Leonardo DiCaprio joins the chorus of Hollywood celebrities who have expressed their fears and hopes for artificial intelligence age.
On the day of his appointment TimeArtist of the Year And Golden Globe nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson One battle after anotherThe Oscar-winning actor opened up to the magazine about how AI could impact filmmaking, for better or worse.
“This could be an improvement tool for a young director to do something we've never seen before,” he said. “I think anything that can truly be perceived as art has to come from a person. Otherwise, haven't you heard these songs that are just brilliant mixes, and you go, 'Oh my God, that's Michael Jackson doing The Weeknd,' or, 'It's the funk of A Tribe Called Quest's 'Bonita Applebum,' done in, you know, the voice of an Al Green soul song, and it's great.' And you go, 'Cool.' But then it gets its 15 minutes of fame and just disappears into the ether of other internet trash. There's no humanity to it, no matter how brilliant it is.”
Moreover, he reflected on how cinema might change in the coming years, adding: “I was just thinking the other day: I wonder what the next most shocking thing is going to be in cinema. Because there's been so many things that have been done that have moved the needle, and some of these directors are so talented now and doing so many different things at the same time: what's going to be the next thing that's going to shock people and shock people in cinema?”
While entertainment industry stalwarts see AI as potentially encroaching on their livelihoods, many high-profile professionals – Guillermo del Toro, Celine Song and Denis Villeneuve among them – have criticized the technology and said it has no place in the filmmaking process. Meanwhile, some, such as James Cameron, admitted how technology can make technical aspects such as visual effects “cheaper”; however, like DiCaprio, he noted generative AI could not replace art created by human hands.
“What generative AI can't do is create something new that's never been seen before. When you think about it, models are a magic trick; what they can do is amazing.” Avatar said the director. “But models are trained on everything that's ever been done before; they can't be trained on anything that's never been done. So what you'll initially see is essentially all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you'll get something like an average of that. So what you can't get is the unique life experiences of an individual writer and their quirks; you won't find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor.”
