Modern cinema is awash with tedious legacy sequels and too much garish CGI. The last thing we need is another excuse for Hollywood to be lazy. Whether it’s Star Wars or Ghostbusters, moviegoers are tired of endless reboots and just want something fresh — without getting hit by popcorn from overexcited Minecraft fans.

To add insult to injury, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued new rules this week which said the use of AI and other digital tools would “neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination” for awards at the Oscars. This will likely pave the way for broader AI use in filmmaking.

Meanwhile, our social media news feeds are overflowing with AI slop; hyper-real, queasy images of celebrities hugging their younger selves or a Beatles photo with two Paul McCartneys and Ringo with 15 fingers. Soon, one might be greeted by this sort of nonsense on the big screen, rather than just on one’s phone. AI has already crept into productions; last year The Brutalist used AI to enhance Adrian Brody’s Hungarian accent. It feels inevitable that the AI sewage gates are about to burst open. Hollywood loves to cut corners, as evinced by how the quality of its CGI has degraded over the last two decades.

AI proponents claim it could be used merely for cosmetic enhancement as opposed to screwing people out of a job. The Directors Guild of America (the DGA) did secure AI-related protections in their 2023 contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). It ensures AI can’t replace human roles and requires studios to consult with directors before using it, though the director doesn’t have veto power.

The DGA was right to be concerned about job losses. As Parmy Olson notes in her book about ChatGPT, Supremacy, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks and the producer of Shrek and Kung Fu Panda, said in November 2023 that generative AI would cut the cost of animated movies by 90%. He also said that animators would be reduced to around 10% compared to “the good old days”.

AI will need to be contractually constrained to stop the hyperreal bull being let loose in the animation shop. There needs to be a framework of what’s allowable with AI. Making Brody sound more Hungarian doesn’t seem like a serious crime, but deepfaking dead actors or extras seems pretty godless. Likewise, using AI to tighten up an already-written third act just speeds up the grunt work, but using large language models (LLMs) to generate a premise and a script should be scorned, even if such a script doesn’t turn out to be totally insipid.

There are parallels in the music industry. People used to bristle at autotune; now it’s an industry standard to use pitch correction, even for live shows. The Beatles using AI to eliminate background noise on John Lennon’s vocals seems like a great use of AI, however limp the song might have been. There is a world where it could be just used to help artists be better artists.

But keep dreaming. That’s not the world we live in. We live in Yanis Varoufakis’s world of techno-feudalism, where online overlords like Amazon bypass markets and hoard cash that doesn’t get recirculated in society. Vassal businesses have to pay Amazon, a third-party platform, to get access to their customers because its service is frictionless. Convenience usually trumps ethics and restraint is in short supply in Hollywood, whether it’s cosmetic surgery or the CGI denouement of a mindless action movie. Like Amazon with commerce and distribution, AI will make things almost too frictionless to resist.

The one crumb of comfort is this: there is something aesthetically repugnant about full-blown AI. It looks like what it is: soulless. Hayao Miyazaki, director and Studio Ghibli co-founder, calls it an insult to life. Will audiences start to miss the human touch? Polling would suggest people are suspicious of AI. Reality has been under threat for a long time and it keeps retreating with every technological innovation. But warping the means of escapism may be enough for people to reject the inevitable march of progress en masse.

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