The video explores the evolving role of AI in the creative arts, envisaging future films with AI-enhanced actors and dynamic performances. It questions the impact of such technological advancements on the traditional filmmaking and performing arts industries. The discussion brings in prominent voices like Justine Bateman, who argues that AI's encroachment may threaten artistic authenticity and provoke industry disruption, while Hadi Bovere considers potential for new creative expressions through technological synthesis.

The debate highlights differing perspectives on AI's ethical implications in arts, including intellectual property issues and the creative process. Justine Bateman voices concern over generative AI's reliance on past works, criticizing it as uncreative and a possible violation of copyrights. In contrast, Hadi Bovere examines how AI might foster novel artistic collaborations and educational opportunities, emphasizing ethical considerations in teaching AI in arts at the University of Florida.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. resurrected [ˈrɛzəˌrɛktɪd] - (verb) - Brought back to life or activity. - Synonyms: (revived, restored, rejuvenated)

Imagine films in which, say, Brad Pitt or Emma Stone plays opposite an AI resurrected Katharine Hepburn.

2. cadre [ˈkɑːdreɪ] - (noun) - A small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession. - Synonyms: (team, group, assembly)

...today's A list actors are AI mapped entrepreneurs that form this cadre of extremely talented individuals...

3. biophysical [ˌbaɪəˈfɪzɪkəl] - (adjective) - Relating to the science of the application of the laws of physics to the biological context. - Synonyms: (physiological, biological, physical)

...we created these biophysical sensors called the accents, that read your autonomic and somatic system.

4. autonomic [ˌɔːtəˈnɒmɪk] - (adjective) - Pertaining to self-governing physiological processes. - Synonyms: (involuntary, automatic, reflexive)

...biophysical sensors called the accents, that read your autonomic and somatic system...

5. somatic [səˈmætɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to the body, especially as distinct from the mind. - Synonyms: (bodily, physical, corporeal)

...biophysical sensors called the accents, that read your autonomic and somatic system...

6. embedded [ɪmˈbɛdɪd] - (adjective) - Firmly and deeply ingrained or fixed in a surrounding mass. - Synonyms: (ingrained, fixed, entrenched)

...there is a concern that as technology starts to shrink and it gets deeply embedded inside of our systems...

7. interpolating [ɪnˈtɜːrpəˌleɪtɪŋ] - (verb) - Introducing or inserting something between fixed points. - Synonyms: (inserting, introducing, embedding)

...it was interpolating biological algorithms.

8. recursion [rɪˈkɜːrʒən] - (noun) - The repeated application of a process or operation. - Synonyms: (iteration, repetition, looping)

...which is a generative music system. So it was creating the music in addition to another layer of recursion.

9. derivative [dɪˈrɪvətɪv] - (adjective) - Imitative of the work of another person, and typically disapproved of for that reason. - Synonyms: (imitative, unoriginal, plagiarized)

...described your creative process as nothing more than a blender mashing together past examples of human creativity. Heal, derivative trash.

10. repercussions [ˌriːpərˈkʌʃənz] - (noun) - Unintended consequences of an event or action, especially unwelcome ones. - Synonyms: (consequences, fallout, aftermath)

I think it's going to, you're going to find that people just feel isolated from that, how people feel isolated now from, you know, just, you know, social media, and you're just gonna see that it's not gonna be nice. Yeah.

AI Creativity - Genius or Gimmick?

Imagine films in which, say, Brad Pitt or Emma Stone plays opposite an AI resurrected Katharine Hepburn or Clark Gable or James Dean. Or films, perhaps, in which the faces of today's A list actors are AI mapped entrepreneurs that form this cadre of extremely talented individuals whose facial image the public will never see. Or films with extraordinary performances that perfectly realize their director's artistic vision because the director and their AI team and their powerful supercomputers have crafted the performances from scratch with no real actors being involved at all. And imagine further the possibility that these works can even morph in real time based upon the reaction of audiences or individuals. You can see the possibilities really are endless.

