What Happens In Vegas star thinks AI could make a great movie
Fresh off trying to sell audiences on crypto, Popchips, and Danny Masterson, Ashton Kutcher also really likes autocorrect
Aux News What Happens in Vegas
Only a few months after his NFT-powered animated series was fined $1 million for selling $8 million worth of unregistered images of pot-smoking cats, Ashton Kutcher has found a new tech bubble to enter too late. Kutcher is the latest Hollywood star to shill for the increasingly desperate AI industry. Speaking with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles [via Variety], Kutcher praised OpenAI’s latest money pit, Sora, which Kutcher got a beta version of and thinks is “pretty amazing” at generating video.
Kutcher, whose most recent projects include the memorable rom-com, Your Place Or Mine—ironically co-starring fellow AI booster Reese Witherspoon—and writing a letter of leniency for long-time friend, co-worker, and convicted rapist Danny Masterson, is shocked by how quickly one can “create good 10, 15-second videos that look real.” It’s a little more complicated than that.
In April, OpenAI released a one-minute, 20-second short film called Air Head about a man with a balloon for a head. To be clear, it sucks, and its biggest claim to fame is being the rare AI video where a humanoid only has five fingers. More importantly, generating a small amount of video takes a very long time. As explained by tech writer Ed Zitron, Sora takes about 10 to 20 minutes to develop a 3 to 20-second shot, and the user will have no idea what it’s going to produce. They don’t know if the AI will hallucinate or return something that looks bad or, as Zitron points out, has inconsistent balloon-head sizes. But far be it from Kutcher to heap blind praise on a computer program that could probably generate a movie only slightly worse than one starring Kutcher. The actor admits the software “still makes mistakes” and “doesn’t quite understand physics.” Thankfully, physics aren’t a make-or-break factor in looking “real.”
What really shocked Big Kutch was the iterative advancements in these computer-generated establishing shots that are “leaps and bounds” better than one year ago. “In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher asks, as if establishing shots aren’t the foundation upon which most scenes rest. An easy answer is that it looks better to shoot the shot and for the filmmakers to know what they’re getting. But what about “action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI]”? How about it looks better if a real person does it because AI-generated images look wonky and gross? Also, isn’t art supposed to be about human expression, and why are we posing that question to Ashton Kutcher?
“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it,” Kutcher said roughly 11 months after his union, the Screen Actors Guild, went on strike over this very similar, job-killing hype machine. “I, in five minutes, rendered a video of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.” We’ll have to take his word for it, but it sounds thrilling. Move over, The Piano. You and your kind have been replaced by an algorithmically generated cartoon of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm, presumably made of stolen footage of an ultramarathoner, a desert, and a sandstorm.
Like many before him, Kutcher sees a world where “you’ll be able to render a whole movie.” Anyone could come up with an idea, like, say, one about two stoners who don’t know where their car is, and then the computer will write a script and generate a shitty movie no one will watch. Kutcher thinks people don’t like watching “some movie that somebody else came up with,” which is fair if we’re talking about Jobs but less true if we’re talking about Steve Jobs. Kutcher imagines a future where he “can just generate and then watch my own movie” that has nothing to say about life, love, joy, or pain because—and we can’t stress this enough—no computer has ever experienced those things. Well, except for that poor robot that was programmed to feel pain. Why, why was it programmed to feel pain?
“What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it,” Kutcher continued. “So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it. And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good, the bar is going to have to go way up because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
Who are we kidding? AI can’t even make a poster for 12 Angry Men without adding seven extra guys with translucent skin. But what we want to watch is a movie made by a computer, not one by, um, Sidney Lumet. Can this bubble pop already?
60 Comments
What Happens In Vegas star thinks AI could make a great movieJurassic Park character thinks we are so preoccupied with whether we could, we didn’t stop to think if we should.
Yes, AI art sucks. It sucks about the same as human writers who trot out the same 3 jokes and observations about AI every single fucking time they talk about it. Maybe AI can’t generate new material, but you probably should.
Yeah, this is such a boring fucking take. Why even bother flagging these comments if he can’t say anything interesting about them?
To make people mad.
I wonder if part of it is that we’re much further away from AI-written feature films than AI-written click-bait articles. In fact, they’ve been showing up more and more already, and they’re exactly as unoriginal as thi…wait a second…
Well, it’s the only way his dearest friend in the world will ever be in a movie again.
Remember when someone had the bright idea to build an entire movie around “Here’s two hours of Ashton Kutcher using superpowers to repeatedly land himself in one shitty situation after another, please enjoy”?
The movie ended with him aborting himself, so maybe all those eggs and flour were just so people could get a big bite of bread in the end.
