Lion King directors Roger Allers (L) and Rob Minkoff.
Kevin Winter | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is a ‘Wild West’ with ‘very few rules’ — but it has the potential to democratize the film industry in the long run, according to ‘The Lion King’ director.
Rob Minkoff, who co-directed the 1994 animated classic; Disney film with Roger Allers, told CNBC in an interview that artificial intelligence has the potential to “democratize” filmmaking in such a way that it will be less expensive to produce and direct motion pictures by reducing the amount of expensive equipment involved.
“I think what AI is going to do is democratize the content creation process, because if literally anyone is given these incredibly powerful tools, then what we should see is really an explosion of content, an explosion of new voices,” Minkoff , 62 years old. he told CNBC.
Minkoff was speaking to CNBC ahead of the Reply AI Film Festival. The event, held by Italian technology company Reply during the Venice International Film Festival, is a competition that rewards filmmakers who use artificial intelligence to develop short films. Minkoff is a judge on the panel that decides the winners.
‘Exaggeration’ vs ‘legitimate concerns’
The arrival of new technology has been a fear among people working in the film industry for decades, Minkoff noted. For example, when computer animation arrived in the 1990s, there were similar fears about the impact it would have on jobs.
“When computer animation came out, there were a lot of people who were very scared about it — what it would mean, how it would affect people’s jobs,” said Minkoff, who also directed 1999’s “Stuart Little” and “The 2003’s Haunted Mansion.” he told CNBC.
“What became very apparent early on was that if people wanted to maintain their own personal relevance in the industry, it was very important for them to really learn and adapt to changes in technology,” he added. “We’re experiencing something similar now with artificial intelligence.”
Minkoff recalls using computers to create the famous soccer scene in “The Lion King.” In the scene, dozens of wild flowers can be seen rushing to chase Simba, the film’s protagonist.
In that scene, Minkoff recalls, “we could have rendered 1000s of wildflowers, but the technique we used made it look too seamless with the rest of the animation.”
“People are naturally and understandably concerned when they look at what artificial intelligence can do,” Minkoff said. However, he added, he doesn’t think the technology can replace all filmmakers and that there’s a lot of “hype” right now around the potential of artificial intelligence.
However, Minkoff said, there are concerns about applying AI to movies that are justified, such as those related to copyright and the use of intellectual property in entertainment to train AI models.
“I hope that technology will eventually save us, in some respects, or make life better, easier or more prosperous,” Minkoff told CNBC. “But it’s the Wild West, where everything seems possible and can be done.”
Minkoff added that there are “legitimate concerns” with artificial intelligence when it comes to issues such as protecting media IP and dealing with copyright theft. “I understand why people might want to slow it down or put guardrails on it to be careful, to be safe,” he said.
But ultimately, he doesn’t think AI’s positive momentum will slow down. “My impression is that it probably won’t slow down because these decisions are left up to judges and courtrooms to decide what’s right and what’s wrong,” Minkoff said.
On the copyright issue, he proposed the creation of a dedicated body designed to protect filmmakers’ intellectual property and remunerate them, as the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music, Inc. do. for the music industry.
“Always the man behind the technology”
The Reply AI Film Festival, which awarded three winners this week, began as an internal competition among employees, with staff using artificial intelligence tools to produce film-quality videos, Filippo Rizzante, Reply’s chief technology officer, told CNBC.
“There’s been a lot of progress with technology to produce creative work,” Rizzante said in an interview last week. “This greatly affects the quantity and quality of what we produce as humanity.”
Rizzante dismissed fears that artificial intelligence will displace people working in entertainment. The technology, he said, “will completely change the way the industry delivers content today, but it won’t necessarily change the number of people employed in cinema.”
In this year’s edition of the festival, one of the runners-up, “Gia Pham”, depicts a woman looking at a takeaway menu before being transported to a colorful 2D graphic world. The video’s narrator, who starts out speaking in English, starts speaking in Japanese after switching from 3D to 2D.
Alexander de Lukowicz, co-director of “Gia Pham,” told CNBC that people are essential to the way he and his team work to create short films. AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, he said, helped his short film’s filmmakers “enhance worlds we couldn’t create before.”
“It’s always the man behind the technology who has to guide the technology to get the right result out of it. We wanted to create something like a film to really test the limits of what’s possible,” de Lukowicz told CNBC.
