Google and the Meta Platform The company has been in talks with major Hollywood studios about licensing content for use in its artificial intelligence video generation software, according to people familiar with the matter.
The two companies are developing technology that can generate realistic scenes from text prompts and have offered tens of millions of dollars to partner with studios in some capacity. Rival OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is in similar talks. Google, Meta and OpenAI declined to comment on the discussions.
Hollywood studios are hotly debating how to use AI to cut costs while also protecting themselves from theft of their work. They are wary of giving movies and TV shows to tech companies that don't have control over how their content is used. Just this week, actress Scarlett Johansson demanded that chatbots stop using voice imitations of her own after refusing to work with OpenAI.
Big money is involved: News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, agreed on Wednesday to let Open AI use content from more than a dozen of its publications in a deal that could be worth more than $250 million over five years.
Warner Bros. Discovery has said it would license some of its programming to train models, but only for certain divisions, not its entire library. Walt Disney and Netflix have no intention of licensing their content to those companies, but have expressed interest in other kinds of collaborations.
Hollywood studios are already using AI in their productions, as are many other filmmakers: Tyler Perry used the technology to recreate the makeup of his Madea character in the film, and director Robert Zemeckis is using it to make Tom Hanks look younger in an upcoming film.
New Tools
But a new set of tools, including OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo, go a step further by helping filmmakers quickly create vivid, surreal clips based on just a few words of description.These tools' capabilities have sparked excitement and anxiety in Hollywood, where actors and screenwriters staged a months-long walkout last year over concerns that AI would take their jobs.
Perry, an actor, filmmaker and studio owner, was so impressed with Sora's demo that he put $800 million in studio expansion plans on hold earlier this year. He's been vocal about the opportunities AI brings to studios, but he's also sounded the alarm about the technology's impact on labor. He's called for the industry to come together and create some kind of regulation. “If we don't, I don't know how we're going to survive,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in February.
The music industry has taken a tough stance on the use of AI. Universal Music Group Inc. sued AI startup Anthropic for copying its lyrics and temporarily pulled its songs from TikTok as part of an effort to protect its artists. Sony Music Group Inc. wrote to hundreds of partners this month warning them not to train AI models on its music.
Big studios have not sued tech companies over AI so far, despite concerns that many of these models are already trained on copyrighted material. They would rather find ways to make AI work for them than fight a new technology that could significantly change the industry. But studios have yet to agree to any major commercial relationships with big tech companies over the use of AI.
Hollywood executives worry that licensing negotiations could lead to tensions between studios and their creative partners. For example, a studio may have the right to license a movie it owns to an AI company. But if that company uses that movie to train an AI model with the faces and voices of the actors in that movie, the actors would want the opportunity to decide whether to approve it, too. Several actors have already signed deals with AI companies. (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP
