Is Post-Strike Hollywood Really Ready for an AI Film Festival?

There’s a line stand-up comedians often turn to when a joke about controversial news hits a raw nerve: “What, too soon?”

In Hollywood, that same question might apply to Runway’s AI Film Festival, coming to Los Angeles May 1 and New York City on May 9. After long and contentious Hollywood strikes by the WGA West and SAG-AFTRA unions last year — in which actor and writer protections against the use of AI were a central issue — is it too soon to ask the industry to embrace a festival celebrating AI technology?

Surprisingly, the answer seems to be no, it’s not too soon — but for reasons that seemingly come from opposite ends of the AI argument. For some filmmakers, the festival, now in its second year, is a chance to learn how to use new tech tools AI boosters say are part of the future whether people like them or not. For others, it represents Hollywood ‘s newest cautionary tale.

“We should be championing these tools to empower human and human stories or humanity and human storytelling, as opposed to siloing it toward… automating the movie making process,” Sam Lawton, the winner of 2023’s inaugural AI Film Festival, told TheWrap.

The Runway festival’s second edition comes as tech companies are scrambling to push AI’s potential creative uses further in a perpetual arms race involving hundreds of billions of dollars. The scramble is already impacting media and entertainment. Companies like Deepdub are creating AI-powered dubbing technology that threatens to put hundreds of thousands of voice actors and technicians out of work. And OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, recently debuted Sora, a text-to-video program that quickly led producer Tyler Perry to scrap plans for an $800 million studio expansion, which he attributed to seeing Sora’s “shocking” model in action.

For Carleton Eastlake, a WGA member and former board member, novelist and futurist, the AI festival is not coming too soon — but possibly too late.

“It’s tremendously useful — it’s like seeing an enemy nation engaged in military maneuvers” with a window into “how to attack, out there in public,” Eastlake told TheWrap. “The studios ought to be the most concerned,” he said. “And the unions really need to be on top of it. Because the film festival illustrates for them year by year just what the problems are and how rapidly the sophistication of those problems is developing.”

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, who led negotiations with the studios over AI protections, was cautiously optimistic. “Those AI tools that are intended to expand creativity and augment human participation have the ability to be used in a positive and productive way,” he told TheWrap in an email. “The real question with regard to AI is to what extent it will be used to replace human creativity — which is where it becomes particularly problematic.”

The more than 1,700 short films entered into this year’s festival seem better categorized as video art than narrative storytelling, entertainment attorney Jody Simon, a partner at Fox Rothschild in Los Angeles, t0ld TheWrap.

But the work “sort of throws into relief what the promise and the issues are” when it comes to AI, he said. “The promise is that it’s a tool for creative artists…the fear is that copyrighted work is going to be just chewed up and spit out” by the technology.

With protections against technology replacing humans in filmmaking now in place with new guild contracts, the time is right for creatives to learn how to use new tools. At least that’s the view of Runway, a New York-based applied AI research company

“The quality and controllability of these tools have improved dramatically over the last year, and we look forward to seeing the creative ways they are leveraged to tell really compelling and important stories,” Cristóbal Valenzuela, Runway CEO and co-founder, in an email to TheWrap.

AI-focused festivals are proliferating

Runway’s festival awards monetary prizes to videos between one and 10 minutes that employ AI in their creation. Competition submissions, which closed in mid-March, do not require use of Runway software but had to be submitted via a Runway computer portal.

Locations and May dates for screenings of the winning videos have yet to be determined. The top prizewinner will receive $15,000 in cash, with other awards ranging from $500 to $10,000, as well as various numbers of credits toward the use of Runway programs.

The videos are judged in part on using AI options, including text-to-image or editing techniques including in-painting and motion tracking. This year, the festival has added text-to-video applications to the available the tool kit. (See rules and terms here.)

This year’s festival entrants represent a wide range of genres, from sci-fi to action to horror, to romance, “and we’re seeing a nice mix of animated and cinematic styles,” said Emily Golden, Runway’s head of growth marketing. “We’re seeing really incredible variety in the entries this year ranging from films that are 100% [AI] generated to films that use a hybrid of generative AI and live action.”

The AI festival has grown from between 300 and 400 entrants last year to 2,400 for 2024.

Along with Runway’s event, other AI-focused film festivals are cropping up, including the AI International Film Festival and Infinity Festival Hollywood in November, which celebrates “story enabled by technology,” including AI.

“If you put your head in the sand and think passively, it’s your loss — you’ve got to be on top of it,” Infinity Festival founder and CEO Mark Lieber told TheWrap. “When the internet happened, you had to be on top of it.”

Lawton, whose video “Expanded Childhood” won last year’s AI festival, heard about the competition while studying film at the University of Nebraska. He is now based in New York working for Google’s creative lab.

His student colleagues in Nebraska’s Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film were split down the middle about AI use in the creative process, Lawton said.

In his film, Lawton uses AI to expand on childhood family photos. And within the film Lawton raises probing, and somewhat disturbing, questions about the psychological potential of AI. “Can AI help to reframe tramautic memories and promote healing? Or does it create a false sense of reality that can lead to confusion and cognitive dissonance?” Lawton writes on his website. Those questions get a blunt airing through the words of Lawton’s father, whose running commentary on the altered photos are part of the film experience.

Even with new union contracts in place, AI concerns continue. There remains a massive disconnect between the financial goals of studios and the artistic ambitions of filmmakers.

And some Hollywood experts just don’t want to talk about what remains a touchy subject. WGA West did not respond to several requests for comment on Runway’s festival. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, last year’s festival keynote speaker, also declined to comment. So did leadership of the New York Film Festival and Film Independent, the organization behind the annual Spirit Awards.

In January, one observer on X (formerly known as Twitter) wrote about the upcoming Runway festival: “And the award for best laundered data goes to…”

Crabtree understands the apprehension.

“It remains to be seen how film festivals will recognize the uses of AI by filmmakers, but they should be celebrating the positive uses, rather than promoting the negative ones,” he said.

“Hello Human, ask me anything”

Meanwhile, what does AI itself “think” about the AI Film Festival? The tool seems as confused as Hollywood.

“Hello Human! … The timing of accepting the upcoming Runway AI Film Festival in relation to the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes is a subjective matter,” ChatGPT responded. “It’s important to consider the perspectives of all parties involved, including the unions, filmmakers, and industry professionals. While the strikes may have brought attention to important issues within the industry, the Runway AI Film Festival could offer a platform for exploring new technologies and storytelling methods in filmmaking. Ultimately, the decision to accept or participate in the festival should be based on individual considerations and the potential benefits it may offer to the industry as a whole.”

That’s what ChatGPT wrote in response to the prompt: “Is it ‘too soon’ after WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes to accept the upcoming Runway AI Film Festival?“ As to the journalistic ethics of quoting a chatbot…what, too soon?

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