Whoever Controls the Training Data Will Control AI

Plus: How They Pulled Off THAT Shot in "Bad Boys"

Author

Steve
June 25, 2024

Greetings Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

Whoever Controls the Training Data Will Control AI

I get it; the topic of AI is so very tedious at this point. It has reached NFT levels of overhyped, annoying, and ubiquitous. Faithful readers know I’ve been pretty pessimistic in general about it, although I do highlight instances where there might be some actual AI use cases. This tweet more or less summarizes my thoughts on the matter:

That stipulated, I do believe it is valuable to keep an eye on some of the ongoing developments that will impact content owners and artists. You know, the business we’re in!

Vulture has an article on the upcoming copyright infringement lawsuits filed by the three major recording labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group) against Suno and Udio, two AI music startups. From Vulture:

In very similar lawsuits, the labels allege that Suno and Udio infringed on their copyright by training AI models on the labels’ libraries, which constitute a large chunk of all recorded pop music.

“This process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings,” the lawyers claim. The lawsuits say “it is obvious” that Suno and Udio trained on the labels’ libraries and that when tested, both services were able to imitate copyrighted recordings.

Specifically, lawyers allege Udio could imitate artists including Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Lin-Manuel Miranda when given the right prompts, while Suno generated songs imitating the tags for Jason Derulo and producer CashMoneyAP.

The AI startups are claiming “fair use.” I’m not a copyright attorney (or any kind of attorney at all. The closest I’ve been to a law school was driving by USC!), but I’m guessing as more of these types claims appear, AI companies will claim that their training data usage will fall under the banner of being “transformative.” After all, it’s not the same song anymore right? It’s been transformed!

By contrast, Reddit has eagerly jumped into the AI pool, licensing its content to Google and OpenAI for training data. But that’s easy for Reddit, because its content is all user-generated! As the article asks rhetorically, “shouldn’t the people who post to, comment on, and moderate Reddit get some share from their contributions to this suddenly valuable corpus of human interaction?” Well, yes, but they won’t!

These will be the considerations for Hollywood as the studios explore deals with companies like OpenAI. The ownership of the training data and its resultant royalties will be key as this technology develops and we learn what is real and what is hype. What will also be required is a powerful regulatory arm, as we know the tech companies cannot be trusted to be forthcoming on where their training data is from.

How They Pulled Off THAT Shot in Bad Boys

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is one of this year’s box office hits, and it also has an incredibly cool action sequence that I assumed was created with CGI, but was actually filmed mostly-practically, with a specially-made Snorricam rig.

As IndieWire describes it:

…in one unbroken take, star Will Smith performs some elaborate action choreography while also acting as his own camera operator, with a rig attached to his body that allows the perspective of the shot to shift between first-person and third-person depending on how Smith swings the camera around. In the actual movie the scene is even more impressive, as there’s a moment when Smith tosses his gun to costar Martin Lawrence and the camera seems to fly through the air to follow it, connecting the characters in one seamless shot.

The aforementioned BTS video is below:

@willsmith

Just wait until you guys to see this scene in @Bad Boys: Ride or Die…

That’s extremely impressive! I can barely get my iPhone camera pointed the right way to avoid the dreaded zoom chin.

One part of the article I did think was strange:

The SnorriCam is a large, body-mounted rig that hadn’t been used in a Hollywood movie yet…

While it is probably true that the specific mount used in Bad Boys might be its first use in a Hollywood film, there have been Snorricam shots in mainstream Hollywood releases for a while, such as The Hangover and Pain & Gain.

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

How Lionsgate hopes to use technology to improve storytelling (link)

The FBI shut down one of the world’s largest illegal streamers. (link)

The Big Tech jobs that AI will kill. (link)