Artificial Intelligence is primed to take over Hollywood with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall. Proponents of AI are making bold promises. That potentially means human creativity will be replaced by the theft — sorry, data scraping — of pre-existing words, sounds, images and ideas.
Jobs will be lost as human actors and crew are eliminated from the process. Clean water will be wasted, with billions of gallons needed to cool data centers. What will be left is anyone’s guess.
Despite these concerns, AI has found (bought?) a berth at film festivals, which purportedly exist to celebrate the art of cinema. At Cannes this year, a producer was hawking AI translations of international films. Actors who make a living dubbing such films? Soon to be obsolete apparently.
Earlier this month, a Korean film festival in the city of Bucheon launched its first competition dedicated to AI filmmaking. And closer to home, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York featured a program of short films made with generative AI. Among the filmmakers taking part was Nikyatu Jusu, the writer-director of the horror feature “Nanny,” which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2022.
My colleague Michael Phillips called it an “eerie, assured feature film debut,” and it also got a home video release from the prestigious Criterion Collection. All of this is background to say: Jusu is respected and her work is well-regarded. So it came as a shock to many that she was embracin.
