The CEO of AI video giant Runway just said the quiet part out loud — and the room noticed. During a fireside chat at View Conference in Turin, Europe’s top VFX gathering, Cristóbal Valenzuela was asked whether AI could eventually replace human actors. His answer: “Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s already happening in a way.”
Cristóbal Valenzuela (Credits: Variety)
Valenzuela — co-founder and co-CEO of the New York-based generative AI company behind the Gen series of video models — was speaking in a session provocatively titled “Every Pixel Will Be Generated.” His comments reportedly provoked one of the biggest debates at the conference, which is no small feat at an event packed with VFX artists whose livelihoods are directly on the line.
Rather than framing AI purely as a cost-cutting weapon, Valenzuela described the technology as “a new medium of expression” and “a new medium of storytelling.” It’s the classic Runway pitch: AI doesn’t replace filmmakers, it hands them a new paintbrush. But to an audience of visual-effects professionals, the line between paintbrush and replacement has never looked thinner.
Why Hollywood Is Nervous
The unease isn’t theoretical. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes — Hollywood’s first industry-wide walkout in 63 years — were driven in large part by actors and writers who feared AI would devour their jobs. Since then, Runway has only grown bolder: the company struck a partnership with Lionsgate to build a custom AI video production and editing model trained on the studio’s library of more than 20,000 films and TV shows, including “The Hunger Games.”
Runway, founded in 2018 by a team of artists including Valenzuela, has expanded far beyond creative tools — recent moves include advertising generation products and even robotics-adjacent world models. The company’s bet is that large-scale video models are “generalization machines” that will find uses in domains nobody has imagined yet.
Tool or Threat?
Valenzuela himself has said creative communities are polarized between AI as destroyer or savior, with reality somewhere in between. But when the CEO of one of the most powerful generative video companies on the planet tells a room full of VFX professionals that AI replacement of actors is “already happening in a way,” the middle ground gets harder to stand on.
The entertainment industry’s AI reckoning isn’t coming. It’s here — one generated pixel at a time.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
