It's tough to tell what's real anymore. Over the weekend, I fell into a rabbit hole because my TikTok feed was full of insane, AI-generated videos from OpenAI's new video platform, Sora. For clarity's sake, I still knew that the clips were fake. I would have heard if a bear broke onto the field of a Major League Baseball game, and I'm nearly certain that Albert Einstein never landed a kickflip on a skateboard. But it was only because these scenarios were so unrealistic—but realistic-looking—that I paid any attention to these videos in the first place.The reality is: AI is getting better—and that's scary.
For Hollywood, the danger is immediately clear. If studios could successfully create an AI movie for a fraction of the price that it costs to pay real human actors, then it's only a matter of time before a major production company sells out. That's why Tilly Norwood—an "AI actress" who resembles a 20-something-brunette with an English accent—had everyone in Hollywood running amok like that AI bear on a baseball field. But once the furious news cycle calmed down, veteran entertainment journalist Anthony Breznican summed up why we won't see AI actresses on the big screen anytime soon.
"Tilly is a close approximation of reality, but that's not good enough," Breznican wrote in a piece for Esquire. "We make things as realistic as we can, but what we truly crave is actual reality, or abstraction that captures a different perspective on what's true."
There's one of AI's largest hurdles so far: original thinking. Users can ask for skincare routines and recipes from an entity with no skin or tastebuds, and it can generate whatever Men's Health or The New York Times recommends. Some people find that helpful instead of turning to real people with opinions, but a (possibly untrue) news aggregator is nothing fancy. That's just the Internet, folks.
When Breznican writes that AI can't "capture a different perspective on what's true," he means, essentially, that it can't form an opinion of its own. It can problem-solve from every angle, and it can present endlessly remixed and regurgitated versions of something that already exists elsewhere. It can't exactly realize anything. Usually, when AI finally does anything worthwhile in TV and movies, its first thought is, Kill all humans. Hopefully, my smartphone musters up something like, "Clean my screen, please!" before we jump to humanity's eradication.
Director Wernor Herzog probably said it best on a recent episode of Conan O'Brien's podcast, when he stated that AI can't tell a good story.
"I've seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence," Herzog said. "Story, acting, everything. They look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul."
Essentially, what you're watching may look real, but it's not saying anything. Stories are about making choices—and often, people who make the wrong ones. As O'Brien added: "Emotions get us to a truth sometimes that facts cannot deliver."
For now, it also helps that audiences aggressively do not want AI anywhere near their TV shows or movies. Most people I talk to about AI would rather see real human beings act on screen, and it's generally agreed upon that AI still doesn't make anything look better. The digital de-aging of Robert De Niro's face in The Irishman didn't fix the fact that the actor still walked around like a man in his late seventies. And that time Disney used an AI tool to recreate the voice of a young Mark Hamill so that they could shoehorn Luke Skywalker into The Book of Boba Fett? Don't even get me started.
If Hollywood ever does put Tilly Norwood on screen, just tell her to scram. No matter how cool Einstein looked when he landed that kickflip, real craftsmanship is still more impressive than any cheat code.
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