At the Core of Hollywood’s AI Fight: How Far Is Too Far?
Alan Ruck, the actor who played Connor Roy in HBO’s “Succession," says he and a director friend tested out the generative-AI tool ChatGPT a few months ago over lunch, to see whether it could write a screenplay. They asked it to write a scene about Ruck as a soldier in basic training, a play on the actor’s role in the Broadway show “Biloxi Blues." “It was s—," Ruck said. “It was every cliché and hackneyed idea you could imagine." The potential use of artificial intelligence in TV and movies has become a hot-button issue in the biggest Hollywood labor strike in 60 years.
Ruck, like many writers and actors on the picket lines, is worried the technology will replace jobs and produce low-quality content. Entertainment executives say bots won’t be penning scripts soon, calling such fears overblown. But big companies across Hollywood, including Warner Bros.
Discovery, Paramount Global and NBCUniversal, are already using AI tools in other ways and are actively exploring new applications, from summarizing scripts to special-effects to promotional marketing, people familiar with the situation say. Several studio executives said AI tools could accelerate storyboarding, which uses a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds, and set design, such as dreaming up what a restaurant in the 1960s might look like. Producers could use a digital replica of an actor to make tweaks to a scene without having to reshoot it—to turn someone’s head or change their expression slightly, studio executives said.
A promising application is for dubbing of actors’ voices in different languages. AI could make the audio sound like Ben Affleck or Harrison Ford in Italian or German and even adjust the movement of their lips accordingly. Some production
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