Kate Knibbs: Yeah, they might not be having the best year. And then another part of the film in television industry that AI has made a big impact on, is storyboarding, which is when they're developing a TV show or movie, they hire visual artists to sort of sketch out how the sequences will look. I've talked to a lot of visual artists in that field who say that that whole field is getting completely wiped out basically because it's so easy to have image generators mock up storyboards now. And even really big name action movies that you've probably heard of involving superheroes are using that kind of technology. So those are just a few examples, but basically anything you can think of is there's some sort of experiment being done with GenAI tools.
Lauren Goode: And what does all of this mean for the Hollywood labor market? Obviously AI was a big topic of contention during the strikes a couple of summers ago. Where are we now?
Kate Knibbs: So there's not one monolithic response to AI, but I think the fact that it was such a point of contention is really indicative of how a lot of people in crew and actors and actresses feel, which is threatened, because this technology really, it will augment some jobs for sure, but it is already, as I talked about with the storyboarding, replacing some work that was formerly done by humans. And so there's a lot of pushback. There's a lot of, I think, valid trepidation.
Lauren Goode: Right. The sense is that it's really going to benefit the studios, their bottom line versus the workers, the character actors.
Kate Knibbs: Definitely will. There are, I will say though, I actually talked to a group of documentary filmmakers a few weeks ago who are all very interested in incorporating AI into their processes and already are. And on the director and producer side of things, there are some really prominent directors and producers who are also embracing this tech. Darren Aronofsky, the director of Black Swan and Requiem For A Dream, has a AI film studio and he has a partnership with Google's DeepMind, and I'm sure whatever he does with that is going to be just as upsetting as Requiem For A Dream in a different way.
Lauren Goode: Did I also ever tell you about my bus ride in Lisbon with Darren Aronofsky?
Kate Knibbs: No. What happened?
Lauren Goode: I had interviewed him at a conference. Darren strikes me as someone who's always been pretty tech forward, and at the time, this was 2018 or 2019, it was at a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, and he was doing a lot in VR. So I interviewed him on stage at this conference about that, and then afterwards, a bunch of us were going to the same dinner and he and I and another person ended up on a bus that took forever to get across Lisbon to this dinner. So I was stoked as a journalist, thinking, "I'm literally sitting in the back of the bus with Darren Aronofsky and I get to ask him all these questions." I'm sure he was like, "Get me the hell off of this bus." And then we got to the dinner and he introduced me to the giant wave surfer, Garrett McNamara, who was in town because he was surfing those giant waves in Nazare. And I have to tell you, Kate, I've never had anything feel so much like a fever dream.