Hollywood And The Threat From Artificial Intelligence — Real Or Imagined
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: If you guys want fair residuals, say hell yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Hell yeah.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Writers Guild of America is rapidly approaching its 100th day on strike against Hollywood studios and streamers. And just over two weeks ago, the writers were joined in their work stoppage by actors, making this the biggest strike that Hollywood has seen in decades.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRAN DRESCHER: You cannot change the business model as much as it has changed and not expect the contract to change, too.
KELLY: That's actress and SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher speaking in July. Drescher called out the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group that represents major studios and streamers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DRESCHER: So the jig is up, AMPTP. We stand tall. You have to wake up and smell the coffee. We are labor, and we stand tall. And we demand respect.
KELLY: We should note that many employees here at NPR are also members of SAG-AFTRA. We are not on strike because broadcast journalists are covered under a different contract.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: There are some differences between what the Writers Guild is demanding from the studios and what SAG-AFTRA wants. But there are more commonalities.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BRYAN CRANSTON: What we have put forth in the negotiations is not unreasonable. It is not unfair.
KELLY: That's Bryan Cranston, the actor who played Walter White in "Breaking Bad," speaking last week at a rally in Times Square. He mentioned something that worries both actors and writers - the use of artificial intelligence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CRANSTON: We will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots.
(CHEERING)
CRANSTON: We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living.
(CHEERING)
CRANSTON: And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity.
(CHEERING)
KELLY: Artificial intelligence, or AI, may be one of the buzzwords of 2023. In Hollywood, many have long seen it as an enemy.
KARLA ORTIZ: Generative AI models encroach almost every space in our industry.
KELLY: Karla Ortiz is a graphic artist who has worked on some of the biggest Marvel films, including "Guardians Of The Galaxy," "Loki," "Black Panther" and "Doctor Strange." But on one of its latest big projects, the Disney+ series "Secret Invasion," Marvel used AI to animate certain images.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SECRET INVASION")
KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR: (As Gravik) Nick Fury. My war is set in motion. This is the extinction of the human race.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
OLIVIA COLMAN: (As Sonya) So you are responsible for all this?
SAMUEL L JACKSON: (As Nick Fury) Why do you think I came back?
KELLY: The studio behind the series said AI was used to complement its creative artists not replace them. But many creatives in the industry, including Karla Ortiz, remain worried about what's happening with AI.
ORTIZ: They're replacing jobs using our work as training data. It's not a hypothetical for us. It's happening right now. It's existential for us, really.
KELLY: When Ortiz says training data, this is what she means - AI has to learn how to do what it does, so as an example, AI will be trained on thousands and thousands of images from various artists so it can figure out how to generate a very specific style of art. Ortiz says she has found her entire body of graphics work has been used to train AI.
ORTIZ: It took away my ability to consent to being a part of this technology. They took away my credit. No one will know that my work powered those images outside of my name being clearly linked to it. And it took any kind of compensation away. It's really painful.
KELLY: Who should be compensated and when? It's a complicated question involving the legal definition of concepts including copyright protection, public domain, and fair use. Plus, some argue that artificial intelligence is a type of art form in itself that can inspire further creativity. Ortiz does not see it that way.
ORTIZ: You know, it's hard to not see the stolen work of my peers, you know, when I see these technologies. It's hard for me to see this as something that will be usable to me when I know it's already taken away jobs and opportunities. Personally, as an artist, I wouldn't use it. I don't think I would. I love painting. I love every step of the process from the doodle to the sketch to the drawing to figuring out the light, the colors, the composition. All of that is what makes art brilliant and wonderful. And to outsource that process to a machine feels empty to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: CONSIDER THIS - as AI continues to evolve and advance in ways many see as exciting, others whose livelihoods depend on creativity see these very advancements as a threat. But AI has been changing the landscape of the arts and Hollywood for far longer than you might think.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Wednesday, August 2.
