Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta is the first Netflix production to use AI-generated footage, with the streaming service claiming that the move achieves spectacular results 10 times faster than usual and at a significantly lower cost. But does GAI (generative AI) pose a mortal threat to humans in the film and television industry?

Human VFX specialists may be nervous about their future employment prospects, but really this is just the latest technological innovation in an industry constantly competing both for audience attention and cost-cutting ingenuity. Crowd scenes in modern films are often populated by a mix of human extras and computer-generated figures. Real actors perform in front of blue (or green) screens, onto which the spectacular locations are added later by CGI. Instead of physical make-up, AI can make actors look younger or older, or transform them into fantastical beings. The question concerns where this use of GAI falls between enhancing the creative powers of humans and replacing those humans with machines.

Recent strikes by writers and actors have highlighted the threat to creative livelihoods posed by GAI. The Writers’ Guild of America ended a five-month strike in 2023 with an agreement which limited the role of AI in screenwriting. American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA recently ended a year-long strike by performers in video games, having won an agreement that requires consent before a company can use a performer’s likeness — and previous work — to generate new material without the person’s presence, or even knowledge.

Movies can, after all, generate convincing “performances” by digital clones of deceased actors: why pay a human to work when a computer programme can generate the same product? Voice-over artists are especially vulnerable, when a recorded voice can be used to generate new speech ad infinitum.

In the UK, negotiations between the actors’ union Equity and producers about the use of AI are ongoing. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain has a campaign around AI, but so far has reached no firm agreements to limit the use of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) in replacing the human imagination.

The UK government, which looks to the AI industry as one of the engines for future economic growth, has taken an outlying position on generative AI and human creators, arguing that normal copyright rules should be suspended for companies wanting to train their models on what humans have created. Writers, performers, visual artists and musicians are campaigning against this position, arguing that “just as tech firms are content to pay for the huge quantity of electricity that powers their data centres, they must be content to pay for the high-quality copyright-protected works which are essential to train and ground accurate GAI models.”

The difference between previous technological innovations and GAI trained on their output, according to the creatives defending their copyright, is that GAI will first consume their work and then become their direct competitor. Musicians will find their audiences lured away by AI-generated pastiches of their own work. Actors will be replaced by software which parrots their own voice, down to the timbre and characteristic emotional expressions. Writers will no longer be hired when companies can request work by genre and subject matter, “in the style of” the redundant scribe.

In short, though VFX specialists may be wondering whether to find a new profession, Netflix’s use of GAI to realise a director’s vision is far from humanity’s biggest problem when it comes to generative AI on screen.

When AI is generating all the scripts, performances, music and visual design, and there are no more creative humans whose work the machines can ingest and regurgitate, we may start to wonder why cinema is so homogenous and cold. El Eternauta’s use of AI may not be overly troubling in and of itself, but the future of entertainment could be far more artificial.

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.

TimandraHarknes

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