Prior to the advent of digital technologies, which enabled composers to replicate any instrument on a laptop, TV musical scores consisted of straightforward melodies played by a small group of session musicians. Both those players and the person who transcribed the composer’s scores lost their employment as a result of the newer technology.
But, that does not imply that producing scores is now easier or less expensive.
These days, entire orchestras are used in even the smallest TV shows. Although technology has made life easier, the expense of creating music for movies and television shows has gone up. More advanced jobs replaced the lost ones as opportunities increased.
At the AI on the Lot event held at Los Angeles Centre Studios on May 16, Matt Nix, the showrunner of “Burn Notice” and the recently released “True Lies,” used this comparison to describe the arrival of artificial intelligence. No matter how much the studios might want it to be the case, he dismissed the notion that AI will lead to low-cost TV and film production that employs fewer people.
During a panel discussion led by IndieWire editor-in-chief Dana Harris-Bridson, Nix stated, “I think what studios are forgetting in the arms race of Hollywood is that firing a bunch of people has literally never worked in the history of mankind.” Every new technological advancement has never been met with the response, “We’ll just try not to do anything new just to save money.”
Nix offered the machine rifle as another analogy. Numerous troops with guns may fire hundreds or even thousands of rounds with a single machine gun. But it did not mean that armies were supplanted by machine guns; rather, it meant that armies now carried machine guns and that conflicts were more expensive than before.
He thinks AI will make Hollywood far more productive and efficient, but the business will still invest in the next big thing, just as FX-heavy superhero and fantasy programmes merely drove up production costs.
“We still have an arms race,” he declared.
Setting aside all metaphors, AI does have the power to eliminate employment and cause havoc with the studio system in Hollywood. Writers on the WGA strike last summer battled for protection and remuneration when employing digital copies, while performers also insisted that AI-generated content could not be given to a writer to punch up or replace the act of writing entirely.
Renard Jenkins, president of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), noted in a keynote address that widespread fear is unwarranted. In his speech to attendees of AI on the Lot, he pushed studio executives to think about the true cost of integrating AI at scale into an organization’s or studio’s current infrastructure. He contended that this rendered the notion that AI will eventually replace all humankind impractical.
Jenkins remarked, “You are probably not going to release people into the wild.” “You’ll have to learn how to retrain people, and because they will be in demand, you’re probably going to have to throw more money at them to keep them.”
He went one step further: CFOs and contemporary executives will be replaced by AI, not below-the-line artists. If you provide Jenkins ten years’ worth of financial performance data along with content output data, he could quickly create an algorithm that will forecast and make judgements for Wall Street more accurately than a C-suite executive.
He stated, “Every step of the process will be impacted, but don’t think of it as a replacement.” “Consider it from the perspectives of improvement and temporal currency.”
Executive producer of “Bull” and “The Umbrella Academy,” Mark Hoffman, stated that writers and artists are genuinely playing with AI in a very “hushed tone.” In accordance with the new labour contract, writers and studios must sign agreements limiting studio liability and obtain consent before deploying AI. Inherent problems with copyright and title also exist. Hoffman claimed that as a result, studios have adopted the general policy that “it’s not allowed.”
Nix went on, “AI is bad and evil, and no one in the writers’ rooms of Hollywood is going to employ it. Many folks, nevertheless, will return from the restroom with some very brilliant ideas.
Hoffman thinks that AI will reimagine screenwriting as a process and an act, much like talkies did with movie scripting.
The first and last miles are the hardest in a marathon, he declared. “You need to think of an inspiration first. What topic will you write about? AI can’t just be told, “Give me a movie.” It needs to come from some source. It is really difficult to reach the end. Rewriting the screenplay: I already have something that’s fairly excellent, but I need something really amazing to draw you in. Therefore, you will still require personnel for the final mile.
While it is true that AI is the best at quickly and cheaply writing scripts, Nix suggested that this isn’t the main issue. “There’s a consistent trend that says AI is this completely worthless garbage that will replace all of our jobs,” he remarked. It’s almost like you have to pick one or the other. Guys, we should all be sitting on a gold mine if cheesy writing were that valuable.
