Ashton Kutcher says you’ll “soon be able to render an entire movie” with artificial intelligence, and explains what it means for cinema

Ashton Kutcher recently talked about AI technology and what it looks like for the future of cinema. The actor says he’s been playing with OpenAI’s generative video tool, Sora, and says it’s “pretty amazing.”

During a recent conversation with the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles Kutcher explained:

“You can generate any footage you want. You can create great 10, 15 second videos that look very real. He still makes mistakes. He still doesn’t fully understand physics.

“But if you look at the generation of this that existed a year ago versus Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, it contains footage that I’d say you could easily use in a major motion picture or television show.

Kutcher said he pushed Sora to create footage of a runner trying to escape a desert sandstorm, and when he talked about it he shared:

“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it. In five minutes I rendered a video of an ultramarathon runner running across the desert chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.

He then went on to talk about what this means for the future of cinema and how it will make the process of producing projects much cheaper:

“Why would you go out and do a prop scene of a house on a TV show when you could just create the prop scene for $100?

It would cost you thousands of dollars to go out and shoot. Action scenes where I jump off this building, you don’t have to have a stuntman do it, you could just do it [with AI].”

With artificial intelligence evolving so quickly, Kutcher believes people will soon be able to generate an entire film using the technology. He explained:

“You’ll be able to render an entire movie. You will simply come up with an idea for a movie, then write the script, then feed the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie.

“Instead of watching a movie someone else invented, I can simply generate and then watch my own movie.”

He went on to say that for Hollywood studios to compete with this, they will have to step up:

“What will happen is there will be more content than there are eyes on the planet to consume. So any content will only be as valuable as you can get people to consume it.

“And so, therefore, the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something that’s good, the bar is going to have to be raised, because why would you watch my movie when you could just watch your movie?”

This whole AI thing is pretty wild, and studios are already embracing it and using it in their filmmaking processes. The technology is both exciting and scary, and it will be interesting and strange to watch it continue to evolve.

Source: variety