Now, the fact is, like many, I would in fact be extremely curious to see such works. But the question is, what would all this mean for the traditional realm of filmmaking or of the performing arts? Would this decimate industries? Would it collapse opportunities? Or might it open radically new modes of artistic expression, or perhaps even both of those?

So let us now bring in director, writer, producer, and author Justine Bateman, who is an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor. She holds degrees in computer science and digital media management from UCLA and is an outspoken advocate for protecting the rights of television and film professionals in the realm of AI. Welcome, Justine. Thank you for being here. And we also have Hadi Bovere, who is a computer scientist and interdisciplinary artist who is also an assistant professor at the University of Florida, where she has been tasked with establishing the nation's first AI and the arts curriculum. She's also the technology director of David Burns Immersive work, Theater of the mind. Thank you so much for being here.

So, Heidi, I just want to start with you quickly. You have been working with many of these tools, AI, broadly defined, but also computer-based systems that can read the particular biometric data of dancers or actors in the creation of your work. And I want to start with an excerpt from your piece, radical signs of life, just to sort of set the stage for the kinds of performance work that you do, can you just, like, set that up for us? What is that work, and what was the role of these technological tools in the creation of that work?

Sure. Radical signs of life essentially was a critique of the emergence of cybernetics and the ways in which our bodies actually can generate work. So essentially, Marco Donnaruma and myself, we created these biophysical sensors called the accents, that read your autonomic and somatic system, and they can create music and visual imagery. But it was really kind of an attempt to reverse cybernetics, in a sense, to understand that the error within the dancers actually enables us to retain the humanity within the work.

The other thing I'll say about the work is that the idea was that there is a concern that as technology starts to shrink and it gets deeply embedded inside of our systems, that we've moved away from externalized colonization, moving bodies across space towards internal colonization. So the work was really kind of critically reflecting on that potential future. So let's take a brief look, if you will.

Looks totally cool. And so can you just give me a clearer sense of what it was that we were seeing there? So it looked as though the dancers did have various technological measuring devices on them. Is that the case? And what were you doing with the readouts?

Yeah, so each dancer had two biophysical sensors on their body. And I was basically sending the data over something called open sound protocol, which then was translated inside processing. And it was interpolating biological algorithms. It was actually generating those creatures that you saw on the screen organically. And then the data was also sent over open sound protocol to Max MSP, which is a generative music system. So it was creating the music in addition to another layer of recursion. And then both of the sensor data going to both systems actually reached a threshold, and it triggered memory engrams on the back of the screen. So there were kind of two layers of imagery. So the idea was to explore this idea of bio memory as it relates to the emergence of technological or computational systems.

Right. So, clearly, the work you're doing and also the curriculum that you're developing, is a very positive look at the way AI can influence the kinds of things that you and your colleagues in the live performing arts space do.

Now, Justine, your view is rather different. You have a more of a dystopian view of where AI may go, not necessarily in performing arts. I want to get your feel there, sort of in film is where your focus has been. Do you have a similar sensibility that AI is going to decimate things when it comes to live performing arts as well? Or is it limited to the filmic arts?

I can't speak to that because I don't. I mean, beyond doing just straight plays when I was an actor, I'm nothing. I'm not kind of up on what's happening in live performance as far as how technology is being involved. But, I mean, first I want to help people have, like, a little bit of a definition of what generative AI is.

Think of it as like a blender. And if you have a blender at home and you turn it on, what does it do? Well, it depends on what you put into it. So it cannot function, Geneva AI cannot function unless it's fed things. Okay. And then you turn on the blender and you give it a prompt, which is your little spoon, and you get a little spoonful, little Frankenstein spoonful out of it of what you asked for. So what is going into the blender? Every but 100 years of film and television, or many, many, many years of doctor's reports or students essays or whatever it is.

