AI companies are courting Hollywood. Do they come in peace?

LOS ANGELES — Artificial intelligence is coming to Hollywood — but is Hollywood ready for it?

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is meeting with entertainment industry players, including executives at talent agencies and film studios, to demonstrate and explain its latest technology, Sora, which conjures videos based on what users describe in text.

It's a delicate dance for entertainment companies that want to harness powerful tools that could reduce costs and streamline their processes. They don't want to get caught flat-footed at a time when the state of the industry is already tenuous because of pay-TV cord-cutting, streaming losses and other factors. At the same time, they want to avoid offending Hollywood actors, writers and legions of behind-the-scenes workers — such as animators and storyboard artists — who fear AI could kill their jobs.

"Nobody wants to be behind the eight ball," said Daisy Stall, head of entertainment finance at California Bank & Trust. "If it's going to be at your doorstep, you got to deal with it, right? It's still so uncertain and people are just preparing, but they're not sure the role that it's actually going to play."

The looming threat of AI in Hollywood was a key issue in last summer's dual strikes led by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher warned last July that if actors don't stand their ground now, "we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines." The agreements reached that resolved both strikes offered some AI protections. Actors must be asked permission and compensated for the use of their digital likenesses, for example.

But when OpenAI unveiled its text-to-video tool in February, that prompted additional, urgent questions regarding how these innovations would disrupt entertainment production. A user can type in a prompt, such as "a movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30-year-old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet," and Sora will create a detailed video that's up to a minute long.

Entertainment mogul Tyler Perry recently told the Hollywood Reporter he was holding off on an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta studio, saying, "I am very, very concerned that in the near future, a lot of jobs are going to be lost."

OpenAI said in a statement that it looks forward to an ongoing dialogue with artists and creatives about Sora, some of whom it has already worked with as the technology remains in its testing stage before its wider release.

"OpenAI has a deliberate strategy of working in collaboration with industry through a process of iterative deployment — rolling out AI advances in phases — in order to ensure safe implementation and to give people an idea of what's on the horizon," the company said in a statement. "We're sharing our research progress with Sora early to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals."

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