Despite what you may think, this isn’t a bit from “Punk’d.”
Ashton Kutcher is receiving backlash on X, formerly Twitter, for his excitement over how artificial intelligence could potentially replace employees in the entertainment industry.
The “That ’70s Show” venture capital firm launched a $243 million fund in 2023 to invest in artificial intelligence start-ups. And recently, the actor spoke about “playing around” with a beta version of OpenAI’s video generation program, Sora, at an event in Los Angeles with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Variety reports.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Kutcher said. “You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics. … But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds.”
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Some footage made with Sora could “easily” be used in TV and film productions, he said, potentially helping studios cut costs.
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher said. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI].”
Kutcher added that video-generating platforms like Sora and text generators like ChatGPT could potentially allow audiences to “render a whole movie” on their own at home.
“You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie,” he said.
He continued: “What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it. So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it. And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good — the bar is going to have to go way up, because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
Not everyone in the entertainment industry is as enthusiastic about AI seeping into the entertainment industry as Kutcher.
Tyler Perry told The Hollywood Reporter in February that after seeing Sora’s “mind-blowing” capabilities, he felt concern over how the tech could potentially ruin some people in the industry’s livelihoods.
“There’s got to be some sort of regulations in order to protect us,” he told the entertainment magazine. “If not, I just don’t see how we survive.”
Perry added: “I just hope that as people are embracing this technology and as companies are moving to reduce costs and save the bottom line, that there’ll be some sort of thought and some sort of compassion for humanity and the people that have worked in this industry and built careers and lives.”
And it seems a lot of people on X share the same concerns as Perry — albeit expressed in snarkier ways.