It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Almost every industry is thinking about artificial intelligence these days - how to use it, how not to use it. And the actors and writers striking now would like to see regulations governing how AI can be used in their industry. Now, AI was not really part of the conversation during the Hollywood strikes of the 1960s and 1980s or during the last WGA strike in 2007. And yet, Hollywood has been imagining the threat of AI for long before it was real. NPR arts critic Bob Mondello tells us how AI became a movie villain.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: 1968 - a movie astronaut encounters a problem.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
KEIR DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal.
MONDELLO: He's in a small craft outside his spaceship in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and will soon run out of oxygen, which shouldn't be an issue.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Hello, HAL. Do you read me?
MONDELLO: The ship's computer, the HAL 9000, just needs to let him back in.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Hello, HAL. Do you read me?
MONDELLO: It's programmed to run the mission flawlessly as it explained earlier in the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
DOUGLAS RAIN: (As HAL 9000) No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
MONDELLO: So this can't be a glitch.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Do you read me, HAL?
RAIN: (As HAL 9000) Affirmative, Dave. I read you.
MONDELLO: Still, HAL is not cooperating.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
RAIN: (As HAL 9000) I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
MONDELLO: It's hard to describe the shock this was for 1960s movie audiences. There'd been films with, say, robots causing havoc, but generally robots doing someone else's bidding. Robots, at that point, were about brawn, not brain. Anyway, that sort of B-movie silliness was exactly what director Stanley Kubrick was trying to avoid. So his machine intelligence simply observed with an unblinking red eye. And when addressed directly, it spoke with a calm, modulated voice, not unlike the one that would be adopted four decades later by Siri and Alexa.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY")
RAIN: (As HAL 9000) This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
MONDELLO: Earlier literary notions of artificial intelligence - and there were not a lot of them at that point - had not really caught the public's imagination. Samuel Butler's 1863 article "Darwin Among The Machines" is generally thought to be the origin of this species of writing. And it mostly just notes that while humankind invented machines to assist us - and remember, a really sophisticated machine in 1863 was the steam locomotive - we were increasingly assisting them - tending, fueling, repairing. But Butler didn't suggest that they'd developed consciousness, nor did the science fiction writers who immediately followed him. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne invented devices as they sent characters to the center of the Earth and into the recesses of time...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE TIME MACHINE")
ALAN YOUNG: (As David Filby) If that machine can do what you say it can, destroy it, George, before it destroys you.
MONDELLO: ...Without ever considering that those devices might want to do things on their own. The term artificial intelligence wasn't even coined until the 1950s, about a decade before Kubrick made his "Space Odyssey." But HAL made an impression. Within just a couple of years, movie computers didn't just want spaceship domination. In "Colossus: The Forbin Project"...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT")
ERIC BRAEDEN: (As Dr. Charles Forbin) Colossus will address us directly.
MONDELLO: ...They wanted the whole world.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT")
PAUL FREES: (As Colossus) This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours.
MONDELLO: And then, this notion went viral. A high school student nearly set off World War III in "WarGames" when he thought he was hacking a computer company but accidentally challenged the Pentagon's defense network to a quick game of...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WARGAMES")
MATTHEW BRODERICK: (As David) Global Thermonuclear War.
JOHN WOOD: (As Joshua/WOPR) Fine.
BRODERICK: (As David) All right.
MONDELLO: Problem being no one told the defense network they were just playing.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WARGAMES")
BARRY CORBIN: (As Gen. Beringer) What in the hell's happening here?
BRODERICK: (As David) Oh, my God.
JASON BERNARD: (As Capt. Knewt) Cobra Dane, we have Soviet missile warning.
MONDELLO: Mechanical men stopped being all brawn and got a new dispensation to think for themselves, something fiction had granted them before Hollywood got around to it. Sci-fi novelist Isaac Asimov came up with rules that would theoretically keep independent machines in line, which should have reassured Will Smith as he stared down thousands of them in the film of Asimov's "I, Robot." But he seemed skeptical.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "I, ROBOT")
WILL SMITH: (As Del Spooner) Yeah, I know - the three laws, your perfect circle of protection.
BRIDGET MOYNAHAN: (As Susan Calvin) A robot cannot harm a human being - the first law of robotics.
