Ron Howard believes there’s a chance AI-generated films could succeed — but only if movie audiences decide they’re worth watching.
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Howard spoke during a fireside chat at the Runway AI Festival, the AI company’s content showcase, at New York’s Alice Tully Hall on Thursday evening. The Oscar-winning director of “A Beautiful Mind” and “Frost/Nixon” acknowledged to Runway co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela that the technology has been “democratizing” the filmmaking process, allowing storytellers to “more efficiently, more broadly” tell their stories. But whether those films end up dominating multiplexes will depend on whether audiences have an appetite for them, he said.
“It’s going to be, again, up to the audiences to determine what appeals, what resonates,” Howard said before the crowd of several hundred attendees, acknowledging that creators will have choices between traditional and AI-facilitated production methods.
“It’s going to ultimately be determined by us. What’s worth our time? What are we invested in? What values do we care about?” Howard continued. “Do we care about knowing the alive actors on screen and connecting with them for that reason, or which I think won’t ever go away, but are we also fully willing to invest in characters that are synthetic? There are already CGI characters, there are already animated characters. So, I think the answer is, we don’t really know, but I expect there’s room for all of it.”
Howard also said he shared the concerns about the changes AI has inflicted upon the creative community, which has splintered both auteurs and actors alike. But it was up to the same creative community to figure out the best legal and cultural guidelines about how AI is used.
“It’s all our job to worry about it, think about it, experiment with it, learn from it, and talk to each other and work on it,” he said. “But it’s going to evolve, and audiences are ultimately going to tell us.”
Howard’s comments come as top-tier directors have taken varying positions on the technology in recent months. Martin Scorsese said last week he had joined the German AI startup Black Forest Labs as an adviser, saying the technology could help make the storyboarding process more efficient, while Steven Soderbergh has repeatedly heralded his use of generative AI in films such as “John Lennon: The Last Interview” and an upcoming Spanish-American War film. Meanwhile, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have said AI should be a limited “tool” as part of the broader filmmaking process, with Spielberg saying on a podcast last month that AI would not be “the final word” in his films.
Howard said that some of the purported ways AI could optimize the filmmaking process — such as generating images quickly, lowering costs, quicker turnaround in editing — haven’t yet emerged for him despite the “breakthroughs” in the technology.
“It seemed it’s going to create a lot of efficiencies, but so far I can’t say that I’ve seen it yet in my world,” he said.
Valenzuela, Runway’s co-CEO, has spoken repeatedly about the company’s tools opening up the world of filmmaking to a broader audience. In a press conference with reporters before the Howard chat, Valenzuela said he believes that soon much of the content floating online will be AI-generated by users, though he disputed whether that would quell content made through traditional filmmaking. “Idon’t think that you take the human out of the generation part,” he said. “The human is the one generating the content in the first place.”
“This is not a zero-sum game,” he said. “You’re free to choose what medium you want to do, so if you want to have a voice of a person and do, instead of traditional CGI, a much more effective AI workflow, you can. If you want to do all traditional filmmaking, you can. There’s nothing preventing people from choosing things. I think that’s sort of a mutual discussion, because I think a lot of the topics sometimes are skewed towards this idea that we’re going to stop doing everything we’ve done, and everything in the world now moving on will be AI-generated and kind of nothing else, and I think that what we just see right now, that’s not what’s actually is happening.”