As major Hollywood actors license their voices to AI, and Coca-Cola uses algorithms to generate its latest holiday commercial, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out director Rian Johnson has his own message on the subject: “F*** AI.”
“Yeah, f*** AI,” Johnson told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s something that’s making everything worse in every single way.”
Johnson made the comment last month, at a festival showing of his forthcoming Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in his successful Knives Out murder mystery series starring Daniel Craig. Notably, this was before Disney — his former Star Wars paymaster — decided to splash $1 billion on a stake in OpenAI and license the very characters he’d previously directed for public use as generative AI video fodder.
“I don’t get it,” Johnson continued. “I mean, I get it in a ‘This makes sense to save money by not paying artists’ way. But then, what the f*** are we doing? Is this where we want to be?”
Last week, Disney boss Bob Iger announced an unprecedented licensing deal that would see 200 iconic characters unlocked for use in ChatGPT and Sora, allowing users to create their own shortform video content that would then be regurgitated up and made available to subscribers on Disney+.
“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Iger said in a statement.
One thing important to note here is that Disney’s character license will only extend to characters it has described as animated, masked or creatures. Still, a swathe of Star Wars heroes and villains will be included in that roster, including Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Darth Vader, The Mandalorian and Yoda.
Disney has also said that it won’t be allowing any direct replication of actors’ likenesses or voices, though it remains to be seen how the company will police what users create, or where OpenAI’s algorithm will source its character designs and voices from, if not from having gobbled up the original performances seen in Star Wars movies.
In September, the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union issued a strongly worded statement in response to the emergence of Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated “actress” that has enraged Hollywood. And of course, all of this comes amid the ongoing backdrop of Hollywood’s other huge industry development — the $82.7 billion sale of Warner Bros. to Netflix (which Johnson has partnered with for his Knives Out series). One recent report suggested that Netflix valued Warner Bros. so highly because it wanted to use the century-old company’s intellectual properties within its own generative AI content in future.
Image credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
