Big Smile, No Teeth: AI will be making movies sooner than you think

There will always be human actors and writers and directors, and there will be productions that sell themselves on having absolutely no AI content. But they’ll be fewer and far between. — 123rf

There's a lot of speculation about what artificial intelligence (AI) is doing to our world. More and more we’re not afraid of AI going the Terminator route and pumping out cyborgs to hunt us down. More and more we’re worried that AI will destroy our world by taking all the jobs.

And that definitely is a concern for me. 

Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic, has said 50% of all entry level jobs will be gone in five years. He’s not the only one. Tom Gardner, the CEO of financial and investing advice company Motley Fool, has said we are at a point where AI is going to make a lot of people obsolete (OK, that’s kind of extreme).

Now, I can’t speak to other industries but in my own, which is film and TV, I can comment since I’ve been keeping an eye on this issue.

There are lots of interviews with directors and actors stating that AI will never be more creative than people. That we want to see real actors and stories written by real people. These interviews are inspiring to listen to but they don’t ring true to me.

My view of all this as a producer?

I agree that people want to watch real actors and stories written by people right now. But could that change? I think so.

Just look at streaming.

I believe that Netflix is the winner in streaming – mainly because it has the most new content coming online regularly. How does it do that? It takes a venture capitalist approach: It funds lots of small projects, which gives it lots of new content – and every once in a while it catches lightning in a bottle like Squid Games.

Streaming is predicated on creating content. And if you can do that cheaply? Well, we know people want humans in their entertainment, but you know what people want even more than that? New content.

Already studios like Staircase Studios AI have promised to produce “near studio quality” movies for US$500,000 (RM2.11mil) per film. Netflix doesn’t release exact numbers but its midrange productions are likely budgeted in the tens of millions of dollars. So for a company like Netflix, whose whole business is predicated on cranking out new content, 500K per film has to be enticing.

It won’t care about “what people want” once AI can produce video that is indistinguishable from reality – and it will get there sooner than we think. It might not make a big deal about it, but sooner rather than later, I believe we’ll be watching full AI films on streaming platforms.

And what happens to people who want to watch real people? The audience won’t know the difference and we won’t care. This will be like the difference between going to see stage plays and going to movies back in the day. Movies won out. Theatre is currently the refuge of the elite.

There will always be human actors and writers and directors, and there will be productions that sell themselves on having absolutely no AI content. But they’ll be fewer and far between. They’ll be expensive, and there will be director connoisseurs who make such films, but just like theatre and movies, wholly human-made film and TV will be the bastion of the purists and elites.

The rest of the population will move on to cheaper AI-driven movies and TV.

How can I be so positive this will happen?

I’m just following the money.

Even if it’s not Netflix or other streamers taking advantage of AI to pump out content, budding storytellers will have all the tools to produce a studio-calibre story on their laptops at home. And those creators will create a slew of AI content. Most of it will be garbage, but some of it will be good.

Someone is going to create the next Lord Of The Rings in their basement.

So are actors and human directors and writers going away? Nope. But more and more of our content will be AI-generated and we won’t even notice.

People say that new technology gets rid of jobs but also creates new ones. In film and TV, it’s hard to see where these new jobs would be created. The credits are still going to roll but fewer and fewer of the names on screen will belong to anyone real.

Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.