Female Filmmakers Should Embrace Rather Than Fear AI’s Possibilities

Fear of the impacts artificial intelligence may have on the business and art of filmmaking were a core part of last year’s writer and actor strikes, and continue to hang over the industry as it edges into a new era of omnipresent AI tools and usage.

But the tools may in fact free female and other underrepresented groups of creators, giving them the power to do far more with even modest resources, a force multiplier that could be used to make high-quality projects more quickly and cheaply while empowering a broader array of creative visions than Hollywood typically embraces. That was the take of a panel of female film producers and technologists at a pre-Oscars panel co-sponsored by Women in Cloud and Microsoft at Soho House in West Hollywood, Calif.

“I really see AI as a human-plus technology,” said Michelle Pruitt, a Microsoft executive and film fund investor. “We have this fear that tech is going to take over. There’s a lot that AI and the tech industry can do to remove bias so it's not in the technology itself.”

Among the more prosaic uses are “improved efficiency in scheduling,” said Pruitt. “The ability to leverage these tools in marketing, and (audience) segmentations” as well as many parts of the creative process.

“You can go a lot deeper, faster with humans and technology working together,” Pruitt said. “So it's that efficiency we're trying to promote. You can't get any of these benefits if you're scared of the technology. Get your hands on it, break it. Find where it doesn't work. It is math, it is not human. It is simply looking for what is the next best input to what you're asking it.”

“For me, it's just another tool we can use to tell our stories,” said Mary Matheson, a video producer and professor on narrative and immersive media at Arizona State University’s Los Angeles campus. Matheson is using AI tools on two documentary projects, one to authenticate images of Russian war crimes in the Ukraine, the other to create an experience around reproductive rights.

“You can use AI to make it feel more realistic to (audiences),” Matheson said. “A, it's still really rudimentary, but b, it’s something we can use as a tool. It's just something we need to learn to work with.

AI is already creating some interesting artistic experiments, like the just-debuted Our T2 Remake, a parody of the Terminator 2 movie created by 50 artists, each using AI tools and their own approach to create a part of the parody, without using any components from the original film.

“It works really well in the parody space,” said Joanna Popper, a former CAA and HPHPQ 0.0% tech executive who now consults with entertainment companies such as the Russo Bros. production company AGBO. “What was fascinating was watching the artists’ varying differences, in comedy, in tone. Some were more photo-real faces.”

Also of note: the T2 creative work was largely done last fall, and already the technology has evolved in substantial ways around abiding challenges, such as what Popper called “mouth issues,” the way the AI tools create moving mouths and lips in an accurate way.

There are plenty of problems to beware, of course.

“There’s not a lot of form around it, not a lot of rules,” said Gavriella Schuster, a long-time Microsoft executive who speaks on women’s empowerment and has a tech-focused podcast. “How do we apply all of our rules? We want to respect the rules of private property. We want to respect the individual. It's about applying that same governance over this process (of using AI tools). We have to create those limitations on ourselves about how we're going to utilize that.”

Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini, a poet and author who also is a researcher in AI bias at MIT’s Media Lab, said at a keynote conversation at South By Southwest on Wednesday that you have to understand what the intent of an AI prompt is. Otherwise, as corporations keep tweaking their models to reduce bias and impose guardrails, you can have P.R. mishaps like Alphabet’s Gemini AI creating an ethnically diverse set of Nazis.

The other issue is figuring out how to get problem areas fixed when an AI tool veers into problematic territory, Buolamwini said.

“You have to understand what is missing,” Buolamwini said. “Often what is missing is redress. You have to have pathways of redress.”

Popper said one way to stay within ethical creative guidelines is to actively seek out tools that were made without, for instance, stepping on copyrights. Both AdobeADBE -0.4% and ShutterstockSSTK 0.0% have used their vast collections of stock and other photography to train specialized AI tools that don’t depend on someone else’s property.

“You may want to work with them,” Popper said. “The upside of the tools, and tje very best outcome is that they're giving you ability to work at the very highest level. We can help guide the future toward what we'd like to see.”

There are other tools generating video from text prompts, helping craft and format scripts, analyze stories for their beats, and create storyboards to attach imagery to a written project.

“Runway holds hackathons and film festivals, and what are the 10 pieces that won?” Popper said. “You can learn from them. Like any area that's still new and in an emerging phase, there are a lot of opportunities to quickly be at the pinnacle of it. In other areas of film, there are people with 40 years of experience in it. Here, if you choose to dive in, you can be one of the innovators. It's a really exciting opportunity.”

Event co-sponsor Women in Cloud announced a string of resources and recognition for female filmmakers, including the WICxIcons Visionary Award to Nazrin Choudhury for Red, White & Blue, about the challenges a woman faces trying to find abortion services after her state bans the procedure. Choudhury’s project was nominated for the Oscar in live action short film, and can be seen in theaters right now as part of ShortsTV’s annual collections of Oscar-nominated shorts.

ShortsTV founder and CEO Carter Pilcher said at the AI event that this year’s three collections of Oscar-nominated short films were on target to top $3 million in box office grosses by the end of the weekend, nearing the peak hauls the 19-year-old series pulled in during the years just before the pandemic lockdown hit.

Women In Cloud also honored Karen Dufilho, executive producer on the Oscar-winning animated short War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko. The film’s co-writer and another producer is Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Women in Cloud’s Chaitra Vedullapalli also announced three collaborations with the group and MicrosoftMSFT +0.9% to offer funding and other support for female creators to learn more about AI tools, cloud computing and related technologies. In all, the three programs will have $30 million in scholarships available, at amounts as high as $6,000, to fund training and education.

The programs include the Global Cloud & AI Certification Scholarships, the Microsoft Cybersecurity Certification Scholarships, and the Microsoft AI Innovation Challenge, which will be further unveiled this week.

Correction: In a previous version of the story, quotes from Mary Matheson and Michelle Pruitt in the story were incorrectly attributed to each other.

Source: Forbes‍