‘Thank You for Generating With Us!’ Hollywood's AI Acolytes Stay on the Hype Train

Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood super-producer behind culture-defining megahits like Jurassic Park and the Star Wars franchise, recently put a question to the head of the American Film Institute: “How are you going to teach taste?”

As Kennedy told an audience of industry insiders who gathered in Manhattan this week for the Runway AI Summit, the venerable LA film academy has been incorporating certain artificial intelligence tools into their curriculum. Kennedy says she asked the institute’s dean how the school would continue to raise generations of not just prompt-generators but discerning filmmakers with a distinct point of view. “Taste is fundamental,” Kennedy, 72, told the crowd. “It does define the choices you’re making.”

In other words, how could the AFI ensure that these AI tools were being used to make work that is, you know, good?

It’s a great question. And the sort that was in short supply during this industry confab, which New York-based AI company Runway hosted less than a week after OpenAI killed its video app Sora, disrupting the company’s $1 billion deal with Disney. Despite that blow to early prophecies that Sora would remake Hollywood, the hype machine was working overtime Tuesday, as executives labeled AI as a technological feat on par with the harnessing discovery of fire.

“AI has become the conversation,” Runway’s cofounder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told the audience at the event while an AI-generated video showed an old man on the subway reading a newspaper when the big bold headline “AI Has Become the Conversation.” In addition to offering a suite of text-to-video generation and VFX tools for “creatives,” Runway also operates an annual AI-generated film competition. It’s positioned itself at the forefront of the creative revolution in AI. As I discovered at the event, that also involves trying to make “generate” happen. As in popularizing the verb. Summit guests were offered free T-shirts exclaiming “Thank You For Generating With Us!” in the iconic Bookman font of those “Thank You For Shopping With Us!” plastic bags.

“We’re living in magic times,” Valenzuela told the crowd, in a tone-setting, 10 am keynote titled “The Normalization of Magic: AI and What’s Ahead of Us.” The title was a nod to sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws” outlined in a 1962 essay, the third and most famous of which claims that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As if to prove the point, another AI-generated image was projected on big screens spread across an enormous high-rise ballroom, showing Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs striding the ancient Athenian agora with a be-toga’d sage (Socrates, I’d guess). “We are literally here!” Valenzuela beamed.

Well, not literally. But you know what he means.

By and large, Runway’s AI summit was marked by this sort of wild, declarative enthusiasm. Early in the day, Paramount’s chief technology officer, Phil Wiser, cautioned that he wanted to describe the benefits of AI without being “hypey or hyperbolic.” He then immediately went so far as to claim that generative AI ranks among the top 10–and maybe even top five–“technology trends of all time,” ranking it right alongside the printing press, and fire.

The mood at these kinds of events brings to mind one of the only funny Bluesky posts: “CEO of Oreo cookies: The Oreo cookie is as important as oxygen.” Another speaker compared AI’s revolutionary potential to that of the printing press (again), the photographic film camera, and Adobe Photoshop (she, incidentally, heads up Adobe’s new AI business ventures). An executive from video game studio Electronic Arts boasted that AI was able to “close the gap between imagination and creation.”

While this type of hype is predictable at industry-led events, again and again summit attendees were reminded that generative AI isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan techno-bauble, like VR headsets, the “metaverse,” or NFTs. It’s actually revolutionary.

The insistence betrays the measure of anxiety one might expect at a confab celebrating a power–hungry industry staring down an energy crisis. And the shuttering of a video-generating tool from one of the biggest companies in the game. And protests against the data centers necessary for the technology to work.

Indeed, there was plenty of talk about how AI—despite concerns about how its great many “efficiencies” may change, or render totally redundant, the work of those toiling in creative fields—is not an affront to human creativity.

Everyone seemed in agreement that what AI cannot do—yet, anyway—is “generate” its own ideas. “The origin of creativity is the human mind,” said EA’s Mihir Vaidya. Adobe’s Hannah Elsakr offered similar sentiments, projected onscreen as an equation: (Humanity x Creativity) AI = Unlimited Possibility. We were told that “stories are human” and that, in this brave new world of unlimited possibility, “human judgment” will be key. But AI’s promise of instant gratification misunderstands the very core of human creativity.

AI boosters see human beings as almost purely idealized, creative engines: prime movers in an increasingly technologized process. In reality, creativity is revealed in work and the toil of figuring things out. One learns to play guitar by stumbling through Green Day power chords. One learns to write by writing, and rewriting, and futzing around with the shape and structure of sentences. You can’t learn to write by just thinking about writing. Or “generate” a killer guitar riff by imagining it. Creativity is not just some commodity, trapped in the imagination, that can be tapped and sieved by technology. It is a skill that must be learned, not just unleashed. The dreaded “gap between imagination and creation” is not some inefficiency that can be ironed out by a computer program. It is where creativity itself emerges.

The other nagging issue is the results. A lot of the images demo’d at the summit looked plain awful. They are conspicuously synthetic, digital, inhuman. Yet everyone applauds for them, as if they actually look good. In another session, Rob Wrubel, founder and managing director of AI studio Silverside, bragged about how his company used the tech to make a completely AI-generated holiday ad for Coca-Cola. Maybe I, too, live in a bubble, but I recall that spot being widely despised and mocked. This, of course, was never mentioned.

The suffocating hype-o-rama made Kennedy’s fireside chat a healthy dose of reality.

In addition to stressing the importance of human virtues like taste, and even basic ability, she outlined a few instances in which technological advances had failed her productions. Kennedy, who stepped down as head of Lucasfilm earlier this year, cited a recent Star Wars film—the forthcoming The Mandalorian and Grogu, one presumes—where 3-D printed props began breaking after a few takes. Because they were not built by skilled prop masters, whose experience grants them intuitions about how objects will behave, and not just how they look, they turned out flimsy and subpar.

She stressed the importance of uniquely human experiences like chance and accident to the creative process and underlined the value of the sort of “thinking time” that other speakers onsite seemed keen to streamline or eliminate altogether. “I’m gonna sound like a traditionalist!” she said. And to be fair, she did. Refreshingly so.

If AI is indeed a useful tool for the blockbuster filmmaking process, then it’s little surprise that someone with a CV as long and impressive as Kennedy’s would have more sophisticated thoughts about how to use this tool. The younger, jumpier AI upstarts seem more eager to use technology as an end run around a creative process they talk about as sacred.

Maybe it’s the sort of circumspection experience—combined with tremendous success—brings. Or maybe it’s just the difference between knowing how to create something and merely being able to generate it.