And so in the film business in particular, that's what we call theft. It's the biggest violation. Yeah. And the term that continues to be used is all we did. I think the CTO of OpenAI, I believe that's her position. I forget her name when she was asked on some interview recently, what do you say about the fact that you didn't ask permission to take it? She said, well, it was all publicly available. And I will say this. If you own a car, I know we're in New York City, so it's not going to be as applicable. If I see a car on the street, it's publicly available, but somehow it's illegal for me to take it.

So that's what we have the copyright office for. And I don't know how well staffed they are to handle something like this, but this is the biggest copyright violation in the history of that office. And the us government, the european, the EU government was on it pretty quickly, the United States government put together, and tell me if you feel I'm going off on too much of a tangent here for your topic, but they put together groups of people to discuss this. What should the guidelines be? Not just in the arts, but in many other places. And of course, they had Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, and a series of other CEO's who run AI companies who benefit greatly financially and otherwise on there being no regulations.

So they had one of these that had virtually nobody from medicine or the arts or anything like this. And then you thought, okay, well, second go around, maybe you'll have no, second go around another batch of tech bros. Third go around another batch of tech bros. And so, surprise, surprise, the guidelines come out, which are virtually no guidelines, but $32 billion earmarked for the AI division of our society. So all those meetings paid off literally for all those men and women. Tech bros can be male or female.

And meanwhile, like, the entertainment business will be flattened because the entertainment business is a pipeline of duties right from conception to release. And you take out too many chunks of that pipeline and it'll collapse. It's just kind of structural, you know, societal structural physics.

But I want to go back to the blender analogy that you use, because I've read that description that there's nothing creative. It's just mushrooms. Yeah, it's a regurgitation. Regurgitation stuff. And so I was curious what AI would respond to that criticism. So, if you don't mind.

Well, hopefully. Hopefully it'll regurgitate some quote from me. Well, here we go. Here we go. So. And I would like to see what you think. Think about it. So, here is the actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman has described your creative process as nothing more than a blender mashing together past examples of human creativity. Heal, derivative trash. Your response? So let's just see what it says.

Creativity isn't just about entirely new ideas. It often involves combining existing ideas in novel ways. Much of human creativity comes from such synthesis, and I'm designed to assist in that process. By finding hidden patterns and data, I can help surface new combinations that can result something fresh and unique. Derivatives. Why are we listening to this? It's just a bunch of bullshit.

So clearly, chat has not convinced you. Right? So you. It's a parlor trick. It's a parlor trick. It's just jamming together a bunch. This is not a sentient being. This is not a person. This is not a. It's just a computer program. I totally agree with you. I mean, that's all it is. I just want to get the point of view of someone who actually works in the field.

Heidi, can creativity emerge from the unusual synthesis of creative things in the past that have never been put together in this particular novel way? Can that be creative? Yeah, that's a possibility. Yeah. I mean, I think.

And does something need to thoroughly break new ground and have no antecedent in previous human creativity to be creative, or can it be an incremental process? What's your, I think the challenge, though, with these kind of large language models, and again, I think when we're talking about AI, we've really kind of narrowed. I feel like my students have this understanding that AI equals chat, GPT, Dolly, and mid journey, which is not true. There's a long history, you know, going all the way back to cybernetics and thinking about computational systems. But I do think that, you know, with the larger language models that are owned, you know, by major corporations, when we have media consolidation in this fashion is what we might call, like, Nick style, right? Very generic, and there's a lot of averaging.

That's happening, rather than creating small language models that might be based on an opus, a corpus essentially of individual work. I'm blanking on the author's name, but she created a work where she used chat GPT well, two, like an earlier version to create a black story. And then she ended up building a whole smaller language model just with Gwendolyn Brooks poems. And it's a very different, nuanced story that's told because it's based on the language, different data set. So I think that is far more interesting to me in terms of helping my students understand the distinction.

