That AI will play an increasingly important role in professional film production in the future is clear. But in Hollywood, too, there is a dispute over the use of AI between producers who want to save costs and creatives who are afraid of losing their jobs. That&s why Rob Bredow, former Chief Creative Officer of the legendary VFX forge Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and current Senior Vice President of Creative Innovation at Lucasfilm, tried to allay creatives& fears of AI competition in a TED talk. To demonstrate the possibilities of AI in the Star Wars film universe, he showed excerpts from the "Star Wars Field Guide," a short film created by an ILM artist in two weeks with the help of AI, showing AI-generated animals from an alien planet from the perspective of an exploration droid.
Star Wars Field Guide
But that went badly wrong - the echo on the net was devastating: because the SF animals demonstrate the weaknesses of AI rather than giving hope for fantastic new worlds. You can almost see the generated creatures& prompts, they are simple recombinations of familiar earthly animals, the results of which have nothing imaginative. Shown are, for example, a peacock snail, a blue goat and lions, a monkey spider, a crocodile turtle, a tiger polar bear or a zebra gorilla, all of which completely fail to meet the high expectations that one has of creatures from the Star Wars cosmos created by ILM.
(from 11:08 the Star Wars Field Guide is shown in excerpts)
On the other hand, the examples show very well what image AIs can create with ease: fusions of the most diverse objects (or even styles), which for an LLM are simply intersections in the Latent Space of all trained images and concepts. But are the unfantastic creatures only the result of unimaginative prompts or do they testify to the fundamental inability of AIs - in this case image models - to create something truly new? Can they really only recombine what has already been learned in any way, or could they - with a different prompt or a different model - also be creative and create something truly new?
Star Wars Field Guide
It is astonishing with what self-confidence Bredow presents the clip and puts it in a line with technological VFX revolutions that have made ILM famous in its approximately 50-year history - be it the legendary effects of the original Star Wars films such as lightsabers, the spaceship models and hyperspace jumps or the animated (CGI) dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Bredow argues in his lecture that AI is just another tool in the creative toolbox of VFX specialists, but the clip shown demonstrates the opposite. We can be curious to see how ILM will really use AI in the next Star Wars projects and hope that the quality will be significantly higher.
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