On the subject of Hollywood’s AI future, few have been extra vocal — or essential — than Justine Bateman.
Armed with a pc science diploma from UCLA, the veteran actor-filmmaker has sounded an alarm concerning the risks of changing human work with machine fabrication. She turned a lead voice in the course of the strikes when she suggested SAG-AFTRA on the difficulty and was a public face of the AI-skeptic motion on the WGA picket line.
Bateman is the founding father of Credo 23, a two-year-old group that believes Generative AI “will destroy the construction of the movie enterprise” and has set as its purpose “making very human, very uncooked, very actual movies/collection that respect the method of filmmaking.”
As Hollywood begins to cautiously dance with text-to-video instruments like OpenAI‘s Sora and because the firm makes Miyazaki-esque pictures obtainable (to no small furor), Bateman is renewing her name. The Household Ties star and Violet director argues a motion is rising — that it must develop — to fight a drift to the artificial utilizing natural materials human each in creation and sensibility.
She calls this motion a drive towards “the brand new” — a push to revive a humanity to filmmaking that she says has been misplaced because the algorithms started dictating content material selections final decade and that shall be additional torched by AI.
Her mission is a sort of populism we’re prone to quickly see throughout a bunch of industries (she is shut with Sean O’Brien, chief of the Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters). A number of high-profile creators have joined her push, together with Mad Males creator Matthew Weiner and famous cinematographer and The Handmaid’s Story director Reed Morano.
To platform the motion, Bateman has based the Credo 23 Movie Competition — a “filmmaker-first, no-AI occasion” during which motion pictures can include nothing machine-generated (visible results are OK, as they’re pushed by people). She says she is going to give all income from the competition to the filmmakers to help them and fund their subsequent movie.
Credo 23 is happening this weekend at Hollywood American Legion Put up 43 simply south of the Hollywood Bowl, showcasing about 30 shorts and options. They vary from items like Ethan Krahn’s avant garde Meditation on a Room to Callie Carpinteri’s teen-drama Tribeca hit Soiled Towel, in addition to two Bateman-helmed options, Look and Really feel, the latter starring David Duchovny and Rae Daybreak Chong. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Bateman earlier than the competition.
You’ve determined a movie competition is an effective technique to get your message out. What do you hope it accomplishes?
The 2 targets of the competition are first, no AI, and second, all proceeds go to the filmmaker to allow them to make their subsequent human movie. What occurred was this. I noticed the studios have been all in on AI and the streamers have been all in on AI. However then the festivals went all in on AI and I believed, “Wait a minute. The movie festivals are the place we noticed Pulp Fiction, and Sorry to Trouble You and intercourse, lies and videotape and all this actually unique work. And now, how does that occur if festivals are all in on automated content material?” So I believed, “I’ll begin my very own competition.”
Is there one thing damaged concerning the competition mannequin usually, do you assume? Or are you simply fearful a couple of tech takeover?
I’ve numerous gratitude for movie festivals. There are such a lot of individuals who spend an unimaginable period of time and who work actually exhausting to showcase nice filmmakers. On the coronary heart of all these movie festivals, there’s a real goal to champion nice artwork. However what have I seen occur — and maybe it’s a results of cash constraints, I actually don’t know their enterprise — is that they all the time had three classes of focus. Premieres of massive movies, cause-based movies, and kickass modern artwork like a Pulp Fiction or a intercourse, lies and videotape or a Cronenberg Crash. However the first two of those classes have gotten extremely massive whereas the third has gotten actually small. Movies that have been completely different and actually hit you in the best spot have been sacrificed for the sake of the opposite two classes. I’m not pointing fingers; I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes financially. However I need to do it otherwise.
There’s additionally a sense amongst some filmmakers that there’s much less profit to going to a competition.
Effectively, individuals used to return to festivals to get distribution. However now it’s so exhausting to get a deal. So we mentioned, “What if filmmakers acquired paid by a competition the way in which artists do at Coachella?” We don’t have a ton of cash however I saved the overhead low in order that between sponsors [Kodak, The Teamsters, AI-safety nonprofit Fathom and others) and ticket sales and everything else, we were able to cover all our costs with 20 percent of revenue. The other 80 percent is going back to filmmakers so they can make their next film.
How does all this tie into your anti-AI stance?
So this is about how the business has changed long before AI — when the tech companies came in and carpetbagged Hollywood. They’ve never been in the entertainment business. They’re in the tech business, which is a different financial ecosystem. It used to be that every time one viewer watched a film one time they paid $15, and the filmmaker got some of that. Then it became $15 so a whole household and anyone they share their password with can watch 5,000 or 10,000 films. It became about subscribers and a totally different setup. That’s never going to benefit a filmmaker.
And you think this affected the quality too, this drive towards quantity.
The north star was always excellent work. Sure, you had movies and TV shows that weren’t great. But everybody wanted to be connected to a really good project. Now with the whole new model, what you get is a conveyor belt of content. Of course there are exceptions. But the north star is not excellent work — it’s the conveyor belt.
How do you define that term?
Conveyor-belt content is the kind of film or TV series that can play in the background while you scroll mindlessly through Instagram. If you look away for 15 minutes and can’t know what’s going on when you look back — they don’t want that. I literally had a filmmaker friend who got a note from a streamer that said their film was “not second-screen enough.” The goal is to be cinematic Muzak. This is why a lot of people don’t want to go to movie theaters anymore. A good theatrical movie is designed to make you pay attention every minute. And people are not conditioned for that. So you take this conveyor belt and then you throw in the fear of being boycotted because you don’t have this type of box checked or that type of box checked, and oh man, the system it’s broken. It’s done.
Which leads you to AI.
