By the end of this year, you might walk into a theater and see a big-budget movie that was made in some significant part with generative AI. You may not even notice; like early CGI, the technology’s fingerprints will only draw the eye when it’s done badly.
These are the predictions of Naeem Talukdar, co-founder and CEO of Moonvalley, a startup that makes “commercially safe” AI models for Hollywood studios and other creative businesses. Nearly every studio is already tapping AI for early-stage previsualization work, he claimed. But copyright concerns have stopped moviemakers from going all-in on the technology in actual production.
“The biggest blocker to date for studios has been the legal piece,” Talukdar said. “It’s that their legal teams just can’t sign off on it.”
That could change with the rise of video generation tools that purport to be “clean,” or trained only on licensed data, like Moonvalley’s new Marey model or Adobe’s Firefly video generator. While the courts have yet to decide whether it’s legal to train AI on copyrighted material, these models let risk-averse businesses dodge iffy IP questions.
Shrek removal: Moonvalley recently raised $84 million, days after the public release of its Marey video model. Talukdar said the company trained Marey entirely on videos licensed from the IP holder for the length of training, usually around a couple of years (the license to generate with the resulting model is perpetual). It also doesn’t ingest public domain works or its user-generated content, Talukdar said.
The data pool comes from a range of sources: independent studios, filmmakers, and videographers; film communities across the world; “film students who have tons of B-roll…that they’re not doing anything with,” Talukdar said.
“People aren’t really worried about accidentally generat[ing], like, Shrek, or something like that, because you’ll find that and you’ll remove it,” Talukdar said. “The real concern, especially for these studios, is…what if it’s just some random thing nobody can recognize that was copyrighted 30 or 40 years ago? Basically, this risk that I might just have infringing content all over the place, and I have no idea how to control for that.”
Lydia Clougherty Jones, a senior director analyst at research firm Gartner, said businesses of all kinds remain very concerned about legal questions around AI. Even using ‘non-copyrightable’ material can be tricky, she said.
“Risk of copyright infringement continues to be top of mind,” Clougherty Jones said in an email. “A risk-averse perspective would be to use only non-copyrightable material, but even that approach still requires assurances that the content is indeed not ‘copyrightable,’ which can be challenging given the nuances that distinguish what is and what is not copyrightable.”
Legal vs. ethical: Copyright law is, of course, far from the only fraught topic around AI in moviemaking, which has raised issues from labor impact and aesthetic concerns to questions about the nature of human creativity. When Asteria, Moonvalley’s partner AI studio, announced Natasha Lyonne’s directorial debut, she faced fierce online backlash.
“It’s obviously a sensitive topic, as it should be,” Talukdar said. “You look at the previous [entertainment guild] strikes, you look at everything that’s kind of come around it. And I also think a big part of why we exist is that tech companies have been very irresponsible with how they roll out these models.”
While Asteria describes Moonvalley’s models as “ethical,” Talukdar said he’d rather not weigh in on the ethics of AI in film.
“We prefer to use the words like ‘commercially safe,’” Talukdar said. “The ethical side? My opinion on that is that my opinion shouldn’t matter, in that the less tech people opine on that, probably the better. I think that it’s up to the industry to figure out what’s right, and it’s up to us to abide by that.”
That said, he’s “100% optimistic” that AI will be a good thing for the entertainment industry, adding that AI will make “the areas of production that require the least sort of creative input” cheaper, like establishing shots, B-roll, and backgrounds. He’s convinced good acting and writing will remain impossible to replace.
“It’s not this idea that the big studios are now just gonna start factory-farming content slop and printing profits. It’s also not the flip side, which is, every Joe like me is going to suddenly be creating movies left and right,” Talukdar said. “What’s really going to happen is what we’re already seeing start to happen, is this middle layer of people who have talent, who have taste, who have creativity, but they don’t have necessarily that access, who don’t have a connection to one of the big five studios in the world, will now have the ability to create things that they couldn’t create before.”