“AI Isn’t Hollywood’s Villain—It’s a Flawed Hero,” Writes Joshua Glick for Wired

Technological disruption is nothing new to cinema, writes Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick for Wired. “Early film theorists considered silent cinema a universal language until ‘talkies’ transformed storytelling for the big screen,” he writes. Still, the advent and proliferation of audiovisual content created entirely by artificial intelligence “elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes.” Concerns regarding the use of these technologies are merited, Glick writes, especially with respect to “synthetic resurrection,” where the likeness of a deceased actor is used posthumously in a film. Still, positive uses of the technologies abound, including in human rights documentaries, where powerful testimony can be portrayed without sacrificing the anonymity of the subject. Text-to-video, wherein a user inputs a textual prompt from which an AI produces visuals, can result in projects that are exciting in their “strangeness and messiness,” he writes. Most appealing to Glick are those works which combine the human element with the artificial in a kind of collaboration between man and machine: “These projects point to the productive frictions of mixed-media and cross-platform practices.”

Post Date: 01-31-2023