AI can automate that content. It’s the next step. What I believe will happen is it will subsume the entertainment business because it helps the conveyor belt. They can now customize based on all the years of user history they have on you. For an upcharge, they can put your head on Luke Skywalker’s body for a showing of Star Wars tonight. Or they know you like, whatever, panda documentaries and Hong Kong fight movies, and so they can combine it and make you a movie.
Reboots have been rampant for a while, but until now, studios have had to make the reboot by hand — they had to go out and shoot a whole new movie.
Exactly. And now it will be automated. And people say, “What about copyright?” But of course who’s talking copyright? This is like Kleenex, they make a movie and throw it out and make another tomorrow. That’s how a lot of tech companies see films now. It’s just something to put on your website. And wouldn’t that be better — wouldn’t that be cheaper — if it can be automated? That cheaper really is the key. They would rather have no actors on a set because they’d rather have no sets. Sets are expensive.
Do you think people will go for this? Many experts say customization will be a novelty or, maybe at best, a niche. But you think it will subsume the business?
Yes, because we’re not talking about film audiences from the 1970s. We’re talking about people who’ve been conditioned on the conveyor belt of slop. They’ve also been awakened by social media and self-obsession. I think many people will be into it. Not cinephiles. But this will be new for a lot of people and they’ll go for it because it’s really just one click further than what they’re used to. People are used to looking at TikTok or an Instagram filter. So what’s an AI face?
What about the idea that AI is a tool — that it can help filmmakers who don’t otherwise have the budget to execute all the shots in their movie? Do you put any stock in that?
I don’t believe it. Because if that’s true, hundreds of films would have been impossible to get made before now. Humans always figured it out. That great shot at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard where you’re looking up from the bottom of the pool past the body to the photographers. That’s such an imaginative shot. They used a mirror to get it. If they had AI, they would have resorted to that, and we would have been robbed of one of the great shots in cinema. Constraints are what make great art.
But asking directors to voluntarily impose constraints is a big lift, doesn’t it?
Oh, I’m not asking anybody not to use it. I just feel they’re cheating themselves if they use it instead of finding out what they can actually do; I just would never use it because I’d be handicapping myself creatively. Using AI for a shot is a regurgitation of the past. It’s a vomit of everything that’s been ingested. And it’s theft. Come on. They say it’s a tool. What kind of tool needs to ingest 100 years of film and series or it can’t function? That’s not a tool.
And you don’t think there’s a way to live peaceably with it. Movies that include AI and human performers. An industry, too, that makes room for both.
Anyone who thinks that I think doesn’t understand greed and human nature. There’s a big bag of gold in the corner and you think these companies aren’t going to go and get it?
And just to be clear, you believe art is not possible here. That is, any AI image or video can’t be new, let alone visionary.
For me, artists are tubes through which the universe, God, magic, whatever you want to call it, comes through to us. Throughout history, new genres of stories or new music comes through that tube, and it changes society. But that doesn’t come through with AI; that’s not a tube connected to that source. And the people using it are not artists. Look at what Tom Cruise does. Who doesn’t love Tom Cruise? Look at every video of him, what he puts into Mission: Impossible. He does that for us.
Then you have Deepfake Tom Cruise.
Yes. No one drove a motorcycle off a cliff to make Deepfake Tom Cruise. There was no artist putting work into it, which is what matters to us, which we feel. And look, let’s be honest, these tech companies aren’t going after the artists — they’re going after the low-hanging fruit of all the people who wish they could be artists. It would be like if Boston Dynamics created an exoskeleton that looked like Kobe Bryant and you could put it on and flop around the court and say, “Look at all the jump shots I’m making.” You wouldn’t be Kobe Bryant. And they’re not filmmakers.
What a bleak picture, if accurate.
See, but there’s a new film business emerging. I don’t fully know what it looks like yet but we’re going to get there. The films at our festival, that’s what they do, they’re raw and real and there was no AI. They’re not on the conveyor belt of slop. They’re not automated.
So you want to slow down AI adoption in Hollywood while also building this idea of the new.
Oh no, I don’t want to slow down anything at all. No one can slow it down. I want to give a book of matches — to the studios, the streamers, OpenAI, Runway, everybody — and just say, “Go ahead and burn it down faster.” Because the faster we get AI into the business, the faster we’ll get to a new genre, which we really haven’t had since the ‘90s. So hurry up. So we can get to the new.
But if it’s so bad, shouldn’t there be a push to fight it? That’s kind of what the strikes were about, no?
Both things can be true. I think Generative AI is one of the worst ideas society has ever had. But also, hurry up and get it over with so we can get to the other side. What I want to do in the meantime is build a tunnel. We’re going to figure it out so that when all the AI stuff ends, something new and magnificent will be waiting on the other side. There will be filmmakers — human artists — working on it so that something great will be waiting. The idea of trying to save the tree doesn’t make sense to me. The tree is already dead. The goal now is to plant a new tree.
Some optimism! So how do you see this playing out?
I think after a certain amount of time, people will start getting sick of these regurgitations. It might take a while. But they will. They’ll get sick of an AI telling them their medical procedure isn’t covered or they can’t go to this school or anything else where these automated things are making decisions about their lives. And they’ll get sick of automated content too. What they will want is something real and raw and human and not AI.
And that’s what the festival is, kind of a glimpse at what can be waiting?
Yes. We’re building the tunnel and this is what we are working on so we can bring it out into the light on the other side. We have films that are, at the very least, leaning in a human direction, that resist a cliché turn. But also films that point to something raw that a computer couldn’t generate. We’re trying to get to a future that isn’t automated. I think it’s exciting and a lot of people will join us.
There are two roads. One is going right into the mountain. Fortunately, there’s another road. That’s the road I think we should get on.