I'm Not Worried About AI, I'm Annoyed By It

AI is a fun little tool. It can make lists, it can write summaries, and I'm sure there are other places outside of Hollywood that it will be very useful. But every time someone tweets about AI coming for my job, I roll my eyes.

No matter how good those minute-long clips get, they still don't have the ability to do the only thing that would make me start to worry.

You can't upload your script and get it to spit out a movie.

Until that happens, AI is just going to be one of those annoying things, like crypto, that a certain section of the population is going to be into, but most people avoid.

Let's dive in.

'Terminator 2' Credit: Paramount

AI is Not Taking Over Any Time Soon

Every time there's a new Google Veo drop, someone wants to spout off about how good the clips look and how easy it was to prompt them to get them there.

But AI is not being built to take Hollywood into consideration. If it were, you'd have these AI companies spending a ton of money trying to become input machines for writers to upload their screenplays. They'd have AI reading sluglines and descriptions to spit out these "groundbreaking videos."

They don't.

They have people desperately typing in prompts, hoping you get some sort of character consistency and movement over the course of a very short scene.

Sure, AI can be used to age some faces, create digital extras, or add to the VFX, but it's not doing the one thing that would actually shake up Hollywood, and it's not close to doing that any time soon.

Once in a while, I am impressed with how good the visuals look, and equally annoyed by how much ground AI would have to make up to really take a lot of jobs in Hollywood. These AI programs are neither efficient nor accurate. If you've played with any of these visual-generating programs, you know how hard it is to get a consistent look from angle to angle, or get exactly what you want on the first try.

Character consistency, realistic physics, and coherent long-range movement are significant challenges for current AI video generation models, especially over more than a few seconds.

Tweaking things could take hours. That's crucial, those hours could be spent actually shooting what you want with real people and cameras.

Maybe you think this will be cheaper, but a single person burning out trying to design camera angles to cut together via prompting is actually cruelly inefficient and a waste of resources.

As I said up top, until I can upload my script and see what it spits out, this all feels like a bit of a waste of time.

I could see AI being used by camera departments for visual effects, or AI used in post to help fill in some blanks, but all of it will need skilled craftsmen to spot check and make sure it actually matches what's being made and stays on tone and in reality.

Critics are going to tell me all that is close. That you can have one person doing it all soon, and it's going to change and democratize everything.

But I don't see that happening any time soon.

'I, Robot'Credit: 20th Century Studios

Who is Using AI?

Now, I'm not an idiot, I know that AI is already used for script analysis, generating concept art, pre-visualization, character design, basic video editing, VFX, sound design, music composition, and much more complex tasks within the creative industries.

I just used it to make that list in the previous paragraph...but at the end of the day, human taste and perception are still how things get greenlit in Hollywood.

That's not changing. Mostly because we need humans to pay to go to the movies. We can't trust robots to predict taste; we actually need to see how people react to work.

Look at how a movie like Sinners took over the box office this year. Do you really think AI could have predicted that or even modeled it? Do you think it could have written or directed it?

Come on.

Of course, startups and research labs are exploring ways to integrate AI deeper into production pipelines, which would naturally involve handling script-level data. Some tools are already being developed for script breakdown and pre-visualization based on script elements.

But we are years, if not decades, away from this stuff being seamless.

And let's not forget the regulation at play here. AI is already scraping the internet and looking at other people's hard work. At some point, these companies are going to get sued or regulated, and that's going to slow everything down.

Every time someone says AI is going to take over, they're arguing the theoretical, when you can look outside in Hollywood right now and still see a bunch of humans doing all the jobs.

Sure, people are using it, but it's not writing great scripts or making great movies.

Right now, it's still a tool that takes a really smart person to bend it to their will. And it's a tool that needs a lot of work.

Summing It All Up

AI is a topic for bad parties and a good villain for movies.

Being replaced by AI is just an annoying conversation we have to have every time one of these companies releases some new videos to try and drive their stock up or justify their existence to their investors.

Let me know what you think in the comments.