Medium term impacts of AI on the Film Industry

John J. Schaub 

Mar 21 , 2023 

With the recent quantum leaps in AI tech spearheaded by OpenAI there has been no shortage of predictions about the immediate short term impacts in various sectors. I made a few predictions along that line in a post a few months ago and with the recent release of chatGPTv4 those predictions are feeling pretty solid. That is if you make your money generating boiler plate content you need to be looking for a new job in the very near future. I finished that post with a quick discussion about the potential mid term impacts on an industry like the film industry. The film industry is particularly ripe for generative AI driven disruption simply because when you get right down to it every single role in the rather complex film production value chain is focused on the creation of digital content. Wither you are building sets or providing craft services at the end of the process what you have actually delivered is a stream of ones and zeros that can be shown on a screen. I am clearly not the only person who sees the writing on the wall so to speak as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) today became the first professional association I am aware of to formally address the coming AI driven changes to their industry. To the WGA's credit rather than trying to stand in the way of the freight train they have taken an approach that will at least protect their members temporarily by recognizing that AI needs to be accommodated rather than stopped.

AI assisted script writing is probably the most obvious immediate impact of AI on the film industry and it is very easy to see how script writers will be using AI.  In my opinion the next area to be impacted will be the story boarding process and this disruption has in all likelihood already started. For those that do not know story boarding is the process where each scene in a film is visually laid out to convey the directors vison. Story boarding is essential in that it helps guide all the further processes like set design, wardrobe and camera setup. In simple terms story boarding makes it clear to everyone involved in the production what the production is intended to look like as a finished product. This is a complex process involving multiple skilled professionals who work with the director to not only capture the vision but to refine that vision into something that is filmable on whatever budget and timeline is available.  The story boarding process is expensive and time consuming and will be essentially evaporated by generative AI in the very near future. As of today we have already seen demonstration interfaces that will allow a director to visually lay out a scene via a conversational interface. So rather than having multiple back and forth conversations with story board artists and others a director could literally describe a scene to the AI get visuals created and refine and tweak them as desired. The productivity boost from this sort of technology is hard to over estimate. What previously would have been a multi stage iterative process between a team of skilled professionals will soon be done by a single person and an AI in a couple of days. 

Once you accept that story boarding is going to become an AI driven process in the next year or so you can pretty much see where this is going. If we can generate story boards from a conversational interface why not entire scenes and then entire films? The current visual generation capability of AI is not at the level that a director could go from script to production directly skipping all the intermediary jobs but at the current pace of development it is not hard to envision a situation where a director takes an idea from idea to finished film without involving any other humans in the process.  At this point the line between script writer and director gets blurry and what we are left with is simply a single individual who takes the film from idea to finished product with complete control over all aspects of the process. This vision of the future of filmmaking has no actors, no cameras and no craft services. But wait, There's More!  

Why do we actually need a scriptwriter/director hired by a film studio anyway? The truth is we don't. With a conversational interface there is no reason that an interested amateur could not take an idea and create a film and release it onto the web. This 'film' could then be manipulated and changed as desired by anyone else and reshared forever. In a world with generative AI if you think that the film you are watching needs a car chase that problem is pretty easily solved. So what we net out at is a world where the film industry as it exists today is vastly reduced in size with only a few functions such as distribution and marketing being provided by outside platforms while the product itself is endlessly manipulated and recreated by whomever has the motivation to do so. But wait, It gets weirder!

Things start to get a little surreal when you realize that by allowing for endless manipulation of the onscreen product what you have in effect created is the potential for a massive A/B test based optimization. In this world each version of a film can be subtly manipulated and the resulting viewer engagement tracked and optimized. With completely AI generated films there is nothing stopping an AI from testing wither a car chase helps engagement or hurts it. Should the car be red or blue, we can test that as well. Within a few iterations of running the A/B test the system can begin to home in on what will engage specific viewers and can then tweak the films for them personally. This obviously takes us to a place where entertainment is nothing like it is today. In this world the industry would be dominated by what are in effect highly focused generative AI companies with significant distribution and marketing arms. Almost every single role and skill set in the industry from lighting to craft services does not exist in this new version of the industry. There is an implicit assumption in this vision that the AI models will be extraordinarily complex and resource intensive. If that isn't the case then things get even more decentralized and all that is really left is marketing and distribution using off the shelf AI models. In that world things are even lighter weight and much more fragmented.

The scale of the possible disruption we are looking at is staggering and it is hard to imagine many of the extant players managing to make the transition successfully. Perhaps a few of the streaming services like Netflix could be well positioned to move to an entirely AI driven production chain but I cannot see some of the more traditional entities making the move. The thing to keep in mind is they might need to make this change far faster than they would like. Given the recent progress it seems very possible that fully AI generated feature films will be possible in the next decade. When you are talking about a massive multi national company with staff in dozens of countries a wholesale change in business model in a decade is very hard to pull off.  I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider how these changes might impact other industries where the end product is just ones and zeros :(