Artificial intelligence is causing quite a massive stir in our culture as folks begin to mull over all of the vast and varied implications this brand new technological advancement has in store for the future of our society. Actor and big time investor Ashton Kutcher has considered one of the potential applications of AI during a discussion with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles.
The main thrust of the conversation centered around Sora, a generative video tool created by OpenAI and the impact it could have on filmmaking.
Kutcher said, “I have a beta version of it and it’s pretty amazing.”
the “That 70’s Show” actor then added, “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. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
Kutcher explained to Schmidt how the program could help reduce the cost of making a movie by a significant margin.
“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 elaborated. “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].”
While messing around with the new software, he asked Sora to make footage of a runner attempting to escape from a deadly sandstorm.
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“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it,” Kutcher stated during the conversation. “I, in five minutes, rendered a video of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.”
Here’s more from Variety:
Referencing a new processor from Nvidia, which is supposedly 30 times as performant as existing software, Kutcher said video-generating platforms like Sora are about to become exponentially better.
“You’ll be able to render a whole movie. 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. “Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
He then said, “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?”
On the one hand, this sounds really super exciting. With Hollywood seemingly becoming nothing more than a propaganda maker to push the radical leftist worldview, this software provides independent content creators a chance to make non-woke stories that contain their own messaging and values without having to go broke or try to raise an impossible amount of money to realize their vision.
However, there’s just something terrifying about artificial intelligence in general. It lacks the human soul, thus it lacks emotional understanding and nuance. That will always be a huge limitation that is impossible to overcome. Not to mention, the whole point of AI is to get rid of inefficiency. What happens when humans themselves are the inefficiency?
Just a nightmare scenario for you to ponder.
Sora sent ripples through Hollywood when OpenAI released preview footage in February. Not everyone is optimistic about the burgeoning software: Tyler Perry, for one, halted an $800 million studio expansion project in Atlanta after seeing what Sora could do.
“There’s got to be some sort of regulations in order to protect us,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “If not, I just don’t see how we survive.”
Perry continued, “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, that there’s some sort of thought for them.”