And so in the program, I do want to just kind of depart, because the program that we're actually starting at the university of Florida, we're going to have a center as well as we're starting a certificate program in the fall. And it cuts across not only visual arts and theater and dance, but also music and gaming and other something called digital worlds. And the gateway courses are predominantly focused on the ethics behind using such models in one's work. So it's grounded in still ethics and understanding of bias and all of the theoretical assumptions that are being, you know, made around, you know, race and gender and a whole host of issues. I think that needs to be, you know, brought into the conversation, into the discourse.

So, Justine, if you were successful, which would be wonderful, that there was proper compensation in some way that made sense with that. That's not a goal of mine. It's not. I thought part of the issue was that the permissions, the business would collapse and profits would not go to where they should go. Oh, no, that's not how the collapse would happen. There's a number of let's say you take out all the people that do the marketing for films, okay? That's one piece of the pipeline. So you got like AI doing it or something like that, or you take out the actors.

Now the actors are a linchpin. You take out the actors, then you don't need to shoot anything. So you get rid of makeup, hair, cinematographer, location managers, everything. Maybe you take out the executives at the studio, and they're already using AI. I mean, they have been for a long time using AI programs to decide what to greenlight. So that's the collapse of it.

But what I want to say more so is I'm not maybe because I have a computer science degree, I'm not fascinated with this at all. At all. I don't see that. Yes, it's chewed up 100 years of film and television and, oh, my God, look, you can just put in a prompt and this thing comes out. That's not creativity. That is an output from a dumb program. Really. It's not smart. I mean, it's just a dumb program spitting out stuff.

It doesn't know what it's spitting out. It's not being creative. The person prompting it is not being creative. And so any artist that is using these tools, do you feel that they are diminishing their creativity by invoking? I will say this. If you truly are an artist, and I'm not speaking to what these other artists do because I'm just focused on film and television production and write books, too. But if you are using it to write your script or to somehow put your film together or to write your book or to write your essays, if there's anyone in here, I mean, I'll say a little bit about that in a second, but if you're using it to write your script, I don't believe that you're a writer because you would have to threaten my life to take away my ability to write the script. Like, that's what I want to do or to direct a film. And also, I don't know that society understands what's going to happen to them when this flow is cut off. I believe that artists like really someone who's called to this, right?

An artist is like a tube through which God, the universe, magic, whatever you want to call it, flows through into society. And you look back over history and see how that's true. Music, fine art, films, all of it. And when you cut that off, when you put stoppers in all of that, society is going to, it's not going to be good.

Also, don't forget, this is going to be infiltrating. You're going to have insurance companies denying coverage on something your doctor asked for. And if you are in school and you're writing essays using chat, GPT, or any other program like that, first of all, you'll never find out if you can write. And that's another thing for filmmakers. If you're using this, you will never find out what you can do.

But can you imagine, and Heidi, maybe your curriculum would speak to this. Can you imagine visionary teachers who are able to set their students certain tasks that allow them to gain a real deep facility with these tools that allows their own creativity to flourish in a way that it might otherwise not? I mean, I presume that must be part of the system that you're setting up at University of Florida, right? If it's AI and the arts curriculum. Well, you presumably imagine that the AI input is going to allow a certain kind of creativity that otherwise would not be there.

So where do you come down on this then, Heidi? Yeah, I mean, I guess. I mean, part of me feels like we've moved from kind of like the cyborg towards what I would call like a centaur, right, where there's a co creative partnership with the tool. Whether or not we're talking about robotics, you know, there are artists that work with robotic systems to create dance pieces or to generate visual art. And then part of the other thing, in terms of the program, we have looked at the cultural production, right, of live performance, and what does it mean for the future? Are we talking about, like, multi agent systems that are performing with actors on stage and robotic systems? What is the social choreography of that type of interaction?

