To say Hollywood creates tendencies is just scratching at the beginning. With budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, the film industry in Hollywood is also at the forefront when it comes to advanced technology. This involves Artificial Intelligence (AI) and experimenting with novel ways to use it.
More specifically, Hollywood is using Generative AI in the latest productions. This term refers to AI capable of creating new content (in this case, video content) and differs from other AIs that can analyze data or perform actions independently.
The marriage between Hollywood and AI
The film industry has been in love with AI since at least 1927 when Fritz Lang released a silent film called Metropolis about a robot. Since then, not only has Hollywood used the topic an incredible amount of times, but they have also incorporated this technology into films.
The most common usage of this particular type of AI (Generative) is to deal with the dubbing issue. As you probably know, movies are dubbed in different languages for worldwide distribution. However, it’s not great to watch an actor’s mouth while hearing a disjointed voice.
This is particularly terrible, even hilarious when sentences have different lengths. You can hear the actor’s voice when the mouth is already closed. Other facial expressions suffer, too, since they happen at unnatural times.
Generative AI adjusts facial movements, syncing them to the audio in different languages. This way, the performer looks like they’re native speakers of those languages.
It all happens thanks to AI being able to identify the actor’s expressions and modify the footage, so it’s indistinguishable from the original. And this is just the beginning since AI is poised to create video from text.
From Hollywood’s standpoint, it’s a logical choice that will enhance the experience of people around the world. This is just the tip of the iceberg since AI can create backgrounds, perform image restoration, and much more.
The point is we might be entering an era where you don’t know what’s real anymore. Whether that’s a cause for concern is a different topic. However, can Hollywood honestly claim Actor X or Actress Y are the true performers in the localized version of the film since they didn’t even speak their lines?
The end isn’t nigh, yet
You might wonder with these advancements don’t herald the end of Hollywood as we know it. With AI software able to do such incredible things, you can see that actors might be replaceable in the not-too-distant future. How long until an AI actor is cheaper than a human one? That might be a turning point.
How long until AI can completely modify footage to the point of creating new movies altogether? What would it mean for the film industry? And who’d own such content? These are questions that will be resolved as the tendency inevitably progresses.
