive from the outside, but the cracks start to show once you read one of the guides or start playing around with it for yourself. There is still a lot of work required from you to get a decent output. You should be able to prompt for the story, the environment, the characters, etc. before you dive in. Even with all of that, you still have to do a lot of work to get something that is usable.
Many people use ChatGPT to create ideas or add context to certain aspects of a story or character. But we’re not yet where ChatGPT can just write a good script for you from scratch. It’s more of a companion that you can use to help write better scripts or stories faster. If you get stuck figuring out how to word something, you can give ChatGPT a prompt and use the output as a good source of inspiration to improve your writing.
- VFX Animation and Imagery.
There are a lot of cool tools becoming available that are helping creative people bring their ideas to life. DALL-E is an AI system or tool that can generate or edit images based on a description in natural language. It’s also made by OpenAI, which is the same company that created ChatGPT.
It was trained on a huge subset of images, their text descriptions, and how they relate to one another. When the user gives their prompt, it can generate an image for you, sometimes to horrific results, but it’s often pretty good. You can even tell it which style you want the image to be generated in, such as Van Gogh or Picasso.
There’s a short film that was created using DALL-E called “Critters”. It’s an animated short in the style of a documentary with some comedic undertones and is considered to be the first animated short film that is 100% designed using AI-generated visuals with DALL-E. It’s still fairly limited but very impressive. It shows us how these tools can be used to create things that might not have been created if they didn’t exist and how they can help speed up the production process.
Another really good one is called “The Frost” created by Waymark. The short film is also very impressive, but if you’ve seen any DALL-E-generated images, you can mostly tell that this is what they used to make it.
DALL-E is based on a subset of images that the system has been trained on. These images were created or taken by someone else and often have some copyrights associated with them. The burning question is usually about who holds the rights to those images or if they should be credited in some way. We are entering new territories where there isn’t much regulation.
Before we start seeing major use of these types of AI-generated images in the commercial space, we need to find some fair use regulations around them.
- Video editing and post-production
There are now AI algorithms that can help decide which shot is best to use, remove unwanted elements from those shots, and help make those shots look better with AI-driven color grading or noise removal. Most of the things these tools can do are not anything we couldn’t already do before, but the idea is to do it faster.
Adobe implemented a variety of tools to help speed up workflows in their video editing software Premiere. You can now easily match colors across different clips without the need for manually tuning them. They made it easier to clean up interviews and talking head videos by automatically removing awkward pauses but still resulting in a natural flow.
Several other software are following suit:
- Capwing
- Magisto
- Glia Cloud,
There are a lot of companies that are either being formed or beginning to implement AI in really cool ways into their tooling to help improve the creative process in a variety of different ways.
Summing Up
AI, or artificial intelligence, is something that is affecting a variety of different industries right now, from how we write software to how we make games to how films are being made. But are we overhyping the power and ability that AI has, or are we actually on the brink of some Skynet-level phenomenon?