But I think it is another tool. I've always worked with emerging technologies in a very open source sense, and it is another tool in the toolbox that allows us to think about how can we expand the language of live performance and where is it going. And I think part of where a lot of the conversations with the students have gone is, well, what does it actually mean to be human? Right. When we're working with these technological systems and they're mitigating the cultural production pipeline as a performer in a live context, we could use it also to collaborate on the script, not write the script. I don't think it's a wholesale thing. It's more focused on co creation.

But there are many places within the pipeline that could be disrupted and kind of taken over and jobs are lost. But I also think we can look back to the whole history of technological systems. Think about Marshall McLuhan, the way in which, you know, every technology that emerges, you know, there's something that's taken, and then there is something that's. That's gained.

In the University of Florida, you know, they've invested in 100 new faculty across a whole host of, you know, disciplines in an AI related capacity. Is that. Yeah, across the whole university. I see. So I think, in part, there is a responsibility to understand the potential ways that technology is going to disrupt particular industries and to prepare students. I'm not talking about, like, wholesale, like, reskilling, but I do think we need to be prepared and we need to prepare our students for a changing landscape.

So when you hear artists speak about collaboration, that for you, you just said, that's, I'm sorry, for me, just, you know, from my perspective, it sounds like a joke. Why am I going to capitulate part of what I do to stupid program, it makes zero sense to me. In fact, if I did that, I would right now just stop my progression as an artist. I'm looking to do something.

Look, this is going to, this is going to screw. Our gender of AI is one of the worst ideas our society's ever had. It's going to screw with us in the same way the COVID reaction did. I mean, you just watch. Like, I don't need to. You just see, you'll see what's going to happen.

I'm team human. I think humans are phenomenal. And when people talk about like, oh, well, you know, say like, well, wouldn't you want this to help you write a script or to help you put together storyboards for your films or something like this. And I'm like, you know, I've been using this program already. That's been remarkable for me. And it's my fucking brain.

So I just, the lack, I mean, I just feel like this, it's so, it so suggests a lack of faith in humans and in the human brain and in going beyond what you think you're capable of. Like, for me, creatively, I am. After it burns the structure of the entertainment business down. I'm making films now for the new. I think there's going to be a new genre in the arts on the other side of this that's really raw and really human and really real because we haven't had a new genre in the arts since the nineties of any real significance. I think it's like 20 years overdue because tech has been center stage. Like, get off stage. There are other things that are interesting in the world.

So I think it needs to take a backseat. Calm down. It needs to calm. Don't you notice? Like, at first it was like, oh, we're going to solve these problems for you. Make these things more convenient.

Or how about social media? Okay. And then when they, oh, I forget the, I forget the name of it. Snapchat. I remember when it first came out and someone described it to me and they said, it's like this. You're posting something and then, or you have an exchange with someone and then right after it's gone and I go, so we are reinventing real life interactions with people. Is that what we're doing? Because I can have a conversation with somebody and then it's gone. Or a Polaroid photo, and then there's just one of them, and if something happens to that, it's gone. What a concept of.

And so now we're into this arena of, well, what can we make you that you didn't ask for and don't need? How about that? And you're like, no, no, no, no. Just sit back. There's something OpenAI came out with recently called memory. It's like, I've got one. So I don't know. You want to replace that for me?

And I think there's a lot of learned helplessness. But, Heidi, again, I'd like to give you a chance to respond. I feel like we're setting up a little bit of a false binary here, in part because, you know, like, my dissertation and my research really looked at the way in which intelligent technology was like, a form of slow violence rescripting our nervous system. So a lot of my work actually is using the technology in the service of aesthetics to critique the technology.

So I don't think we're so diametrically opposed, but I do think there are going to be similar. There are some similarities in terms of the cultural production pipeline being disrupted in similar ways. But I guess for me, as an artist that has always worked with technology, I see myself more as a creative technologist. I think what's interesting for me is to invent new technology rather than using pre existing technology that capital has been designing for artists to use.