That’s only the directors cut. The original theatrical ending he just goes back and never meets the girl in the first place and everything turns out okay. The abort himself ending was better
wait there was a director’s cut and THAT was the ending?! Wow
YepIt’s a reverse “It’s a Wonderful Life” where it turns out that the world would have been a better place without Ashton Kutcher. This movie isn’t good by any means but it’s so very early 2000s edge lord shit. Dead kids, dead animals, a pedophile doing what they do. It’s so extreme it borders on parody. A fetus killing itself with its umbilical cord is just icing on that cake
Never trust a prick who dresses like a Mumford & Son banjo tech.
CHOAD
I am also picking up a little of that sweet sweet laurel canyon sound here?
I just watched the short, it’s inoffensive and charming. Why be such a dishonest hater.
Because the AVClub is on the side of the “AI BAD ALWAYS AND FOREVER” crowd who is to busy throwing their clogs into the machine to realize that it’s not the end of civilizationDon’t get me wrong, a lot of AI’s current use cases do suck but instead of discussing how we can build it to be ethically used as a tool for artists, the outrage mobs is just yelling “BAD!!” constantly instead.
It sucks that any discussion about it devolves pretty quickly into outrage and other really strong emotions, because yeah, it stops us from having those discussions – discussions we need to have because the technology has arrived and isn’t going to go away – and because it makes people really irrational.I’m excited by new technologies. I think deep learning in particular could be and has already been very helpful in a lot of fields, and I really wish we had representatives with the guts to regulate its development somehow. It’s here to stay and we should all be trying to learn as much about it as possible instead of rejecting things we don’t want to hear.And maybe, I dunno, keep a list of things celebrities have said about A.I. and do a roundup piece instead of stretching out one “story” that could’ve fit in a tweet (“Person you dislike seems to love A.I.”).
I think most discussions about it need to start with the recognition that corporate interests absolutely have, do, and likely will continue to make choices that cause massive, lasting downstream damage in pursuit of short term gains.
Sure. I don’t think any useful or sustainable deep learning tools or projects are going to come from any corporation for the reason you point out. That’s why while I’m excited for the technology and developments in general and love talking about it in the abstract, I don’t care for or use any of the products that have been released so far. That’s why I’ve been following the news about OpenA.I. and have lost faith in their ability to develop A.I. thoughtfully or ethically. The current reality is absolutely bleak.But, since we’re on a pop culture site, I might as well point out that we’re going to keep seeing instances of A.I.-generated elements appearing in media, and I don’t think that they’ve all bad. Most of them, definitely. But soon we’re going to learn after the fact that something (probably very small or in the background of something) was generated by a deep learning model and no one could tell.
But soon we’re going to learn after the fact that something (probably very small or in the background of something) was generated by a deep learning model and no one could tell. Yep, agreed. I’m pretty ambivalent as far as that goes.
And often to the detriment of other, vital industries. Look way they did to journalism, for example.The problem is that its a bunch of with no experience or knowledge (but often with plenty of envy) of the industries they’re “disrupting”.
I can’t wait to try putting together an intro for a first Dark Tower film. So many possibilities. Such a huge contrast of outlets between creatives and social media trolls. One creates. One just hates. Still, lots of young artists are going to figure out all sorts of cool things to do with this stuff. As if they’d ever have the millions to have a giant crew, cameras, helicopters, build sets, etc.
LLMs are in no way, shape, or form “deep learning”.
Yeah, their recent review of Atlas was given a bad review because the author couldn’t get beyond the idea that literally anyone would use any AI for any reason at any time, instead of the correct reason; it starred Jennifer Lopez and she’s horrible.Which also belies that a lot of AV Club authors don’t understand that auto-generative AI is just a tiny aspect of all the different types of AI that exist and painting them all with the same histrionic brush is ridiculous and counter-productive.
Id say it looks like trash and would fire a filmmaker for turning in similar work.
Yeah “fire” the filmmaker lol
Honestly, I think a good set of actors with a mediocre AI-generated script will turn out okay sometime, and take some screenwriter jobs, or shift it so the screenwriter gets paid less to just fix it up. I get the gist of the article, and AI-whole cloth generated films are further off, but AI as a category is not actually desperate. Just some of hype trains and outliers of it all.
I hope we get at least a few great, human-written scripts produced with AI-generated assets that wouldn’t have been made otherwise.
In the context of a script, is an AI generated asset a word or a phrase?
I meant AI generated asset as in elements of the final film itself, whether it’s a piece of music, a visual effect, an establishing shot, etc.
A group of good comedians could probably do something non-shitty with something an AI-generated script.Though, now that I think about it, wasn’t that kind of the premise of Drunk History?
