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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the intersection of entertainment and technology, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
In just a few short years, text-to-image models went from only being able to churn out smudgy, “dreamlike” approximations of their input to producing detailed visualizations of whatever you describe. As the AI image generators got better, text-to-video models like Runway’s Gen series, Meta’s Make-A-Video, and Google’s Veo also came into their own. Now, some of Hollywood’s biggest studios have signaled that they are ready to start riding the gen AI wave.
Even with all of the obvious concerns about copyright infringement and job displacement that generative AI presents, a steady chorus of voices has been insisting that this technology is going to be the future of filmmaking. A lot of gen AI supporters see it as a tool that’s “democratizing” art by lowering traditional barriers to entry like “learning how to draw,” “learning how to play an instrument,” or “learning how to write a story.”
And even though much of what we’ve seen out of the AI generated video space hasn’t been especially good, more and more entertainment studios seem to be betting on this technology to pay off (for them, especially) so long as everyone commits to it and ignores all of the potential harms that come along with it.
The use of AI in TV and film production isn’t exactly a new thing, but studios
