OpenAI Is Ready for Hollywood to Accept Its Vision

When OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora last year that lets people instantaneously generate hyper-realistic videos — like a movie trailer of an astronaut traversing a barren desert planet — in response to a text prompt of just a few words, it wasn’t the quality of the footage that caught Hollywood folk off guard as much as the rapid growth of the technology initially thought to be years away from being able to be plugged into the production pipeline.

Questions swirled as studios execs chattered about AI’s place in the entertainment industry: What production processes can it streamline; to what degree can it cut costs; what are the legal and labor guardrails?

Since then, OpenAI has been engaging with studios about Sora, hammering home its applications as it works out kinks with independent filmmakers and undergoes safety testing. Now, the company is pitching Hollywood as it ventures toward widespread adoption of its technology.

Rohan Sahai, who leads the Sora product team, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that there’s been considerable interest from the entertainment industry, without specifying the contours of the conversations. He sees utilization of the tools across most stages of production as the tools improve.

“For some of these bigger production companies, the ones who are forward-looking, they see where things are going and try to think about how to change their whole workflows to make the best fit at this moment in time,” he says.

The current legal landscape mostly limits adoption to the previsualization process, like conception and storyboarding, that doesn’t directly involve the final product. Widespread utilization of AI tools in the movie­making process will depend largely on how courts land on novel legal issues raised by the technology. Still, workers in the industry are already losing jobs, with concept artists, voice actors and animators at the forefront of that displacement. AGBO, the production company run by Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo, is making a significant push into the space, most recently hiring AI expert and former Apple exec Dr. Dominic Hughes to serve as its chief scientific officer in a bid to streamline production processes.

Among few considerations holding back further deployment of AI is the specter of a court ruling that the use of copyrighted materials to train AI systems constitutes infringement. Another factor is that AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright protection, limiting exploitation since they’d enter the public domain.

OpenAI is optimistic about a future in which its technology isn’t constrained by legal or labor guardrails as it continues to fight lawsuits from creators. Its conversations with Hollywood reflect that confidence.

“We are taking a broader stroke here in terms of what we want people to do with these models in terms of creating and storytelling,” Sahai says. Rather than “honing in on a certain part of the [production] pipeline,” he adds the company is taking a holistic view at selling Hollywood on the technology since “long-term, people are going to realize it’s so much more powerful than simply tapping into a VFX” workflow.

“We are deeply engaged with the industry as a whole to get their feedback, including studios,” OpenAI said in a statement.

On March 19, the ChatGPT maker screened 11 short films made with Sora by independent filmmakers at Brain Dead Studios, a hip movie theater in West Hollywood on Fairfax Avenue, in a bid to showcase its technology. Those movies displayed the limitations of the tools while hinting at their potential.

None of the titles incorporated extensive dialogue between characters. Narratives were sparse to nonexistent, with more than one person commenting after the screenings some of the films were closer to commercials than short films. Characters appeared to be sitting on air at one point in a movie about the misadventures of knights.

Still, the possibility that Sora can streamline the VFX workflow, an area of production known for especially slim margins, was evident. The titles selected for the screening featured an array of shots generated by the tool exhibiting why it’s captivated Hollywood: a fish bejeweled in eyes; an ocean vista kissed by a string of setting suns; a silhouette of a man swallowed by a vortex of newspapers. Some VFX artists are already leaning into AI, working around certain legal constraints by training open-source systems on their own works.

Verena Puhm, an AI filmmaker, said she started her short film about a dairy farm in a dystopian future meant to be a critique on mass production and exploitation with 15 hours left before the application window closed. She said her project is intended to raise “a bit of awareness about what we’re consuming.”

OpenAI no longer discloses the sources of data used to train its systems. Artists, authors and publications have sued the Sam Altman-led company over allegations it illegally pilfered their work without consent and compensation. Courts ruling against fair use — a legal doctrine that permits utilization of copyrighted works without a license — could have major implications for the AI leader. Last week, hundreds of major Hollywood figures signed a letter pushing back against OpenAI and Google‘s appeals to the U.S. government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted works.