“…the bar is going to have to go way up because why are you going to
watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
…Dear God, I don’t want to watch either!
“Why are you going to watch my movie, when – “ [miracle occurs] “Oh.” And just like that, Ashton Kutcher was never heard from again.
If you have any interest at all in the history of technology, you’ll probably come away with a couple of conclusions, and among them are: Tools will continue to develop, becoming cheaper, more available, easier to use and more capable.Tools will be used regardless of who doesn’t want them to be. Doesn’t matter if you swing a hammer, axe, pen or keyboard.All the people predicting that AI will obviate a lot of creative jobs in the same way that industrial machinery supplanted blacksmiths and tractors sent farmhands home from the fields are correct.I don’t know if a machine will ever come up with a line as good as ‘You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity’ but it does sum up the relationship between machine learning, and those who are standing athwart technology yelling ‘STOP’.
I get people’s worry and even if it seems the same as the past, things do change. The current push for antiintellectualism for example aint that different from the hate of people who want to change from the old ways or philosophers told their bad for…using their brain to think about things besides surviving at this moment. Overall progression has lead to people having easier lives and more time to enjoy it…but also greed lead to using up that now easier life to make things harder and the wage gap larger etc. So it’s how we use it. We can fire everyone but one person in a dollar tree store cause we have the humans shopping check themselves out, or we can have them check themselves out and find new meaningful jobs for our staff that enhance the experience of everyone…instead of thinging of said goal, we jump to the easiest thing, fire everyone but one and then get mad that things arent running as smoothly as we though. Artist being able to use ai to animate inbetweens in animation so they have more time for production bottle necks or hey lets let that studio that animated Jujutsu kaisen get a load off and have the new intern learn by fixing the ai inbetweening of animation, instead people jump to they will fire half the staff and expect 2x the work output.
That was 1:21 minutes of not funny silliness. I had to watch it a second time because my attention kept drifting – kind of like a balloon.
Should be a hit.
Ashton Kutcher sounds like an excited puppy stumbling around happily looking for his toy.
Maybe he’s just flashing back to his time on Two And A Half Men and thinking that an you can generate an shot of “a house” for an exterior shot. Which I suppose he’d be right about… but I’m being way too generous here.
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars”.Well, at least Kutcher’s being honest that the reasons to use AI are nakedly mercenary, rather than dressing it up as some bold new frontier in creativity. It’s soul-crushingly depressing, but it’s up-front about it.
LOL. “Nakedly mercenary…” This tech could let lots of people who barely have the $100 now make something at home with their friends and computer that they never could have dreamed of before. How depressing, eh?
The future is not in AI created movies or user created personal movies using AI. It’s in hyper realistic VR with complete sensory stimulation where the user is a character in the movie actively partcipating in the story. That sounds like the future, not sitting passively and looking at a flat screen.
Interesting take but in my interactions people who watch films the most, don’t enjoy the social aspect of film. They para socially get empathetic with the actors but they don’t want that super close interaction. You can already do what you’re saying with VR, there are games for PS4 that you could literally act in a heist, i think the game is called…heist. You talk to the actors and respond though they’re obviously not gonna talk to you, really. Their are also games where you can knod your head to respond to questions and get different stories or look at a path and get another plot. Games can do things like mimic turning off your tv, read your memory card and say it back to you, mess with your controls, etc but they often don’t and focus on the regular you’re walking and turn around and the door is no longer there. Maybe cause generally audiences get annoyed if you make them feel uncomfortable with new experiences so you wanna max profits and give them what they think they want till someone breaks out and you copy them lol. EXEC bad business handling 101 to make it seem like you know what you’re doing by just following obvious trends or doing nothing new. But yeah, just can’t get with the idea people want to be as close into the movie as you think. They have films where you can look behind you in vr and see the set…not as exciting as you think. Lastly, we had films where people vote on the ending, there are two endings depending on the film played like clue, etc. People or the average person only sees 2.3 movies a year, the studios wanna focus on those who are willing to see the indie darling that doesn’t cost much and the reason even when they don’t always make a lot, big budget action keeps being made even without the superhero boost, is people seeing only 2 a year wanna see a spectacle…the type that visits review sites they wanna see that indie darling or different movie but the big wigs want profits from the general audience that isn’t as hard to please.
I think even in the future, VR goggles are going to be best at gathering dust. Wearing goggles for an entire film sounds like a nightmare.
Go home, Zuckerberg, I hear your mommy calling you.
Video games haven’t replaced movies and television shows, and they’re not going to do so in the future.
They will merge into one thing.
