Entertainment Celebrities Face Struggle and Opportunity in Chaotic Encounters With ‘Pastiche’ AI

Plenty of attention has been paid of late to the seismic disruptive threat artificial intelligence places on the entertainment business, as well as the increasing deployment of AI in film and music.Concerns over AI have recently exacerbated by a fake 15-second clip of a fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt — made by Irish filmmaker Ruari Robinson and created on Seedance 2.0 a new AI service from ByteDance, the Chinese global owner of TikTok — which was the latest home-made fictional video to go viral.Last month a trailer for Amazon-MGM’s upcoming summer blockbuster, “Masters of the Universe”, became the most popular trailer on YouTube for that day of release. But Amazon-MGM executives were disturbed by the fact that on the same day of their long-awaited promo release, the sixth most popular trailer was an AI-generated preview also titled “Masters of the Universe” which was comprised of fictional footage from a fake He-Man film that bore zero relation to the content of their film. Yet there has been less focus on the specific travails of prominent artists in the brave new world of systematic machine learning. More film directors, actors and musicians have begun exploring AI for themselves, with predictably chaotic and uncertain results.Some film stars have previously expressed reservations over the march of artificial intelligence and the dangers that will ensue if established expensive entertainment content becomes eclipsed by cheap and fake home-made videos. In May 2024 actress Scarlett Johansson called out Open AI’s ChatGPT for its voice assistant sounding “eerily similar” to her own. Ms. Johansson added she had rejected the personal entreaties of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman who had wanted her to voice ChatGPT after she had vocalized an A.I. system in Spike Jonze’s acclaimed 2014 film “Her.”Scarlett Johansson, a critic of ChatGPT. Joel C Ryan/Invision/APThe Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey was last month reported by the Wall Street Journal to have secured eight trademarks from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via his entertainment lawyers, of his memorable onscreen catchphrases — including “alright, alright alright” from the 1993 film “Dazed and Confused” — that are designed to protect his voice and likeness from unauthorized AI use.However, for all the ongoing backlash over deepfakes, legal issues over copyright works and intellectual property, and regulatory uncertainty regarding AI, some creative talent is sensing opportunity in deriving content from neural networks.Filmmaker Roger Avary won an Oscar in 1995 for co-writing “Pulp Fiction” with Quentin Tarantino. Yet Mr. Avary’s career declined after a stint in prison following the death of a passenger while he was driving under the influence of alcohol. Having spent time in the confines of a real jail, Mr. Avary subsequently languished in what is sometimes described as “director jail” —an inability to get films made — but he revealed earlier this week that AI had revived his cinematic fortunes.“I go out there and try to get stuff made, and it’s almost impossible,” Mr. Avary said on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. “And then I built a technology company over the last year, basically making AI movies, and all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’, like that, money gets thrown at it. All of a sudden, just by attaching the word “AI” and [the fact] that it’s a technology-based company, all of a sudden, investors came in, and we’re in production on three films now.”Other filmmakers who have embraced AI include the Russo Brothers, who have directed four Marvel Comics blockbusters, and “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky whose AI studio Primordial Soup recently made “On This Day…1776”, an animated short-form episodic series about the American Revolution that was produced in partnership with Google DeepMind and which premiered on the website of Time magazine.Veteran writer-director Paul Schrader, whose breakthrough in Hollywood came when he wrote the Martin Scorsese film “Taxi Driver”, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, says the practicality of AI films will drive their popularity. Mr. Schrader, who will be 80-years-old in July, has immersed himself in AI chatbots and wrote on Facebook earlier this month, “One year from now photorealistic AI dramas will be running through film school bodies like diuretics. Based on my brief AI experimentation a savvy student will be able to create a 90min narrative in 2-3 weeks on zero budget….one or two of these films will break through the thin commercial membrane and attract clicks, buzz and advertising. This is beginning and it will happen very fast.”For all the disposability of most AI-generated content, technology experts believe it will profoundly and permanently re-shape the entertainment business. “The legacy value, skills, knowledge, output and value of Hollywood are trending to zero,” Mark Riley, the founder of Mathison.ai, an AI strategy consultancy, told the Sun. “There is no advantage in being 20th Century Studios or Disney with their vast infrastructures and talent if content can now be produced with a couple of text prompts and an LLM [Large Language Model].”An AI film project which has proved particularly contentious is the Amazon-backed AI-streaming start-up Fable Studio, which is restoring the notorious lost 43-minute footage from Orson Welles’ classic 1941 film “The Magnificent Ambersons” by filming scenes in live action and then overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices.Illustrating the conflicting responses to such movable deepfake feasts, Beatrice Welles, the 70-year-old daughter of Orson Welles, initially labelled the initiative “disappointing”, before softening her criticism in a statement to the New Yorker last week. “In regards to what Fable Studio is doing,” she said, “while I am skeptical, I know they are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie, and only for that I am grateful.”“The broader question is, does the content consumer care?” said Mr. Riley. “Do they care about the jobs, history, brands, and the human interpretation of converting stories into moving images? Do we care about the means of production if the emotional response is the same? I suspect the ease of creativity will create so much volume of slop that it leads to irrelevance for most AI content. The hard part will remain the distribution.”The music industry faces similar pressures. The French-based independent music platform Deezer estimates it receives 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks uploaded every day to its platform, equivalent to 34% of the total songs it gets sent. According to a global study Deezer conducted with Ipsos last November, 97% of respondents couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music in a blind test with two AI songs and one real song.One prominent musician to directly engage with AI has been Andy McCluskey, lead vocalist of the electro-pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). Last year OMD played a 29-date North American tour but the band achieved their greatest commercial success with the song “If You Leave” that was prominently featured in the John Hughes-produced film “Pretty in Pink” which was re-released in theaters last week to coincide with its 40th anniversary.Early on in their career, in the late 1970s, OMD were quick to embrace technology, often performing onstage with a reel to reel tape recorder they named “Winston”, whom they described at the time as an unofficial band member. But Mr. McCluskey declared himself unimpressed with his recent AI actions in a recent interview with an OMD fan website. “Somebody said to me, ‘Why don’t you try writing songs using AI and try to get them to write OMD songs because you could programme in the algorithms to copy what you do and then see if it’s any good and use it yourself'”, Mr. McCluskey said. “So I tried it.“Now admittedly I didn’t try it with a particularly expensive AI tool, and it was absolute shite. First of all I couldn’t stop it either sounding like American soft rock — it was like, ‘Where’s the OMD in this?’ — or bad techno. I’m not giving up yet because I quite like the idea of having a digital minion to do my hard work for me!”OMD with the “Winston” machine in early 1980. Via Wikimedia CommonsMr. McCluskey, who is not on social media, also said he has been the victim of surreal deep fakery. “Somebody actually did an AI of me saying, ‘I don’t have a Facebook page in my name, Andy McCluskey, so if you see one it’s a fake,'” he said. “Then somebody did a fake of me saying it was a fake! In some respects, it was quite amusing.”But Mr. McCluskey raised doubts that machine learning can ultimately ever replicate human ingenuity. “AI will never think, ‘What if I do this?’ because it won’t just have that spark that happens in a human’s head,” he said. “That is never going to happen as far as I can ever see,” Mr. McCluskey added. “AI cannot do a stroke of genius. It can do a workmanlike pastiche.”

Entertainment Celebrities Face Struggle and Opportunity in Chaotic Encounters With ‘Pastiche’ AI

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