Fearing the ACU—AI Cinematic Universe

The technology of cinema has been evolving for ages. Right from the time when it was a tacky small black and white screen where the director had to manually record. First the screen got bigger and bigger till it reached CinemaScope. The color got better and better right from Eastman Color to Technicolor.

Everything progressed consistently from the way movies were shot to the way sound was recorded. Initially special effects were crude after which VFX became an art form. Finally, we had digital age which heralded the era of the multiplexes. Computing got grander and grander till a time came when most of the major blockbusters were nothing but special effects extravaganzas. The Streaming era brought everything home in style.

Now a little bit of fatigue seems to have set in. Special effects are no longer drawing crowds to the cinema halls. You can’t blame the pandemic anymore. The Netflix stock price has crashed even as Disney+ is no longer hot.

To make matters worse, there are ongoing Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes. While streaming residuals are one thing, the impact of AI is another major concern. The ChatGPT era has brought great uncertainty in many professions.

How far can AI go?

AI can write scripts, develop them, create artificial characters, generate special effects, and handle the entire production of a film or serial. The term proc-gen stands for “procedural generation” where data can be created endlessly algorithmically. “Nothing, Forever” is one such show made using GPT-3 which ran as a non-stop Twitch livestream from December 14, 2022, to February 6, 2023. A parody of the famous Seinfeld, it used artificially generated voices, AI-generated scripts, and a low-res computer animation. When will we have a high-res high-quality show that tops the charts?

As it is, deepfakes have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy. If the writers and actors are worried about being replaced by AI, then it is to be noted that superstars can be too. A top star may become an AI-generated recurring character and tomorrow AI superstars could well be created from scratch. While the striking unions have a point, it is a dangerous time to do so for one is sure that the big studios must already be tinkering with AI with an eye to the future. They may well use the backdoor to implement their plans during the strikes.

India seems far away from this, but Bollywood is facing an existential crisis. A few big hits here and there cannot save it. If an AI model succeeds in Hollywood, it will replicated all over the world.

Welcome to the AI Cinematic Universe (ACU).