‘Thank You for Generating With Us!’ Hollywood's AI Acolytes Stay on the Hype Train

While this type of hype is predictable at industry-led events, again and again summit attendees were reminded that generative AI isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan techno-bauble, like VR headsets, the “metaverse,” or NFTs. It’s actually revolutionary.

The insistence betrays the measure of anxiety one might expect at a confab celebrating a power–hungry industry staring down an energy crisis. And the shuttering of a video-generating tool from one of the biggest companies in the game. And protests against the data centers necessary for the technology to work.

Indeed, there was plenty of talk about how AI—despite concerns about how its great many “efficiencies” may change, or render totally redundant, the work of those toiling in creative fields—is not an affront to human creativity.

Everyone seemed in agreement that what AI cannot do—yet, anyway—is “generate” its own ideas. “The origin of creativity is the human mind,” said EA’s Mihir Vaidya. Adobe’s Hannah Elsakr offered similar sentiments, projected onscreen as an equation: (Humanity x Creativity)^AI = Unlimited Possibility. We were told that “stories are human” and that, in this brave new world of unlimited possibility, “human judgment” will be key. But AI’s promise of instant gratification misunderstands the very core of human creativity.

AI boosters see human beings as almost purely idealized, creative engines: prime movers in an increasingly technologized process. In reality, creativity is revealed in work and the toil of figuring things out. One learns to play guitar by stumbling through Green Day power chords. One learns to write by writing, and rewriting, and futzing around with the shape and structure of sentences. You can’t learn to write by just thinking about writing. Or “generate” a killer guitar riff by imagining it. Creativity is not just some commodity, trapped in the imagination, that can be tapped and sieved by technology. It is a skill that must be learned, not just unleashed. The dreaded “gap between imagination and creation” is not some inefficiency that can be ironed out by a computer program. It is where creativity itself emerges.

The other nagging issue is the results. A lot of the images demo’d at the summit looked plain awful. They are conspicuously synthetic, digital, inhuman. Yet everyone applauds for them, as if they actually look good. In another session, Rob Wrubel, founder and managing director of AI studio Silverside, bragged about how his company used the tech to make a completely AI-generated holiday ad for Coca-Cola. Maybe I, too, live in a bubble, but I recall that spot being widely despised and mocked. This, of course, was never mentioned.

The suffocating hype-o-rama made Kennedy’s fireside chat a healthy dose of reality.

In addition to stressing the importance of human virtues like taste, and even basic ability, she outlined a few instances in which technological advances had failed her productions. Kennedy, who stepped down as head of Lucasfilm earlier this year, cited a recent Star Wars film—the forthcoming The Mandalorian and Grogu, one presumes—where 3-D printed props began breaking after a few takes. Because they were not built by skilled prop masters, whose experience grants them intuitions about how objects will behave, and not just how they look, they turned out flimsy and subpar.