The AI Closet

What’s the old joke about sex in high school? Everyone is talking about it… but nobody is doing it.

Is AI the opposite? Everyone is using AI… but nobody wants to admit it… or talk about it? I loved the conversation in Wired with Puck’s Matthew Belloni about artificial intelligence in Hollywood. The headline pretty much says it all: “Everyone Is Doing It.” Hollywood may be one of the loudest places when it comes to the AI resistance. Writers worry about their work being used to train models (or chatbots doing the writing from ideation to final script)… actors worry about their faces and voices being cloned… animators, special effects artists, editors and… well… everyone else is worried that AI will at worst eliminate jobs… at best lower rates… and perhaps most predictably, give studios another way (as if they needed one) to squeeze creative labour. These are not imaginary concerns. For years, Hollywood has looked for better creative for less money (from tech to talent and beyond).

Soooo… they can say how bad AI is for creativity and movies… buuuutt… they’re using it… at scale.

Belloni talks about screenwriters using AI to suggest scenarios and help develop ideas. Studios are experimenting with it. Netflix has publicly said hundreds of its shows use generative AI in some capacity. AI is being used for storyboards, visualization, production workflows and countless other pieces of the creative process. The public conversation may still sound deeply anti-AI… while behind the scenes, the technology is increasingly becoming part of how the work gets done.

Welcome to the AI closet.

And I’m not even sure this is hypocrisy. Hollywood (much like each and every one of us) isn’t anti-AI… Hollywood is anti-being-replaced. It’s anti-being-ripped-off… it’s anti-losing control. Creative people have always adopted technology. Cameras… digital editing… CGI… motion capture… Auto-Tune… virtual production… the entire history of entertainment is a history of humans using increasingly sophisticated technology to manufacture something that moves other humans (see: The Internet!). As I said during my radio conversation this week on iHeartRadio, the resistance isn’t necessarily to the tools themselves… it’s to what happens when the tool becomes the substitute. There is a lot of creative power in these tools… from helping a writer get unstuck to helping a director visualize something. My bet is that it’s already nearly impossible to know where the human ends and the AI begins, because AI is getting caked and baked into every creative and production tool.

Which makes me wonder how long the AI closet can last?

Would you go see an “AI movie”? Would you care if an established filmmaker (someone you love and respect) talked openly about experimenting with the technology? Is this that weird state where the famous (or established) have the freedom to admit what everyone else feels pressure to hide? Maybe, more importantly, what happens when we can’t tell anymore?

We already accept enormous amounts of technology inside music, movies, television, photography and every other creative medium without interrogating which piece of software touched which part of the creative process… so long as the end result makes us feel something.

If I were a betting man, I’d say that AI quickly becomes just another invisible layer woven throughout the entire process. The result is that audiences may eventually care less and less about whether AI was used. That doesn’t make consent, compensation, credit, control or any other issue du jour disappear. If anything, those battles probably become even more important as the technology itself becomes less visible. I’m just left wondering if we’re currently in a strange creative cultural moment where everyone publicly debates whether AI belongs in the work… while quietly discovering that it’s already a done deal.

Maybe AI doesn’t have an adoption problem at all… it has an admission problem.

This (and some other topics) is what Trudie Mason and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.