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Lori McCreary, CEO of Morgan Freeman's production company Revelations Entertainment, expressed concern about the upheaval of AI and its potential misuse in the film industry. In her field, it comes down to the rampant cloning of the Oscar winner's voice.
For McCreary, when it comes to Freeman's likeness and his stately baritone as seen by the public, she serves as the judge of what is real and what isn't, and she knows what Freeman did and didn't shoot.
Six months later, Revelations' senior vice president of production, Kelly Mendelsohn, sent McCreary a link to a video/audio of Freeman in which Freeman said, “Kelly, I love you, but you're fired.”
“I could tell it wasn't real,” McCreary said today at the Produced By panel, “AI: What Every Producer Should Know.”
“I knew it wasn't real,” the former PGA president said. “Literally, it was (Kelly's) 11-year-old cousins doing it.”
But one day, McCleary was tricked.
She received a video of Freeman appearing to promote the book. the unforgiven We had the star and her makeup artist double-check that the promo footage was actually shot, because it was so good.
McCleary told Produced By attendees that when it comes to the dangers of AI, “we as a community need to get ahead of the curve. Build the tools, be prepared, so that when something comes along we know it's real. We want that bug that says, this is the real Morgan.”
Renard T. Jenkins, president of I2A2 Technologies, Labs & Studios and president of the Society of Cinema and Television Engineers, who also participated on today's panel, said he is working on a solution to deepfakes that is essentially a watermark. But such an effort requires the help of major studios in building an infrastructure and ecosystem that allows creators to be tracked, and that allows them to track every iteration of content from creation to distribution. McCreary hopes that in the future he can help build AI guardrails, just as the PGA helped protect content for movie digital files.
“There's no federal AI law like we have in Europe,” added Ghaith Mahmood, a partner at law firm Latham & Watkins, who attended today's session. “But if I had to predict where more legislation will be passed, it would be on deepfakes, because lawmakers are particularly sensitive to their own deepfakes.”
Mahmood noted that Tennessee passed Elvis' Law in March, which states that a voice is part of an individual's right of publicity, image and likeness. Essentially, others cannot use a person's voice without their permission. The law also states that if a voice or likeness is distributed or imitated by an AI model, it will be prohibited by law.
