Musk producer Nick Shumaker, Hollywood film financier Vania Schlogel, directors Zack London (Gods Don’t Give Gifts) and Nick Holt (AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About) took to the stage at the Zurich Summit this weekend to dig into the implications of AI for film.

Schlogel, who is founder and managing partner of L.A.-based Atwater Capital, also took up the baton of Chief Strategy Officer at AI creative platform Magnific, formerly known as Freepik, this summer.

The exec said that while her roots were in Hollywood film finance, she had understood it was an imperative for her to get to grips with AI during a board meeting at Magnific.

“In an interview about a year ago with the Financial Times, I’d actually said very publicly, that when all this AI stuff gets really big, I’m just going to go back to Idaho and disappear into the mountains, and that’s always actually been the genuine kind of feeling I espouse, as I’m not a technologist. I’ve always been a traditional Hollywood financier,” she told the panel.

“Our founder showed us videos and images from our largest competitor and how they had become viral, and it was sexualized children’s IP, it was horrible depictions of women, some of them famous, some of them not… some very racist things,” she explained. “I had this light bulb moment that this might not be something that I have necessarily been inured to historically, but I actually do need to be involved in.”

Since embracing the technology, Schlogel said she had seen multiple cases where the use of AI made sense, commercially and ethically, even if there were aspects of the technology she has qualms about such as the way in which the confident tone of AI assistants can encourage “cognitive surrender” in human beings even when their level of expertise on a subject is higher that the LLM they are consulting.

“It really is on all of us to get in front of it so that we can shape the ethical direction it goes. Because this will shape society, is shaping society, is even shaping human empathy and how we view each other. So it’s so important to get in the driver’s seat of it, whether you love it or hate,” she said.

Shumaker, head of AC Independent at Anonymous Content, acknowledged the power of AI as a tool across the cinema chain but said he felt compelled to raise questions around the use of original content by generative AI programs.

“The whole fair use in AI thing needs to be addressed. The lawsuits from New York Times, from every major media outlet, disregarding just stealing things from my perspective and ingesting is totally inappropriate. And I just want to put that on record,” he said.

“That we can say that this is the way things are going, at the same time as there’s theft with regards to intellectual property, it’s not a good thing. The notion that we get clogged up in lawsuits for five or six years to address that is not good for humans, for creators, or frankly, for the future of writers or cinema.”

He clarified that while Alex Gibney’s Musk, on which he is a producer, touches on the way Elon Musk is using AI to shape the future, and not necessarily for the best, the documentary used very little of the technology in its production.

He noted the Elon Musk avatar had been created in CGI by humans at a company, which has collaborated with Gibney in the past, with AI only used at the post-production stage to help lip-synching.

London, who is also known under the YouTube pseudonym of Gossip Goblin, is currently gearing up for the theatrical release of his fully AI-generated sci-fi anthology Gods Don’t Give Gifts.

He echoed Schlogel comments on needing to get ahead of the technology, suggested that the polarisation of views in the creative communities around AI was not necessarily helpful or going to change anything in the outcome..

“The the tricky thing is that people see AI as this monolithic thing. Obviously you have full end-to-end automation on one end of the spectrum, and super light AI augmentation on the other, like tweaking the voice of Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. That’s a pretty vast spectrum,” he said.

“It’s become such a polarized topic, you have kind of radical zealots on both sides of the equation. You have the burn Hollywood to the ground side and you have the fuck AI side that you know basically refuses to even accept that it’s part of the equation,” he said.

“The reality is that it’s happening. It’s coming. There’s no point in human history where we’ve seen incredibly advanced technology and said, ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’ The luddites didn’t succeed, and probably the anti-AI movement won’t either.”

Talking about the use of AI on his upcoming film Gods Don’t Give Gifts, London said it would never have been made without the technology.

“This film would never get greenlit otherwise. It’s way too esoteric and niche and cerebral, and so it’s not that we’re replacing a story that would otherwise get told and hire more people. This story wouldn’t exist otherwise; it wouldn’t get made. “

The trio were joined on stage by director Nick Holt, whose documentary AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About was playing at the summit’s parent event the Zurich Film Festival this weekend

Revolving around interviews with computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” for his work building artificial neural networks, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, as well as Anthropic and OpenAI engineers among others, it explores the question of whether AI will save or destroy humanity. ,

Tapping into questions around how AI will impact creativity, Holt said that, for now, he thought AI tools could make filmmaking more accessible.

“We’ve all got access to a pen and pencil, but not all of us can writer a Booker or Pulitzer award-winning novel. I think there are people with who could use AI to roll out concepts and films that otherwise might not get made. I just hope there’ll be a sense that the best work will always rise to the top,” he said.

“Hollywood studios aren’t shy of making 100 million dollar duds, and then the 14 year old in his bedroom or her bedroom using AI tools could make the next big hit. I think it’s a phenomenal tool for that, but I think the interesting thing that we have to deal with is are these systems grown rather than built, and then where does it go as far as our limitations?

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