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🖤 Christopher Nolan Loves AI, isn’t too worried
🤖 Schwarzenegger says Terminator has become reality
🍿 AI Kernels
How Christopher Nolan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI
A lot of people are comparing AI to the invention of the nuclear bomb.
In a recent interview with WIRED, director Christopher Nolan talked about his new movie Oppenheimer and the comparison between nuclear and AI.
“When I was 13, me and my friends, we were convinced we would die in a nuclear holocaust,” said Nolan. I wonder do kids now really think they’ll die from AI? Maybe some, but probably not, right?
“Well, the growth of AI in terms of weapons systems and the problems that it is going to create have been very apparent for a lot of years,” said Nolan. “Few journalists bothered to write about it. Now that there's a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it's a crisis.”
Regardless of whether or not there will be an AIpocolapyse, right now Nolan is having fun using AI for his movies.
MARIA STRESHINSKY: Are you seeing anything in AI that could be wonderful for, in particular, filmmaking?
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Oh definitely. The whole machine learning as applied to deepfake technology, that's an extraordinary step forward in visual effects and in what you could do with audio. There will be wonderful things that will come out, longer term, in terms of environments, in terms of building a doorway or a window, in terms of pooling the massive data of what things look like, and how light reacts to materials. Those things are going to be enormously powerful tools.
Will you take advantage, personally?
I'm, you know, very much the old analog fusty filmmaker. I shoot on film. And I try to give the actors a complete reality around it. My position on technology as far as it relates to my work is that I want to use technology for what it's best for. Like if we do a stunt, a hazardous stunt. You could do it with much more visible wires, and then you just paint out the wires. Things like that.
It'll improve the ease and efficiency of visual effects, you're saying.
It's not starting from nothing. It's starting from a much more detailed and data-driven idea. It might finally break the barrier between animation and photography. Because it's a hybrid. If you tell an artist to, say, draw a picture of an astronaut, they're inventing from memory or looking at references. With AI, it's a different approach, where you're actually using the entire history of imagery.
This interview was killer, right? I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Nolan shares a lot of wisdom not just on AI, but also his career as a director.
Only 20 days until Oppenheimer!!! Let’s GOOOOO 💣
Schwarzenegger says Terminator has become “Reality”
During An Evening with Arnold Schwarzenegger in LA this week, People reported the actor said that Cameron’s theories on AI have ”become a reality”.
“Today, everyone is frightened of [AI], of where this is gonna go. And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over […] So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”
Cameron previously stated he was working on another Terminator movie, but is waiting to see what happens in AI because it’s been moving so fast.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy,” Cameron said on Wondery and Amazon’s Smartless podcast in December 2022.
AI Kernels
Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:
“I don’t fear artificial intelligence, I fear natural stupidity,” says Pinocchio filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Me too, me too 😂 → MovieWeb
Turn one voice into another. No more paying my British cousin to say “cheerio”. Check out Respeecher Voice Marketplace. → Respeecher
YouTube adds tool to let creators dub their voices into other languages. No more weird French movies where mouths don’t match up! → Aloud
AI-Themed Content of the Week
Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI.
It might be a book, movie, whatever.
Check out Spencer Althouse’s reimagining of Disney characters via Buzzfeed.
AIladdin
HerculesAI
MulAIn