AI is revolutionising Hollywood – and the web

The way films and videos are produced is about to break. Generative AI is reaching a quality in moving images that surprises even experts – with consequences for Hollywood, the advertising industry and everyone who watches video.

What is at stake

“Apartment interior, sunset” – three words are enough, and the AI from New York firm Runway AI generates a video sequence with plants on the windowsill and a view of the New York skyline. In conversation with me, Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says: “We are experiencing a revolution in video production.” Less than a year ago, image models like Dall-E and Midjourney surprised the industry; now the video models are catching up.

How fast this is developing

Ely Greenfield, CTO of Adobe Digital Media, tells me: within a year, the first fully AI-generated feature film may be possible. Yves Bergquist of the Entertainment Technology Center in California calls today’s graphic quality “spectacular”. YouTube, Meta and TikTok have already launched their own AI tools for video production. What is a 30-second clip today could be a feature-length film tomorrow – and the day after, a large share of the moving-image production that is still created manually.

What this triggers in Hollywood

The concern is real. Actors’ unions and screenwriters went on strike together in 2023 for the first time in 60 years. The central dispute: how far may studios use AI to replicate voices, faces and performances? The writers have since reached a settlement; the actors were still negotiating. Billions of dollars in damage has already been done. Over time the industry will reorganise: AI will not replace every role, but it will take over parts of the production process – and change the earning models for creative workers.

Where the internet is heading

The second, less noticed effect: the web is being flooded with AI videos. Anyone who wants to see a dog in sunglasses against a snowy mountain backdrop can get it generated in 30 seconds today. TikTok content, ad spots, reels, short explainer videos – all of it can increasingly be produced synthetically. That raises questions about copyright, authenticity and disinformation. Jonathan Taplin of the Annenberg Innovation Lab criticises companies for mining data troves without regard for intellectual property rights. Regulation, as so often, is lagging behind.

I wrote the full piece for Handelsblatt.