I think you could go all the way back to the 1990s, where there's this precambrian of explosion where new media artists were actually inventing new technologies or working with engineers or computer scientists to actually generate new technologies to create their works, because they were poking in the dark trying to invent new things. And so I think part of the challenge here is this kind of tension between generating technological innovation to create new ways of meaning making right in the world, and then also the ways in which somehow that new technology also has the potential to harm other aspects of society in terms of displacement of jobs and these things within the cultural sector.

Sure. Can I just clear something up? I'm not opposed to technology. I may not have a computer science degree. I'm talking about generative AI. That's what I'm talking about. Exactly. Specifically. That's what I'm talking about. I mean, I'm using, like, this editing system now. That's just fantastic. And it's all, you know, it's not. I'm not hand cutting with razor blades, you know, film and which is an art, too, that I'm not versed in. But, yeah, I'm not talking about all technology. I'm specifically talking about generative AI.

Yeah, no, that was clear. I think it does lead to a final part of the conversation that, again, I'd like to get your feeling on. So, historically, art has been a collective experience. I mean, we all see the painting, we all go to the performance, we all go to the film. And, yeah, we can take it in in very different ways. And that's the beauty of the.

The range of human reactions to the same stimulus. Heidi, you're talking about works that would no longer have that quality, necessarily, that the work could actually change based upon the individual's reaction.

What's your motivation for that? And what would that do to that previous collective that kind of defined what our artistic experience was? Yeah, I mean, I guess. I mean, I'm not talking about that work here today, but I also have an empirical research background in cognitive neuroscience, where I actually create media effects research. And part of that is building this massive, like, media genome based on biological signatures as a way to understand the ways in which audiences, whether we're talking about live audiences here or audiences who are watching film, television, playing video games, and their kind of neurobiological response to that content, so we can better identify and create almost like, you know, more personalized experiences.

So, in part, I was seeing the way in which, like, the future of media could be more bioadaptive, right, based on people's unconscious responses to that content, and creating these kind of, like, massive libraries of content. So you would have multiple versions of a given, like, film, for instance, based on people's biophysical response to that. But I do think, you know, part of that is moves in opposition to the way in which, like, these types of experiences or films are about kind of collective engagement. And we're seeing an experience of something. While we might have a subjective response to it, we're still kind of collectively engaging, you know, in the work. And in part, why I started moving back towards, you know, live performance or bringing people together into physical spaces, whether I'm making dance pieces or theater pieces, was because I felt as though we have lost our relational reciprocity to not only our own bodies, but our relation to one another in the natural world.

So I was interested in kind of uprooting the research, kind of disrupting the research that I had been doing, because I kind of had a crisis of faith about its potential danger. And so I have kind of pivoted and moved more towards creating experiences that can be collectively and cathartically engaged in.

I just want to say something about the film version that she just spoke of in relation, different versions, according to how people are reacting and stuff. And that's basically something that will come down the pike. But I think more immediately, maybe it'll come to that, but more immediately, it'll be based on your viewing history. So that's something that will be lost, a shared, shared experience. Even if you're not viewing, I mean, how many times are you at a dinner or something with the party with friends, and you go like, what have you been watching lately? Or what's your favorite film? And somebody says Jaws. And you're like, oh, my God, me too. What about that part where blah, blah, blah. Well, in the near future, you won't be able to have a conversation like that because there'll be a new jaws and it will be made to you or something specifically to you, just like your.

A lot of people have been commenting lately that the comments, like, on Instagram or something, the comments that are more suited to you will be the first 50 comments and the same post. Your friend can look at the first 50 comments or something that's more suited to him or her. So that's how the films will be. And you won't have this shared experience with people because there's something about film or song or something, you know, I can talk about, you know, Dave Brubeck's take five. That was 19, 65, 66 maybe around there. So all these years, other people have been listening to it and you can meet someone go, that's my favorite thing. Oh, my God, me too.

I used to listen to that with my grandfather. We're talking about the same thing, but that'll be, that'll be gone.