SMITH: (As Del Spooner) Yeah, I know. I've seen your commercials. You know what they say - laws are made to be broken.
MOYNAHAN: (As Susan Calvin) A robot can no more commit murder than a human could walk on water.
SMITH: (As Del Spooner) Well, you know, there was this one guy.
MONDELLO: And there was this one robot.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLINKING)
MONDELLO: The "Terminator" movies put all this on steroids - cyborgs in the service of a computerized, sentient civil defense network called Skynet that was designed to function without any human input at all. How did that work out?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY")
LINDA HAMILTON: (As Sarah Connor) Three billion human lives ended on August 29, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire lived only to face a new nightmare - the war against the machines.
MONDELLO: And nuclear blasts weren't necessary to make machine intelligence alarming, a fact cyberpunk noir established definitively in "Blade Runner" with its replicants and in the series that reduced all of humanity...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MATRIX")
LAURENCE FISHBURNE: (As Morpheus) Welcome to the desert of the real.
MONDELLO: ...To a mere power source for machines, "The Matrix."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MATRIX")
FISHBURNE: (As Morpheus) At some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
KEANU REEVES: (As Neo) AI. You mean artificial intelligence.
FISHBURNE: (As Morpheus) A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.
MONDELLO: Hollywood's still fighting that vision. Who knows what the entity wants in the new "Mission Impossible," but whatever it is, it'll be bad for humanity. It seems not to have occurred to Tinseltown that AI might do the things it's actually doing - making social media dangerous or making undergrad writing courses unteachable or screwing up relationships by autocompleting incorrectly. None of those are terribly cinematic, so Hollywood concentrates on exploiting our fears. In the late 20th century, we worried about ceding control to technology. In the 21st century, we worry about losing control of technology.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON")
JAMES SPADER: (As Ultron) When the dust settles, the only thing living in this world will be metal.
MONDELLO: Have there also been friendlier film visions of AI? Sure. George Lucas came up with lovable droids for "Star Wars."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE")
ANTHONY DANIELS: (As C-3PO) Where do you think you're going?
(SOUNDBITE OF R2-D2 BEEPING)
DANIELS: (As C-3PO) Well, I'm not going that way.
(SOUNDBITE OF R2-D2 BEEPING)
MONDELLO: Pixar gave us "WALL-E," pluckily determined to clean up an entire planet we despoiled.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WALL-E")
BEN BURTT: (As WALL-E) Wow.
MONDELLO: The drama "Her" imagined Siri as a digital girlfriend.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HER")
SCARLETT JOHANSSON: (As Samantha) I saw in your emails that you'd gone through a breakup recently.
JOAQUIN PHOENIX: (As Theodore) You're kind of nosy.
JOHANSSON: (As Samantha) Am I? You'll get used to it.
MONDELLO: "Star Trek's" Data was a sort of emotion-challenged Pinocchio.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION")
PATRICK STEWART: (As Capt. Jean-Luc Picard) Mr. Data, are you all right?
BRENT SPINER: (As Lt. Cmdr. Data) Yes, sir. I am attempting to fill a silent moment with nonrelevant conversation.
STEWART: (As Capt. Jean-Luc Picard) Small talk.
MONDELLO: And another Pinocchio, this one fashioned to stand the test of time...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE")
HALEY JOEL OSMENT: (As David) I'm a boy.
WILLIAM HURT: (As Professor Hobby) You are a real boy, at least as real as I've ever made one.
MONDELLO: ...Would have been Stanley Kubrick's own answer to the question he'd posed with HAL in 1968. After spending decades honing the script for AI, Kubrick handed the project off to Steven Spielberg the story of a robot child programmed to love and even to dream.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE")
HURT: (As Professor Hobby) To wish for things that don't exist or to the greatest single human gift - the ability to chase down our dreams. And that is something no machine has ever done until you.
MONDELLO: It wasn't enough, but it put a gentle face on our greatest fear about AI by allowing it to outlive all of humanity. And wouldn't you know - the film opened in 2001.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: That was NPR arts critic Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.