Does Film Survive AI? | Quinn Halleck | TEDxSonomaCounty

[Music] somebody just told me that Ted wasn't a real person which was a really big bummer because I was looking forward to meeting him but perhaps the talk doesn't change perhaps that's the whole point once on a time our stories were told huddled around the fire watching the Warm Glow of the flickering flame well for thousands of years our ancestors would tell their stories and pass them down from generation to generation like a cherished heirloom but that would change with the Advent of electricity see 100 years ago we would trade the Warm Glow of the

temp fire for the glow of the television screen later the technology would continue to advance black and white yields to color film to digital 2D to 3D it's a Continuum of innovation though we don't sit around the fire as much as we used to perhaps there's a lesson in that that the stories have never changed it's stories of love stories of hate stories of The Human Condition today a new transformative Force challenges once again the very fabric of Storytelling artificial intelligence we've all heard it some say AI is the end of art perhaps the end

of creativity and in my case the end of Storytelling hm now in my life I've had the opportunity to work under Hollywood Giants wearing dual hats as both an assistant and a creative I've seen movies made with budgets nearing $200 million and watch Studios develop some of the biggest shows in television but beyond that I'm a I'm a Storyteller I'm a filmmaker I mean this is a childhood ambition of mine since the age of five as a kid I would take my mom's desk lamp and make a film light out of it or maybe some

scrap aluminum and make my very own camera crane well as I grow older that ambition to experiment has never died and AI is my new tool so here I stand with my Hollywood mentorship my filmmaker perspective and now the Advent of AI and there's an important question that's asked as these tools develop does the filmmaker die H C the dramatic music well let's first demystify AI what exactly is it and how much longer do we have until we're all taken over by the Terminator soon no just kidding well AI really is a broad term it's

uh not a single entity like how 9000 nor is it the brainchild of a loone corporation like Skynet instead it simply represents a method of creation wherein rather than being meticulously crafted by human hand it's given a large set of guidelines and data and essentially told to teach itself think of AI as a digital snowball where once we took little bits of snow packed them together to make a snowball now you just take that same snow roll it down a hill and watch it grow bigger and bigger all on its own pretty cool but hold

on if we're using AI to make our stories and just rolling our ideas down a hill hoping for AI to make them bigger and bigger than then what happens to creativity are we restricted and suffocated by the uniformity of AI have we lost something in the process H I wanted to try to find this out I mean we stand at the crossroads between creativity and Innovation so over the past year a team and I set out to find out what this cross roads might look like together we worked on a film called Sigma 1 where

the use of AI wasn't simply just used and a single use case scenario nor was it the principal Creed of driving force instead we treated AI as a collaborator we used it through every step of the traditional film Mak pipeline everything from ideation to execution you see the integration here is key we our goal was to create one of the first AI films but you have to ask yourself what is an AI film well you see it's a balance uh a balance between creativity and how much AI is used in that creativity on one hand

of the spectrum you have artists creating images generated entirely from algorithms and on the other end of the spectrum Hollywood studios are using AI to employ large teams to create single use case scenarios say daging Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones but I wanted to do something new find a middle ground of this spectrum integration as I said is key the story of Sigma 1 began inspired by a true story between an engineer and an AI chatbot in pre-production tools like chat became the creative sounding board for my writer and collaborator Drew Marin it helped guide

our script and deepen our story and then prompt Engineers would use tools such as do and mid journey to create concept art that we would use to help flush out the world and we would take that concept art put it through Runway and begin the storyboarding process in production I would ask my actors to use AI chat Bots tailored specifically to help them find the back stories for their characters Back stories that may have not made it into our film otherwise and then in post-production Gavin Bedford Ian e Mike Joya and artists by the name

of coffee vectors and droel would use tools such as deepface labs and stable diffusion to deep fake my actor so their face could change from one Persona to the next and lastly in post-production my sound designer Heraldo gu would use an AI voice generator from 11 labs to bring a voice to our character Sigma now the overarching goal here was twofold create a captivating AI origin story and to be a little self-aware a little meta we wanted to use the very tools that the story was about so we took these ideas and we applied AI

through the entire creative process the goal here wasn't simply to have cool new vxs but instead figure out a new relationship between Ai and film that we could see in the future the result was astounding and the reason I mention the names of my crew is not merely to give them credit because they deserve it but to illustrate the idea that behind each of these tools are artists specifically trained on how to use them in all over 100 people worked on this project and with them alongside was nearly 15 AI tools and this is a

piece of the result hi Sigma hello James Sigma I want you to introduce yourself self to my friend cat she's a journalist hello Cat I am Sigma my job is to learn Le how I may best stimulate convincing human behavior I have adopted your language your features your great works of art thank you AI is not something we should ignore nor should we want to think of a chef in a kitchen a chef is not responsible for growing the tomatoes or raising the cow instead a chef is responsible for making a meal with the ingredients

they are given instead a chef is given the tomatoes is given the beef and asked to make a meal something new something delicious something greater than the sum of its parts and in this analogy AI is serves as the farmer working on getting better and better ingredients making us all more creative giving us all the better ingredients to create our own visions and because AI is helping us in this process we might not be able to afford the heirloom tomatoes or the wagu beef but maybe now we can make something a little more Michelin star

and less Chef Bo Rd but there's something we're not addressing here I mean sure with better tools comes better stories but in that same breath and to quote Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility there are many fears about how AI will integrate itself into the film industry many fear that writer rooms will be replaced they fear that actors likenesses won't be protected fears that artists won't get credit for their work and I'll tell you those fears are legitimate it will take bold decisions from legislation and from companies to decide how these tools guide and

shape our industry and the worst part about it is that it won't happen overnight but there is a Beacon of Hope in all this believe me because when you think about when internet first entered our home man we all fear the demise of the mailman mail was too slow to keep up with the pace of email we feared that the death of the mailman would happen in causality to this invention but what happened because of that was a new era of online retail became King and suddenly there's a demand like never before for the package

delivery we continue to innovate we move forward we adapt we change black and white turns to color film to digital 2D to 3D it's Continuum of innovation in the wise words of Dory from Finding Nemo just keep swimming okay so to end this what happens when tools develop does the filmmaker become obsolete well I'll tell you AI is moving at such a rapid Pace it's hard to know how far these tools will go and the more important question is how far is too far but from where I stand creativity doesn't die in the process of

making Sigma one I got to see a team of people working together with these tools alongside them inspiring the idea that AI could stand as a remarkable Ally in this process of creativity let me leave you with a vision imagine we're all huddled around the fire this campfire we call creativity and next to us we might see AI let's not embrace it as a rival but perhaps treat it as something that can support us in our creative needs something that allows us to go from Innovation to Innovation it's uh amplifying Us in this process allow

AI to stand with us in our artistic Visions Illuminating our voices H AI where it stands today treats itself as a companion in this creative Endeavor in the hope as we continue forward and we decide how these tools will be used in our life we'll find that then the result AI is amplifying artists not replacing them thank [Music] you