In attendance at the screening was an executive at Universal Pictures as well as Disney, who came in a personal capacity and not as a representative of the studio. A UTA employee at the agency’s Entertainment Marketing division was also in the crowd.

Alton Glass, a Directors Guild of America member who attended the screening, said “workflows are going to shift” with the advent of AI. He stressed, “opportunity will come from that.”

Adoption of AI in Hollywood has been slow but is steadily progressing. Last year, Lionsgate announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Runway that will see the New York-based AI startup train a new generative AI model on content owned by the studio, which will be used to assist with behind-the-scenes production processes. Under the no-cash deal, Runway will have access to a portion of the studio’s titles to create a model designed exclusively for Lionsgate’s use, with the hope that it can be plugged into different parts of the production pipeline, such as the storyboarding process and in helping with the design of VFX work, according to a person familiar with the deal. This was followed by Blumhouse partnering with Meta on a series of short films produced with the help of Movie Gen, which creates video and corresponding audio, as it tests the AI waters, and James Cameron joining Stability AI’s board of directors.

“They’re looking for case studies,” says Rob Rosenberg, former Showtime Networks executive vp and general counsel. “They’re looking for proof of concept that they can turn around and say, ‘We reduced production costs by X percent.'”

Sora was made available for public use in December after undergoing safety testing by experts in misinformation, hateful content and bias. Filmmakers, visual artists and designers were also provided access for feedback on improvements. Since then, creators have been unveiling AI-generated projects to mixed reception, with some criticizing aesthetics that they say approach the uncanny valley and others hailing the near-instantaneous creation of movie-ready visuals and effects.

Similar to how OpenAI is engaging with independent filmmakers as it rolls out Sora, Meeka Bondy, chair of Perkins Coie’s entertainment practice and HBO’s former senior vp for legal affairs, says AI companies courting Hollywood are looking to show creators that their tech isn’t the boogeyman it’s been represented as by some critics. She adds, “It highlights their visibility, but I also think it gives them legitimacy. If James Cameron is doing it, the thought is that they’re not trying to replace” production crew.

The narrative advanced by OpenAI to encourage adoption of its AI tools has revolved around the “democratization” of the entertainment industry. With the tools, creators face lower barriers to filmmaking that, some may say, will help realize bringing their ideas to the screen. Earlier this month, it was announced that James Lamont and Jon Foster, the writing team behind Paddington in Peru, are reteaming for an AI animated film called Critterz. The title is a feature-length adaptation of the short film of the same name from Vertigo Films, which is joined by AI creatives at Native Foreign in the project. That short, written and directed by OpenAI creative specialist Chad Nelson, emerged as among the first AI films to combine visuals generated by OpenAI’s Dall-E tool with traditional animation techniques and was later remastered with Sora. The producers said they hope to “set a new benchmark for generative storytelling pairing human-driven creativity and traditional animation techniques with the latest AI technology.”

But these talking points, which underscore the opportunity presented to some creatives who’ve been able to advance their careers with the AI tools, gloss over those who have lost and will continue to lose work due to the technology. Concept artists and workers in VFX, among other positions that are seen as under fire by AI, are taking stock of potential displacement down the road if the tech advances at the pace it has been.

A study commissioned last year by the Concept Art Association and The Animation Guild surveying 300 leaders across the entertainment industry found that three-fourths of respondents indicated that AI tools supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs at their companies. Over the next three years, it estimated that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected. At the forefront of the displacement: sound engineers, voice actors, concept artists and employees in entry-level positions, according to the study. Visual effects and other postproduction work stands particularly vulnerable.

Sora has limitations — technological and legal — that will restrict its applications in the entertainment industry. Still, it has very real potential in production in ancillary industries, including advertisement and the video work commissioned by corporations, that present fewer labor constraints to adopting the technology. Among the considerations of the technology’s impact on Hollywood will be downstream effects for creatives that depend on such work for the primary source of their income. It’s expected to have a similar impact on soundstages and equipment rental companies since the technology will likely encourage fewer production crewmembers.