A shiver of unease, combined with a strangely defeated shrug, is how the news that entertainment behemoth Lionsgate has signed a deal with the artificial intelligence firm Runway seems to have been greeted by most.
The deal gives Runway access to Lionsgate’s substantial back catalogue to develop a new AI model, with the aim of helping film-makers to “augment their work” through the use of AI.
Lionsgate’s output includes franchises such as John Wick, Saw and The Hunger Games. So, what exactly will be the end result of this deal? An infinite number of episodes of John Wickon streaming TV in a kind of uncannier-than-uncanny-valley animated series? Four more feature-length iterations of Knives Out, using flesh-and-blood actors but AI-gen scripts? And an AI-gen musical score? And will this result in the increased prohibition of new writers’ work because it is so outside the algorithmically field-tested content?
Well, it’s perhaps naive to get too exercised about intellectual property (IP) and proprietary content. Hollywood has always developed projects based on existing literary works, and produced spin-offs on the back of successful TV shows and films. Shakespeare himself often based his plays on existing stories, and developed Falstaff as a recurring character.
But wasn’t the conclusion of the recent writers’ strike supposed to have kept AI in its place? It has been considered as a tool to be used by writers (or creators generally) to facilitate their work, and not something that would supplant them entirely. But maybe that was always a little naive. When the new Alien: Romulus movie used AI to bring a character from the original Alien film back from the dead – after discussions with the late actor’s estate – there was outcry at how crass, exploitative and, above all, smug it was. Clearly, however, everyone involved thought that it was a brilliant idea, and expected all lovers of the original film to show a kind of brand loyalty in praising the decision. Some did. Many didn’t. I felt that it was corporate IP/AI at its creepiest.
The movie industry is reaching a crisis point of sustainability and authenticity, comparable to the outrage seen in the early 70s among pub customers at the introduction of homogenous gassy, ghastly Double Diamond-type beer, which resulted in the Campaign for Real Ale. Or perhaps a closer comparison is to this country’s sudden spasm of objection to genetically modified food in the 1990s, which resulted in supermarkets taking it off the shelves. Although GM food is now making a comeback because climate change is making it necessary to cultivate hardier types of crop.
Now, we are facing a tsunami of genetically modified Double Diamond content sloshing about on screens big and small. There has to be a consumer-led pushback against artificially cultivated proprietary schlock – and critics have to play their part in noticing it and calling it out. Clearly, AI could be a fascinating new generator of creativity and experimentation, but it could also be the complete opposite of those things. ChatGPT-style film-making has, arguably, always been a feature of Hollywood in spirit, but now the technology has caught up. If we are not vigilant, original film-making will become a marginal, connoisseur activity and artificially replicated content will overrun the cinema chains.