But can you imagine that new kinds of conversations and experiences might be generated again, I share your perspective, by the way, and a lot of what you said, it's very isolating. It can be. But can you imagine that the new conversation would be, how did it end for you? Or what was it like? You know, so that things just go in a different direction from what we're used to, but not necessarily one that decimates everything that we think of art providing, maybe.

I think you're going to find, though, I mean, this technology, you can't, you're not going to re engineer human, what humans are in a couple of years. So I think it's going to, you're going to find that people just feel isolated from that, how people feel isolated now from, you know, just, you know, social media, and you're just gonna see that it's not gonna be nice. Yeah. And I guess that's part of why I thought you were gonna say something direction away from that as a focus.

Heidi, is that part of it? In part. I mean, my work was always focused on making these tools open source and available for social justice organizations to increase the impact of their messages through what we call pop culture, for, like, social change. But I do want us to show bioadapted. There's actually a scene very much that mirrors what Justine just articulated or kind of like, mapped out.

What are you doing? I just wanted to see what you're seeing. We are seeing the same things. No, we're not. That. Back in Tenta, that dog in your frame. That dog's not in mine. Weird. You don't think that's weird? I said weird. But lucky.

Doesn't matter. I mean, does it matter? I'm sure there's a dog in mind, because I like dogs. And you're not really an animal person. You know, the scene is supposed to make you feel positive sensations. Doesn't that make you feel manipulated? I mean, yeah, of course, it's fiction, it's media. What else is it there for if not to manipulate? You know, take me on a journey, make me feel something.

And in part, you know, the work, which is by transforma theater company. And in part, it was based on my empirical research, but I also did all of the tech design. The innovation for it was really about creating conversations with audiences, like after, to build some sort of AI literacy and to create a space for people to talk about their hopes and fears and create a critical discourse around the tools.

But I don't think that we have a shared consensual reality right now. We have a very binary reality in terms of our social political environment. So, yeah, no, you know, I place enormous value on the collective experience, and I, even Justine, have a view that I think resonates very closely with yours, which is, you know, when I look at a film or read a book or look at a work of art, a painting, what's important to me is not just the experience for me, it's the history of the human behind it that led to that. That's why, you know, people often have these conversations.

If you have a wonderful forgery, why not? Why isn't that good enough? And the answer to me is obvious. It's because you don't have the history of the human involvement that led to that work. So I think we actually share, but I also see the possibility of a collaboration in which we don't lose our humanity. And the AI provides something that we can't provide. It's different from us. And I can imagine a place where by coming together, we can yield things.

We look at them and we experience them, we feel them. We're like, wow, that was really worthwhile. Now, I understand all the dangers that you're referring to, but at least I feel open to that possibility.

Well, here's the thing. Yeah. I mean, anything can turn. Anything could have a wonderful version. But at least in the entertainment business, what you have are the people who fund films and the people who distribute films have their eyes squarely on the stock price, and they're concerned with quarterly reports that show a widened profit margin. And if they can make $300 million on a film that instead of it costing $100 million, cost a million dollars or whatever, because it was just full.

AI, the chairman of the Sony Pictures Entertainment recently said, like yesterday in Indiewire, said that going forward, their films and tv series will be done with AI primarily. That was his quote. So those people are so interested, they're not using it in order to make better films or more interesting films. It's been a volume content business for quite a few years now, and now it's going to become even more so. And my hope is that the destruction ends the content era, because that's not filmmaking. Volume content is not filmmaking or music. I'm not in the music business, but I'm sure that's not what real songwriters had in mind.

I'm totally with you on that. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but, you know, this is an evolving conversation and we'll see where it goes. And let's hope that there's a collaboration that can yield that good version and not the awful dystopian one that we'll have to see. This and this and whatever I can pull from the air, it's yielding awesome things. So I'm happy with that, and I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes. I hear you. Thank you. Thank you.

Ai And Arts, Technology, Innovation, Filmmaking, Creative Process, Ethics, World Science Festival