AI movie clips might suck now but I am going to guess that they suck a lot less than the ones people could make a year ago. And the ones that are created a year from now are probably going to be better as well. So it seems weird to try and write off a developing technology without really considering how technology development works.It would be like if Pixar tried to make Toy Story in 1986 and then people completely wrote off CG animated movies because of its quality.
Yeah, not sure why this happens all the time and we all keep falling for it. No, the first of a thing won’t be to your unreasonable perfect standards. For what it’s worth, AI is doing a lot better than the other first we’ve given a chance. It’s like people who see the space shuttles explode once and claim a deity doesn’t want us to leave earth and this is our hubris or something and man has no claim to space yadda yadda…like the fact the tech even got that far you know how much an accomplishment that is? From a bunch of neanderthals on a planet to fast forward and people can reach other planets in such a short time given limited items on our planet. Yet alone the fact tons of other stuff exist on other planets and people are like quit it all we failed once??? Not even adding to the fact those same people would likely get to where the inevitable supernova sun is approaching time, and say well that’s it no use trying to go anywhere else, just do it…we’re all happy to follow these types of people. Give up once something doesn’t work perfectly, ain’t it, Chief. Toy story was at release hated by some. Now the 4th looks so good I was shocked. Plenty said animation was garbage only for kids only make simple stories. Now we have some animation tv and film that is more regarded than some live action. In fact, people claimed all superhero or game stories were inferior to books and trash and should not be done now the switch is games in live action. People said dune was impossible to film, people said live action one piece can never happen, the creator of demon souls was told his game was too hard for westerners and people just want easy games and it was the worst game he ever played, now elden ring and the like influenced an entire generation to make souls games. Demon souls was flawed, but we don’t quit just cause something isn’t perfect. Tons of people use ai to fix up essays and find issues. So yeah, ai might make a film one day and not be noticeable. People are too knee-jerk to contemplate these days.
I don’t care about the AI movie/video stuff very much. But he made $8 million illegally and only got fined $1 million? Sign me up!
Gotta love the tech nerds in this thread telling us that it’s different this time, and we should give AI a chance, because apparently Silicon Valley isn’t a giant sucking pit of Torment Nexuses and manchild billionaires.
Yep. This, right here, is how “oh, it won’t EVER come to that, don’t be silly” gives way to “look, this is just REALITY now.”
I love creatively inept negative people completely ignoring all of the potential for this technology. But feel free to seeth at your leisure. Everybody needs an outlet, I guess…
I wonder if AI knows the meaning of “ironically.”
worth remembering ashton kutcher is a tech investor first, a creative (a very distant) second. like, DUH, he thinks the thing that stands to generate him millions of dollars is the future. it’s in his best interest for it to be the future!
“generating a small amount of video takes a very long time. As explained by tech writer Ed Zitron, Sora takes about 10 to 20 minutes to develop a 3 to 20-second shot”That’s pretty darn quick! Normally it would take HOURS or DAYS and this was all inconceivable not too long ago…I wonder if snarky anti-creatives are the types to be writing articles about tech, when it seems like the actual focus of the article is to just be negative. This technology, if affordable to use, will give A LOT of poor/independent filmmakers a chance to try all sorts of stuff. I don’t think Joe and John Schmoe are going to cry tears in their basement about the lost jobs when they don’t have the millions of dollars to create those jobs in the first place.I can’t wait to try this stuff out. Being able to experiment and make your own little short film that looks like something that took a film crew is pretty exciting.
What a choad.
You are terrible at your job and it would be a very good thing if a robot took your job
AI is the new Crypto, a big arrow for people to dump money into for it to be stolen, and for bros to talk about like they understand. The thing about it is that there is no AI in AI? There is no artificial intelligence in artificial intelligence, it’s just the equivalent of a bazillion random numbers generators running at the same time within parameters…yeah it doesn’t “understand” physics, it doesn’t understand anything. That said, I would not be surprised if most video games use AI…I am sure a lot of people went through and QC’d the 1000 large boulder puzzled in Breath of the Wild but do you really think people wrote down each puzzle separately? Maybe they did, but in any case when you generate a “random” layout for creating a new level in a videogame you can do that in…what is that other than what they are now calling AI? Anyway, I think that AI will probably eventually have a pretty important role in proof of concept: if you can give AI a script and it can make it’s garbage from it, you can show what your commercial might look like before you have humans make it. Humans can also in certain areas take the AI rough and make it suck less. However, everything AI produces has and always will be blenderized garbage and, like Crypto…just theft.Also…Ashton Kutcher sucks and has always sucked. Other than in Dude…Where’s My Car?.
Cant be much worse than most of the shit being made now