Is titled Air Head the first short film, published in recent days by the group shy kidsentirely made with Sorathe system text-to-video Of OpenAI based on artificial intelligence to generate ultra-realistic videos starting from textual input. In the short film we see several scenes in which various characters have, instead of a head, a yellow balloon. Furthermore, shy kids’ work shows various yellow balloons, of different shapes and sizes, flying in the most disparate settings. The news does not come unexpectedly: as revealed by BloombergIn fact, the company that develops ChatGPT recently promoted Sora among some Hollywood directors and studios.
The use of AI in film production could redesign the film sector reducing production costs with cuts of several jobs. According to some estimates of California Film Commissiononly in California The film industry employs approximately 700,000 people and pays nearly $70 billion a year in salaries. THE fears that “minor” actors and extras they have towards AI-based tools like Sora, which already manage to reach an impressive level of realism (albeit with some errors), are therefore more than plausible.
When the AI makes errors close to zero, not only the actors of the films will be replaced, but also other “support” figures such as screenwriters, stagehands, costume designers, sound technicians, various assistant directors, and so on, the whose role is (at least for the moment) indispensable for the production of content.
The strikes that we heard about in the second half of 2023 and which saw opposition on one side Screen Actors Guild (the actors’ union) and on the other theAlliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the association representing over 350 US television and film production companies) were a clear demonstration of how much concern there is among those working in this sector.
By reducing the staff needed to make films, production companies would significantly reduce production costs, thus obtaining higher margins. They may also decide to lower ticket prices to encourage users to go to the cinema.
These concerns reignite attention on the topic of regulations related to the impact of AI in the world of work. At the moment there is no news of possible regulations relating to the world of cinema. It will be necessary to see whether trade associations – such as the aforementioned Screen Actors Guild – and US politicians will mobilize in this sense to avoid job insecurity and guarantee fair wages.
Other legal issues, which will inevitably have to be addressed by a possible future regulation, concern the how the training takes place of tools text-to-video like Sora. What are algorithms trained with? Only material is used copyright free or also use the one protected by copyright, but without permission? How should we calculate the compensation of those who produced material used by companies like OpenAI to train their generative models? There is no answer to all these questions, at least for the moment.
