Mountain views – For decades, Hollywood directors, including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland, threw artificial intelligence as a bad guy who can turn into a killing machine.
Even “AI: artificial intelligence” of Steven Spielberg had a pessimistic advantage to his vision of the future.
Now Google – one of the main developers of AI technology – wants to remove cultural conversations from technology as shown in “The Terminator”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Ex Machina”.
To do this, the Mountain View technology giant, California, finances short films on the AI which depict technology under a nightmarish light.
The Google initiative, called “AI on screen”, is a partnership with the media partners in the Santa Monica range, a talent and production management company which represents a wide variety of entertainment customers, including actors and writers. Range produces films.
Until now, two short films have been launched by the project: one, entitled “Sweetwater”, tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his deceased celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will make and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. This is the first project on which they work together.
The other, “Lucid”, examines a couple who wants to escape their suffocating reality and risks everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream.
“They were looking for stories that were not tales of attack about AI, which I was going to, because I think we have seen so many people,” Douglas told Times. “It’s nice to see more – not too positive – but somehow stories on the ground.”
The effort occurs at a time when many Americans have mixed feelings on AI. A survey in 2024 of the University of Bentley and Gallup showed that 56% of Americans see AI as “equal quantities of damage and good”, while 31% believe that AI does “more harm than good”. Changing the way AI is represented in popular culture could help move these perceptions, or at least that’s what some technicians and Iat lovers hope.
Google has a lot to do to convince consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly congested with startups and established players such as Openai, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook Company Meta.
The shorts funded by Google, which last 15 to 20 minutes, are not advertisements for AI, in itself. Google is rather seeking to finance films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice-president of technology and company at Google. Google does not push their products into films, and films are not made with AI, she added.
“Technology stories in films are massively characterized by a dystopian perspective,” said Lane. “When we think of AI, there are so many nuances to consider, what this program is. How could we tell more deeply human stories? What is it like to coexist? What are these dilemmas that will arise? ”
Google has not revealed how much they invest in films. The company said it wanted to finance many more films, but it does not have a target number. Some shorts could possibly become full features, said Google.
Creators who work with Google have access to company technological experts who can share more information on technology. Script technology already exists, for example? How would it work in real life?
“We live with this technology and AI-the questions arise: how does that affect us and how can we connect emotionally via this type of technology?” said Rachel Douglas, partner of Range, married to Sean Douglas.
AI was a controversial subject in Hollywood, playing a major role in the strikes of writers and actors of 2023.
The actors fear that their resemblances and their voices will be reproduced and manipulated without authorization or payment. Writers fear that their work will be used without their permission to create scripts generated by AI and history contours. Animation and special effects may be emptied. Publishers and record companies continued to protect their intellectual property.
The perceptions of the negative public on AI could disadvantage technological companies when such cases take place before the laity juries. This is one of the reasons why companies are motivated to remedy the reputation of the AI.
“There is an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world of what AI and what AI will do in the future,” said Sean Pak, a lawyer for the intellectual property of Quinn Emanuel, in a conference committee. “We, as an industry, must do a better job to communicate the public advantages and explain in a simple and clear language what we do and what we do not do.”
AI companies, including Openai, Google and Meta, have demo or shared their tools with studios and film and television directors. Meta has teamed up with Horror Studio Blumhouse and the vision of the Cameron Venture storm on AI initiatives.
Tuesday, Google announced a partnership with the director of “The Whale” Darren Aronofsky’s Venture Soup, which will work with three filmmakers on short films and give them access to the IA video generator of Google Veo.
Supporters say that technology can make cinema cheaper and give artists more flexibility at a time when cinema is in difficulty.
“If we want to continue to see the types of films that I have always loved and that I like to do and that I will see … We were able to understand how to reduce in two,” said Cameron on a podcast last month with Meta technology director. Cameron sits on the board of directors of stability of stability AI.
AI companies find other creative means of making technology more accessible. In an example, the major artificial intelligence society Anthropic sponsors an next exhibition to The Exploratorium, a museum of science and art in San Francisco. Eric Dimond, principal director of exhibitions, said that he hoped that the exhibition, entitled “Adventures in IA”, will bring more people to explore the costs and advantages of AI.
Anthropic was not involved in the conceptualization of the exhibition, said Dimond, although visitors can interact with his model of IA Claude, as well as the OPENAI and Elevenlabs IA tools.
While Google and others try to put a softer concentration on technology, moviegoers always get many stories about the dangers of robots that have been motivated.
The recent AI tales that were wrong including Blumhouse’s horror film in 2023 “M3gan”, about a robot that becomes so protective of a young girl that she is starting to wreak havoc. Last year, another Blumhouse horror film, “Affrayer”, followed a family terrorized by an assistant powered by AI.
This summer, “M3gan” obtains a suite, published in theaters by Universal Pictures. We expect it to be a hit at the box office.
